airnutz wrote:
A North American Aviation historian might disagree with you on that point August.
And I might disagree, notwithstanding whatever title he may have or give himself, that a person who confined his interest and investigations to a single corporation is actually a historian.
airnutz wrote:
I always considered ACCURATE history was supported by the details.
Trivia, are certain insider or historic points of truth which come to light. If they don't
pass the test of fact or substantiation...then they peril at becoming myth or legend.
I agree with much of what you say. I won't get into facile definitions of what history, myth and legend are, but they do all take the same subject matter (the past) and level of interest (big-picture, important stuff). They differ mainly in their method and, to some extent, purpose. History competes with myth and legend at interpreting the past, in the same way that science competes with religion and pseudoscience at explaining natural phenomena. One distinguishing feature of the historical method is that it is grounded in primary evidence and, as you say, built up from details. But that does not mean that an obsession with details equates with doing history. The details have to matter to an important topic under investigation.
For example, a historian might write about the combined strategic bombing campaign. In the course of that history he would likely make the point that the Americans initially took unsustainable losses during daylight bombing and were limited in their choice of targets by the lack of an escort fighter that could get to Berlin and back and still be a useful fighting machine, but that at a certain point, such a fighter was developed which alleviated those problems. He might note in passing that this fighter was designated the P-51, although already this would verge on gratuitous "color". Those two sentences capture the entire relevance of the P-51, as a distinct design, to the campaign -- indeed, maybe to the entirety of WWII, since there was no other aspect of the conflict in which the P-51 made any distinctive contribution other than as one of the USAAF's standard-issue fighter planes -- that is to say, no reason for a historian to call it out specifically as opposed to just saying "U.S. army fighters." No need, anyway, to talk about the gestation of the aircraft or the correct word for "razorback".
I can't completely rule out the possibility that the technical details of the various Mustang versions have some relevance to any important historical topic, but I've yet to have such relevance pointed out to me. Even if I accepted the corporate history of NAA as such a topic, their relevance as anything but trivia is not clear. As to discussions of nomenclature (Mustang, Apache, Invader; razorback, highback,turtleback) I'm fairly confident in treating that as trivia.
August
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