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I was a history major in college, and one of the biggest problems I have with non-professional pop historians (Howard Zinn, Jared Diamond, etc.) as opposed to academic historians who actually have formal training is that the former tend to invent just-so stories and compile evidence to support them, as though the truth of a thesis is determined by the number of footnotes. Meanwhile, there is so much counter-evidence available to anyone who does even a cursory investigation that the entire thesis can be dismissed entirely. One of the problems I always had with history writing is that every time I thought I had to develop a thesis I'd inevitably have to retool it after finding something that didn't fit, which happened about sixteen times per project. Hell, to give you a sneak preview to the next Pittsburgh series installment, I was researching the City Beautiful movement from the late-19th and early 20th centuries. The classic story is that the movement was inspired by the White City at the 1983 World's Fair in Chicago, but supposedly those in the know know that the real inspiration for the movement was the 1901 McMillan Plan to redesign Washington, D.C. Except a good number of buildings supposedly built as part of the movement predate the plan, and eliminating them seems wrong. Then again, there were antecedents and it only makes sense that they would get merged with the new movement, and now I've spent two hours researching a point from an introductory section that will nonetheless inform how I treat the rest of the piece. This is especially difficult because my normal instinct would be to "teach the controversy", which means writing six paragraphs to go in-depth on the history of a city planning movement because I want to use the movement's precepts as a framing device to describe a neighborhood. It's frustrating as hell, and it happens all the time. It would be a lot easier if I just put blinders on, limited myself to one sentence "The City Beautiful movement started with the White City at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago" and forgot about it. But then I might just be repeating a myth, and that's the last thing I want to do, put myself in the same league as Jared Diamond even though the stakes are a lot lower.
That seems like a general problem though that applies to plenty of academics as well, especially once politics gets involved. For an example, I've read more than enough articles by such claiming that hunter-gatherers were often gender egalitarian, citing tribe after tribe where, say, women are involved in hunting, or men are involved in cooking, or men are involved in child-rearing, drowning you in citations that superficially seem like their case is ironclad.
Then you read the opposite position - sometimes another academic historian, sometimes not - and they point out how even in the cited tribes, women actually only "hunt" in the sense of laying traps for small game, men still do just the most physically demanding parts of preparing food and leave the majority to the women, and the men also only teach older children useful skills, while again leaving the younger children to the women. And more importantly, they actually go quantitative and show how cherry-picked these few tribes even are, and that the great majority of those we know is even less gender-egalitarian.
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Following up Guns, Germs, and Steel with a just-so story of the precipitous decline of Easter Island in Collapse which conveniently ignored, y'know, the obvious and terribly destructive germs part, was peak Jared Diamond.
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