History is written by the victors

I have a BIG nitpick with this framing. While it is correct in many instances, it’s imprecise, and sometimes just flat out wrong.

A better framing is “History is written by the historians”. In other words, the historical narrative is set by those who put forth the effort to do so. In many cases, those historians are writing from the perspective of the victors, but not always.

I’ll give you a few examples:

The Mongol Empire was one of (if not the) largest contiguous land empires in world history. They conquered everything from China to eastern Europe and Mesopotamia. By any interpretation of the word, the Mongols were the victors in virtually every conflict they had. Yet they also didn’t really write histories. There’s only 1 real Mongolian historical text we have: The Secret History of the Mongols. It was an account of the life and conquests of Genghis Kahn written shortly after his death. Yet, as the title alludes to, it wasn’t a public document. It was written for the ruling dynasty. The earliest copy we know of is a copy from ~200 years after the original was written, and it didn’t become widely read until another 300 years after that. For the first half-millennia after the Mongol conquests, the historical narrative was entirely based on the accounts people who were conquered by the Mongols. In other words, the history of the Mongol conquests and their subsequent empire were almost entirely written not by the victors, but by the conquered. This heavily influences our popular conception of the Mongols as barbaric war mongers who committed horrific acts of violence. We don’t think much about any other contributions the Mongols had in the realms of culture, economics, political administration, philosophy, diplomacy, etc because the people who wrote about the Mongols (and set the historical narrative) had no interest in portraying them in a positive light. Compare that to someone like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, etc. All of them were similarly successful conquerors and warlords, yet the historical narrative about them is FAR more complex and positive than that of Genghis Kahn. Because the history of Genghis Kahn was not written by the victors.

Another example which is probably more accessible to a lot of people: The American Civil War. For most of the 150 years after the war ended up until just the past couple of decades, the prevailing popular narrative portrayed in pop culture and taught in schools was the Lost Cause narrative. The war was about States’ Rights. Slavery was not a part of the war at the beginning and the Union only brought it in later to justify their aggression towards the South. It was called the War of Northern Aggression by many. The South was primarily fighting to preserve a pastoral and romanticized way of life, etc, etc. This is the narrative portrayed in fiction such as Gone With the Wind and The Birth of a Nation. Of course, we know this to be bullshit. It was a war over slavery and the South was fighting to maintain the most brutal and oppressive form of slavery the world has ever seen. Yet for over a century that wasn’t the broadly accepted historical narrative because after the war ended people in the South put a lot of effort into creating and disseminating the Lost Cause narrative while the victors (the Union) didn’t put any effort into crafting an historical narrative. The North was more concerned with reuniting the nation and rebuilding, so much so that they completely gave up on Reconstruction and let the same people who had led the Confederacy run the South as an apartheid state for the next century.

These are just 2 examples, but they aren’t the only ones by a long shot. History is not always written by the victors. It’s written by the people who put forth the effort to write it, and the historical narrative ends up reflecting this down to the modern day.

You do so by reading primary sources. From both the victors and the losers. On the losing side this can be difficult as their stuff is less likely to be preserved (intentionally or not). It is important to remember that every side will have its own bias, but this is often also shaped with time, so it is important to get sources that are as close as possible to the events before they can be mythologized. Also there are no wrong answers; just answers with supporting context.

What time periods/places are you interested in? I am able to and would be happy to give you a detailed list of primary and secondary sources for a good chunk of concepts.

That’s the big thing - historians tend to focus. Even the university “western history from 1500” or whatever are going to vary a lot by what the professor is interested in and focused on. Behind just focusing on like a whole country or time period, they get super specific and do shit like figure out that whole undocumented kingdoms existed based on numismatic work (coins) or look at things like architectural influences that the crusaders brought back and can be seen in their classes (I had a prof who had a whole feminist interpretation of medieval castle architecture)

Your comment alludes to the history of religion, which is definitely a complicated topic and has its own complexities in historiography (the study of history and techniques). Religion has interactions with so many other spheres, and so you also often have to dive deeply into the culture and history of the specific people who practiced it to understand the why - which is hard, because religious interpretations that are common now tend to get read backwards into the text.

I’d be happy to give you a list of sources for any religion as well. (Do you feel most comfortable with texts for popular audiences, or would you like to explore academic material?)