Today I read a great essay by Rebecca West from the year 1915. I pulled this resonant passage:
“We must rebel against the formidable army of [putative writers] who have achieved the difficult task of becoming men [or women] of letters without having written anything. They throw up platitudinous inaugural addresses like wormcasts . . . and chew once more the more masticated portions of history; and every line they write . . . dissociates more thoroughly the ideas of history and originality of thought. We must dispel this unlawful assembly . . . round the wellhead of scholarship with kindly but abusive, and . . . coarse criticism. That is one duty which lies before us.”(emphasis added)
I am relating this criticism to certain lawyers who, with no formal training in the craft of history, write and publish books of “history” based on such secondary sources as they might manage to fish from the ocean of books out there (and not even bother to use scholarly articles, much less archival sources).
Dame West's essay is here:
https://newrepublic.com/article/71896/duty-harsh-criticism