Given the narrowness of the material cited, this piece seems to me like unequal application of skepticism and status-quo gatekeeping.
A state-approved high-school textbook is subject to myriad business and political agendas that practically, by definition, compromise its truth and accuracy.
A peer-reviewed scholarly publication is supposed to have a chain back to actual sources and facts that anchors it in spite of any agenda or narrative it may propound.
The issue here is that Bulstrode presented a bunch of claims with no evidence or even contradicting evidence in the actual sources she cites. There are also some engineering issues: sugar mill rollers are oriented differently from steel mill rollers because they serve very different purposes.
The comment from here was good: https://www.ageofinvention.xyz/p/age-of-invention-cort-case
> Historians, myself included, often make leaps of intuition from limited evidence. But speculation ought to be explicitly signalled as such, rather than presented as certainty. Especially when that certainty creates a narrative so compelling that it makes major newspaper headlines. Bulstrode’s narrative requires multiple smoking guns to work, none of which are in the evidence she presents.
Blatant corruption from top to bottom is the norm, it would seem.
Feynman also loathed psychology and gave it as an example of "Cargo-cult science." Last I heard every single first year psych texbook contained the Stanford prison experiment as an example without mentioning how it was total rubbish. Is that /still/ true in 2023? Textbooks are weird.
My comment is as cheap as yours for illustration purposes. I don't believe Feynman fabricated his stories of textbook corruption. Do you?
Of course the best evidence either way on the latter is the contents of textbooks that are actually being used. How did they get that way? Heard anything that might give us ideas on where to look a bit more closely?
Generally anyone who is fucked in the ass by a creepy uncle ends up at a therapist office so I give psychology the benefit of the doubt.
Care to practice what you preach? Which textbooks, specifically? How are they ahistorical?
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-c...
Fights over textbook content are ancient and written about constantly. Since these battles are more heavily scrutinized outright falsehoods won't be found easily — rather meta-narratives are achieved by omission or emphasis.
I would not argue that these meta-narratives are "ahistorical", though — rather, I would say that they reflect the interests of certain parties. Perspective is inseparable from "history".
That seems to be what you were claiming though in your original comment:
> as there is no shortage of fictional narratives anywhere — look no further than US state-approved high-school history textbooks.
One could make just as good of a case about online users posting disparaging and speculative comments without presenting a shred of evidence, looking no farther than HN comments. Where does this kind of reasoning take us...?
Kudos so for writing comminist, and socialism.