people will argue that we cannot access the past directly, so everything is just a "story." This is more pronounced by bad-faith right wing attacks on "revisionsim" that assumes there is an unbiased and "obvious" historical truth, postulating the "common sense" positivism of Ranke and others as the correct method of doing history. Often, this is about using the medieval as a foil for the modern, to contrast the supposed unaesthetic or wholesome modern world with the more enlightened and "civilized" ancient one. Beware the Roman statue profile picture accounts with names like Remember the West or whatever. Yet left-wing audiences are not immune to this, most obviously in the case of an all-powerful oppressive Catholic Church (my personal favorite was the person who insisted Roman statues survive because early Christians were too stupid to use ladders).
jondellisola.substack.com
www.forkingpaths.co
www.newstatesman.com
