Oddbean

This is what I wrote (and didn't previously publish) about that: IS DARRYL COOPER A HISTORIAN? Michael Shermer ASSERTS that Darryl Cooper is a pseudo-historian "...with pseudo-historian Darryl Cooper... even though I'm a PhD historian and I work and write regularly in the profession, I've never heard of Darryl Cooper." -Michael Shermer This actually appears to be quite dishonest to me. Michael Shermer is a science historian. But the area of history where he disagrees with Darryl Cooper is that of World War II, which is not an area of history that Michael Shermer is an expert in. But more fundamentally, Michael Shermer's apparent definition of a historian is tied up in... you guessed it, institutionalism. Apparently Darryl Cooper can't be a real historian if he isn't known as such in institutional circles. I vehemenetly disagree with this approach. A historian is any person who studies history. It does not require somebody to work within societal institutions. Darryl Cooper may or may not be wrong, but because he studied source material and came to a conclusion and wrote about it, and further because he also made that study a core part of his profession (as a podcaster about history), that makes him a bona fide historian, not a pseudo historian. Darryl Cooper claims he has read 80 books, parts of another 100, and 1200-1300 academic papers and journals on the history of Israel prior to 1948. I can't tell if he is exaggerating, but that is enough to qualify anybody as a real historian. From this he output 26 hours of podcast. It has taken him many years to produce the few podcasts that he has produced. The Martyr Made podcasts are very deeply researched. He has written no books, but books are simply not his medium. I conclude that Darryl Cooper is a historian.