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Like I said, my graduate program told us that any research older than five years was not valid to be cited in our assignments, and we were cautioned to assume that all older papers were invalid.

That immediately struck me as... Odd. And by "odd" I mean bad.

For one thing, I'm a historian, even if an amateur one, and it is offensive to me to scorn things just because they're old. My area of work in history is in early music, and as a natural consequence of that, I had spent my twenties swimming upstream against prejudices about the artistic worth of pre-classical musics. Assuming older research papers were wrong not because of their contents but because of their date stamp smelled entirely too similar to scorning pre-classical music not due to any exposure to it, but arrogant, ignorant presuppositions about what would be found in it.

🧵