Dan Carlin (hardcore History podcast) crashing out hard over Trump.
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
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As long as people take it with a grain of salt. Though I honestly don't even trust myself to take something with the appropriate amount of salt, because you get influenced by what you consume, even when consciously resisting it.
I mean that's just good advice for anything.
Of course, but dosing the salt is the key.
Historian devoting his life to one subject: some amount of salt.
Historian writing about a great number of subjects: some more salt.
History degree but not spent his life being a historian: more.
Not a historian: more.
Not a historian and a major league kook: yuge amount.
Sure but do you ignore say Gulliver's Travels or Don Quixote that are using their stories as analogies to their political time because they aren't trained historians?
They're not works of history and should not be relied on as such.
Still, you make a good point in that "trained historian" is a relatively new thing. Thucydides wasn't trained, and yet he was one of the greatest historians in history. Edward Gibbon too. But today we have so many, and so many pretenders, and it's close to impossible to tell without first becoming a specialist yourself. If I told you all sorts of things about Alexander, how would you know if I know what I'm talking about, or if I'm just making things up - without redoing all the research yourself?
So I rely on the admittedly imperfect metric of whether someone is employed as a historian by a university, and the somewhat better metric of whether he is actually specialized in the subject.