Writing history about over-analyzed eras is always tricky business. Thorny issue emerged in conjunction with specific historical developments. Other historical changes caused difficult concept to evolve. Obviously charting those historical currents is part of the joy of writing my book. However, for the past few days I've been delving into the historical era more explicitly, working from the primary sources (I heart digital humanities as they are ALL available online) and I'm having a heck of a time figuring out where to stop. Some amount of context via analogous issues will enrich my book, but how much? At what point does thorny issue become lost among analogous issues?
Of course, since working with primary source documents is a particular speciality of mine, and I am, if I don't mind saying, quite good at teasing out the allusions between thorny and analogous issues, there really is no end to how long I could work this particular document cache. I'm on day two and could easily run a full week.
Obviously, I need to narrow to the precise threads that most clearly connect thorny and analogous issues to one another and then winnow the document analysis down from there.
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