Do Secular Historians Talk About Source Reliability? Woodman and Kraus

This is another video in which I address the strange claim that real historians don't even talk about the reliability of a document or author as a whole but rather just use the passage-by-passage approach. Here I discuss a passage from a book on Latin Historians in which the authors, while advocating the theory that Tacitus moved the date of a trial, reveal the fact that this is part of an on-going discussion among historians about how reliable Tacitus is about chronology. They make it clear that Tacitus was at the time (1997) generally regrded as quite reliable chronologically, but that this view would have to be revised if it were true that he dyschronologically moved a trial in his history. In passing, I should mention that there were historians even then who thought that Tacitus did *not* change the trial date, and one historian (named Mellor) who apparently changed his mind on the matter, so that in 2010 he concluded that indeed Tacitus didn't change the date. For purposes of this video, my only point is that yes, of course, historians concern themselves with whether Tacitus can be regarded as a reliable author and whether, therefore, his implicit and explicit chronological indicators can be taken as prima facie accurate. Hearty and humble thanks to David Yuen of Digital Pizzazz, who helped me to fix a slip in the audio of this video (three of them, actually) and did it so seamlessly that it is hard to find. Here is an earlier video in which I discuss this same odd claim that real historians just use passage-by-passage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXj4KtFLuno And here from last week is the discussion of probability theory and the rejection of the passage-by-passage approach: