Line #127 Main/DatedHistory


1	-> ''"Although the graduate schools now go in for all manner of metacritical precautions, it is still a common enough ambition to find and follow the clue which will show that quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, that trinity of squares, have been wrong all the time."''
2	-->-- '''Frank Kermode''', "Reading Shakespeare's Mind", ''The New York Review of Books'', October 12, 1967.[[note]]A reference to the Latin Canon defined by Saint Vincens referring to the faith that has been believed "everywhere" [ubique], always [semper], and by all [omni]"[[/note]]
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4	History is for the most part not a mystery. Chronicles, legends, ruins, artifacts, and other forms of evidence have given us a pretty solid grasp of what happened in previous centuries. We know who fought which battle where and when, who ruled which country, who invented which device, who lived where, and who married which king and when.
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6	And then sometimes we find out that we were wrong.
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8	It isn't a common occurrence: most of our knowledge about the past is based on hard evidence. No amount of scientific innovation is going to change the date of the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI Battle of Vimy Ridge]] or the number of people who died in the sinking of the RMS ''[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_of_Ireland Empress of Ireland]]''. But some of what we believe to be sound historical fact is based on soft and sometimes unreliable evidence -- hearsay, legends, traditions, opinions that have gone unchallenged due only to respect for authority and/or a lack of dissenting voices, reasoning based on data too fragmented to be unambiguous, and occasionally outright forgeries. When new discoveries or new methods of investigation or even new opinions on an event lead to the original belief being discredited among historians, the writer who based his work on contemporary history can be unfairly left looking like he skimped on the research.
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10	As you might guess, the more distant the subject in time the more likely this trope will come into play. We know more about any given day during UsefulNotes/WorldWarII than we do about the entire reign of the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops (the one who built the really big pyramid), for instance.
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12	Compare ScienceMarchesOn for when the same thing happens in science.
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14	This trope is ''not'' for AlternateHistory stories where the writer deliberately changes historical fact to explore the possibilities of a new timeline. Examples where a writer simply didn't know better should go in HollywoodHistory. Examples where a writer deliberately misstates history to make it more palatable go in PoliticallyCorrectHistory. This trope can however be caused by someone in the past misstating history for the purpose of political correctness if their version ends up being taken as fact by later generations. Likewise, this trope is not for cases where an author takes a clear side in something that is currently actively debated by historians, only for situations where later research or revelations ''definitively'' reverse the common understanding.
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16	As this reflects changes in understanding of history between the elaboration of the work and later times, any given example can be summarized as a PeriodPiece, that is also an UnintentionalPeriodPiece on a meta level.
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18	----
19	!Example subpages:
20	[[index]]
21	* DatedHistory/{{Prehistory}}
22	* DatedHistory/{{Antiquity}}
23	* DatedHistory/MiddleAges
24	* DatedHistory/EarlyModernAge
25	* DatedHistory/LateModernAge
26	[[/index]]
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Context Main / DatedHistory