about history, unless it stokes their nationalist ego/agenda, in which case it's more often than not skewed for that purpose.

What sort of resources do we as a society devote to accurately uncovering and reporting our history? How much do we devote, yearly, to the preservation of history for future generations? I'm not talking about tourist attractions and such. I mean "history" as an important area of study and scholarship.

Compare that to the cost of a single football stadium, or the money spent on developing, marketing, and purchasing video games, and you'll get an idea of how much we view "history" as a priority.

According to the National Park Service, their sites alone get close to 100,000,000 visits per year. Including:

Independence Hall, Philadelphia - 909,090 visits

MLK Jr Memorial, DC - 1,083,671visits

The Vietnam Wall - 1,585,525 visits

Lincoln Memorial - 2,980,075 visits

"More than 700K visited Gettysburg, provided $88.5M economic impact..."
https://www.abc27.com/gettysburg/more-than-700k-visited-gettysburg-provided-88-5m-economic-impact/

but thank you for doing this research. The question was somewhat rhetorical, but since you took the time to answer with some data I feel I owe you an answer of my own.

Buildings and memorials, significant as they may be, are not necessarily preserving or conveying accurate history.

How much did we as a culture spend on confederate monuments? Was that preserving history, or distorting it?

I've been to the Vietnam Wall, and as touching as it is, it says nothing about the causes of our involvement there, nothing about the actual history aside from the fact that Americans died during that conflict. Similarly, Independence Hall says little if anything about, say, how one reason for the revolt was the British signing of treaties with Native nations restricting Anglo settlement west of the Appalachians.

I've been to Gettysburg. It's been a while. but when I was there I saw relatively little about, for instance, the history of the African slave trade and its impact on American culture and society. This may have changed--like I say it's been a while-but in the current political climate if there is more than I remember it's now in danger of being purged in our current campaign against "woke."

Ditto the Lincoln Memorial.

To use what might be an outrageous analogy, millions and millions of people visited Lenin's tomb at the Kremlin--I've been there too--and the Soviet government spent tens of millions of dollars--probably more--preserving that carcass and the building in which it was housed. I'd hardly call that a commitment to history.

How much history is taught in school? How historically literate are we as a people? I run across young people who have no idea what the Cuban Missile Crisis was about. I saw a video on Youtube in which a seemingly very bright young American woman wondered why Berlin was an issue between east and west. Hell, a candidate for Vice President of the United States--Sarah Palin--reportedly didn't know that Germany was our enemy during World War II. And our current president evidently believes there were fighter aircraft used during the American revolution. In a culture with any degree of historical literacy a statement like that would have been immediately disqualifying.

And have you seen the recent figures on those who believe the Holocaust never happened, or that the moon landing was faked?

"One in 10 young Americans believes that the Holocaust never happened, while 23 per cent think it’s a myth or that the number of those killed has been exaggerated.

In a 50-state survey of Americans aged between 18 and 39, 12 per cent said they had never heard, or thought they had never heard, the word “Holocaust” before."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/holocaust-denial-conspiracy-theories-america-b1869838.html

Money spent on monuments, while important, doesn't mean we're actually taking history as seriously as we should.

And then again, just for comparison:

"NFL revenue eclipsed $23 billion across the 2024 fiscal year, as reported by Ben Fischer of the Sports Business Journal. It marked the second consecutive year where NFL revenue jumped by at least $2 billion and represented record-setting revenue for the league once again."

https://sportsnaut.com/nfl/where-does-nfl-revenue-come-from/

And that's just the revenue posted by the NFL. It doesn't include college or high school football, nor is it a measure of "economic impact" which is probably far higher.

Anyway, thanks again for taking my post seriously enough to do some research. I'm glad so many people visit our memorials and monuments, and worry about the impact the Trump cuts and layoffs at the National Park Service will have. And I apologize for this overlong and wordy post.

Best wishes.

History has been revitalized by many recent developments but yes, many of the sites are inaccurate or lacking in broader context.

I was trying to detail the shift in history as a genre and a discipline. It is moving steadily toward a more scientific approach and one of the things AI is helping with is decoding ancient texts.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-04161-z

It is a great time to be studying history as we gain tools and information that lets us put more of the pieces together, sometimes literally.

I love "wordy posts" - Thanks for yours!

Rec

The Bible was written by many people that weren't considered "winners" by any secular meaning.

and which were to be excluded, were determined by powerful people in the Eastern Roman Empire in the Fourth Century. The “winners”, if you will.

Everything is both subjective and relative. It's in the eyes of the beholders.

