Histories and Fallacies: Problems Faced in the Writing of History

Having enjoyed other books by Truman, this one caught my attention. It has provided insight into not taking texts at their face value or jumping to conclusions which I am prone to do. It also offers grace to prior personalities by not judging them by todays mindset but rather viewing them in light of their own times. Often witty, very readable and worth the time if this is an area of interest.

This book caught me by surprise. I was expecting a dry academic book on historiography, but this was not the case at all. This is a short, concise, very readable book about common mistakes that historians make. Too often, historiography classes focus too much on theory and the various ideological approaches and not the historian's core job. Trueman sums up the job of the historian as answering this one fundamental question: " Why is this person doing this thing in this way in this place at this particular point in time?" All other concerns, while important, should not be the central focus. This is often lost in service to trying to prove an ideological point or stay true to a particular ideology. While all historians have perspectives on the subject they are studying, this does not mean that. The biased historian cannot write history or that you should not use different mythological approaches, but rather telling a good factual story should be the central goal. One should also be aware that your findings are always provisional and that new evidence or new perspectives can challenge. The type of history that Trueman promotes is a well written, detailed history that advances the discipline. Keeping the guidelines and suggestions that he write about in this book goes a long way towards accomplishing this.

Carl Trueman is a professor of historical theology and church history at Westminster Theological Seminary. He blogs at Reformation21 and is always an interesting read. Because of my prior knowledge of Trueman and my passion for history I was excited to read his book on Histories and Fallacies.This book is actually pretty difficult to review. It's difficult because you can actually learn a good deal of diverse things such as Holocaust denial, Marxism, and the "racism" of Martin Luther. Trueman takes various areas of historical research and discusses them while teaching the reader how to do history.In the first chapter he discusses Holocaust denial and various ways that historians deny history. In the second chapter Trueman explores the grand scheme of Marxism and shows how Grand Schemes can lead to fallacious thinking and bad history. In the third chapter the reader is exposed to the pitfalls of anachronism. Various historical questions are explored such as "was Calvin and Calvinist?" and "was Martin Luther a Jew-hating racist". Trueman shows how such questions are off-the-mark historically. The final chapter is a conglomeration of some of the most typical fallacies in historical research.Obviously this book is not for everyone. That is partially why I am only giving it a quick review. Even though the writing is often hilarious and witty, if you don't give much of a care about "doing history" then you will be bored out of your gourd. But for those of us that are history nerds, and especially those of us that are charged with writing history/biographies, then this book is phenomenal.So, if you like history buy this book. If you don't like history keep the name Carl Trueman in mind and perhaps pick up some of us other offerings.

This little volume is an examination of problems faced in the writing of history (actually, that's the subtitle). Trueman refutes the idea, currently popular, that history is illusory, analyzes the failure of those who, like the Marxists, interpret history according to an overarching ideological scheme, and discusses the dangerous pull of anachronism, especially anachronism of ideas, such as calling Luther an anti-Semite racist. He finishes by discussing several historical fallacies: reification (the mistake of treating an idea such as `Aristotelian thought' like a concrete, transferable object rather than a fluid set of concepts that means very different things to different people at different points of history), oversimplification (the mistake of making historical artifacts, events, etc. more straightforward than they really are, such as saying that the American Civil War was started over slavery), the post hoc fallacy (including an interesting discussion of necessary and sufficient conditions), the word-concept fallacy (similar to reification, in which a word such as `liberty' is stripped of its historical context and used as a modern thinker would use it), the genetic fallacy (the mistake of drawing too strong a connection between historical circumstances and their modern or later manifestations), and a handful of other such ideas.The book is straightforward, interesting, sometimes funny, and neatly bridges two disciplines in which I'm interested. Trueman's position as a church historian also makes his work more immediately applicable to some of the historical issues I find myself struggling through.