historian

I'm historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat.

And your job as a historian is a difficult job, and as you said, because the more you learn, the more you come to understand, the more complicated the picture appears.

So just to linger on it, what are, what are some of the things that historians miss?

Historians long pinned the start of the Viking Age to a brutal ambush on an English monastery in 793 CE, which the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described as an onslaught of lightning, “fiery dragons,” and “heathen men.”

Now, culture then comes in and, you know, tweaks things in all kinds of weird ways, and that's, as a historian, what I like to study.