Differences of opinion are what make horse races. Mark Twain

There are facts of course (such and such happened on whatever day), but much of history will always be debated or viewed through various prisms. Is history as a contest between oppressors and oppressed (and all the various subgroups of that, like men/women or colonialist, etc.) as some say, or is there more nuance? Do leaders lead really popular movements and shape opinion, or do they generally follow the popular zeitgeist (hence leaders aren't actually that important) whatever it is?

Historians will often disagree on what makes a great president or a top general (or nearly as often WHO was a great president or general), and often what traits work for one person won't work for another. Why is that? Just circumstance?

Forensics, DNA and other tools offer proof of what happened. But why something happened is how an event gets put into the larger narrative. And narratives are what resist correction.

Rec

There is no name or date on the Trinity "grave".

The disastrous 2016 GPR scan backfired on the true believers who permitted it only after pressure resulting from the 2014 discovery of Richard III's remains. To my point about denial in the face of evidence, Holy Trinity Church's Patrick Taylor issued this formal denial:

“We are not convinced that there is sufficient evidence to conclude that his skull has been taken. We intend to continue to respect the sanctity of his grave, in accordance with Shakespeare’s wishes, and not allow it to be disturbed. We shall have to live with the mystery of not knowing fully what lies beneath the stone.”


GPR results seem to confirm what was not found during prior looks into the "grave". During a visit to this church in late 1815, American author Washington Irving spoke with an elderly sexton who told Irving that a few years earlier that he had an opportunity to see beneath the gravestone in the floor when an excavation was underway. The sides of the excavation collapsed and in the process created a hole permitting a view of what was underneath the alleged floor tomb for Shakespeare. Irving states in his Sketch Book, published in 1819, that the sexton “told me he had made bold to look in at the hole, but could see neither coffin nor bones, nothing but dust.”

After the 2016 disaster of "tomb-gate" they spun the results as showing only that no skull was found but meanwhile they quietly started looking at other potential sites such as near the Hathaway Cottage.

Thanks for the LiDAR clarification.

Comic thread is comic.

To believe that is "Shakespeare's grave" one has to believe that the Bard was buried beneath a blank slab with no coffin and no head in a hole too small for an adult body which is now confirmed by ground penetrating radar to be devoid of human remains.

Emotional attachment to legend blocks all evidence to the contrary. That is what keeps history inaccurate.

but it's quite funny to see you try to use it to make your "I'm in favour of applying science and facts to the study of history". Also funny to see you quoting Washington Irving, when you started off by (correctly) pointing out his stories about Columbus were bunk - not that I'd call them 'history'. They were popular entertainment.

Can we agree on that?

In Coll's final report:

"Neither grave appears to be full sized....The surprising result of the GPR survey is that there is no evidence for even a moderately sized family vault."

"As for the grave presumed to be that of William Shakespeare (grave 2) this appears at first sight to be
unnaturally short since, neither it nor any of the other family graves appear to extend into the area
beneath the altar step. From figures 10 and 13 this grave does not appear large enough to contain an
adult male and the evidence could potentially be construed, as has been suggested, that the grave does not
contain a burial."

"The results of the GPR investigation have laid to rest a number of historical myths about the Shakespeare
graves. The data are consistent with a historical tale which was originally thought unlikely since the data
confirm that the grave thought to be that of William Shakespeare has been partially cut across by another
feature, presumably in an attempt to restore the stability of the floor. The data also show that the
Shakespeare family was not buried in a traditional vault, although some of the area is delineated by
brickwork but in a discrete line of simple shallow graves. The use of a very high frequency antenna has
allowed the deduction that burial for each of the five members of the family was in a shroud, not in a
coffin from the absence of small metal artefacts in the area of their interment. Comparison of the data for
the central three graves suggests that there may be foundation to the story of Susanna Shakespeare's grave
being disturbed even if it is not possible to conclude whether she was exhumed and subsequently reinterred
elsewhere. "

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/231752969.pdf

If you're going to quote something and put it in bold, then expect people to check the context in the original. Your emboldened part is followed by (still in the same paragraph) "This seems unlikely given the apparent existence of a subsurface air gap above material that is both mixed but also approaches the soil beneath in its relative permittivity (cf Figures 8 and 12)." If you're going to try and pretend the "this seems unlikely ..." doesn't exist by cutting off the paragraph, then you're cherry-picking. That is not a responsible attitude to history, and that what's makes this thread ironic and comic.

Yes, they don't think they used coffins. From the same source: " The change in fashion from burying in a shroud to using a wooden coffin occurs around the period of these burials". So it wouldn't be surprising either way. The disturbance of one end of the grave lends credence to a story that someone had taken the skull (nearly 200 years after he died). That, however, is not "Shakespeare isn't buried there. It's empty", and it's an extremely minor bit of late 18th century history. For that to be the centrepiece of your OP "other people aren't taking history scientifically enough" is, frankly, poppycock.