… TO WAR IN IRAQ
"The two most glaring challenges of writing recent foreign affairs history are the lack of available archival sources and the interestedness of the human sources, who usually aim to portray events in a favorable light. In the face of these obstacles, historians, journalists, and other scholars usually take one of two paths.
The first, favored by journalists, is to "go deep": to squeeze every drop from the available sources and cast a wide net for interview subjects. Going deep tends to shed light on how an event happened, how personalities interacted, how information was collected and evaluated, how decisions were made and by whom.
The second, favored by historians, is to "go wide": to place an event in wider contexts, including the immediate context and the preceding decades or even centuries. This is the interpretive heavy lifting in which the historian links an event to broader trends, ideas, and forces that created the intellectual, cultural, political, and economic atmosphere in which the primary actors operated. Historians often go wide on recent events because their preferred method of going deep — raiding the archives — isn't yet possible…"
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