主题：【整理】西方历史与学术的由来——关于西方历史的真假问题 -- 疯狂的蚂蚁

First to say something about myself -- have been in college learning history a couple of years, but that was late 80s and early 90s. Left the field and even left the country for so many years. Seems to me that you are still in the field and being acadamicly active. Well, Liberal Arts majors are still hard places to earn a living, especially back in China. Appreciated and highly respect your staying there.

I do agree with you that a guilding mind and a steady belief and love of the learning is very critical. History is still not a science and very much dependent upon the person -- the quality of the scholar himself more or less decides how far his study can go.

But what prompted me to respond to the Original Post, is that I saw the rush and lack of serious attitude toward learning among young people of today. The few posted shared originally showed a dangerious tendency to disregard serious learning and jump into convinent conclusions.

However hard for us to see, to tell and to explain the historical events to ourselves and to others, the very basic requirement is to get as much details right as possible. And whenever inconvinent new materials are encountered against our own previous thoughts, we will have to adjust our own thinking. And this is why all the hard works and related techniques in studies of archieves, field works are so very important, and the previous generations of English, German, French scholars are to be respected for their achievements. Of course, we have our own tradition of Chinese scholars who were doing exactly the same thing for thousands of years.

As time goes by, and the many hard works of many generations of historians later, we are getting better and better seeing things in history, as complex and multi-layered events. Like you mentioned, these major events such as 五四运动 are to be reviewed, the evaluation of things like 封建社会 in ancient China will continue to be debated.

We are who we are because we humans have memories and history as our collective and extened memories. And I do like the saying "all history are modern history", as our lives and our ancestors' lives are continous flowing like a river, it's all related and whatever happened affects our thinking of today.

And this all the more reason we treat history with care, with respect toward truthfulness. As we do not want ourselves to be misled.