Most grand narratives are neither wrong nor right. They violently simplify reality, or say things which are so vague that nobody can agree what would make them true or false (not quite the same as cold reading but related). They leave out alternative points of view, such as whether the Korean War was driven by international Communism or just one phase in an internal Korean conflict between nationalists and communists. But you can still check some of the facts that are used to support the big statements. Is anything in this book by economist Brad Delong flat out wrong?
A classic problem in social history goes like this: in the thirteenth century CE, the heaviest weapon that was commonly worn in European towns was a dagger or long knife with a blade up to 30 cm long. By the sixteenth century CE, towns were full of men wearing swords, particularly in the British Isles, the Low Countries, Germany, and Bohemia (in Italy and Spain wearing swords may have been restricted to gentlemen). How and when did this change happen? This has caught the attention of academics because it is linked to the civilizing process, state formation, and the monopoly on violence and those were fashionable at universities in the twentieth century. Back when I was in contact with them, the people who study German fencing from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries tell people that one book shows that medieval Germans wore swords everywhere just like people in the sixteenth century: B. Ann Tlusty, The Martial Ethic in Early Modern Germany: Civic Duty and the Right of Arms (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011). What does it actually say about medieval law?
