Disputed: Six Records That Do Not Agree, and What a Historian Does About It (E-book, PDF)

Disputed is an original e-book from Writesides of History. Approximately 6,400 words across an introduction, nine chapters, a conclusion, a note on evidence and a reading guide.

Somewhere in the source column of a historical record there is sometimes one extra word after the book and chapter number: disputed. It does not mean the row is wrong. It means the people who have looked hardest at the evidence do not agree, that the disagreement is live, and that anyone building on the row should know before they start.

This book takes the six entries in this publication's own registers that carry that word, and takes each of them apart. A casualty figure of 430,000 reported by the only man in a position to count. A river that may be the Sambre or the Selle, on a description detailed enough to argue about and not enough to settle. A winter camp usually placed at Tongeren on the strength of a name that belongs to a later town. A British stronghold that has never been found. A hill in the Lot that fits the account and cannot be proved to be the place. And an emperor who died a prisoner in a Bulgarian tower, in a manner reported four different ways — followed, eight years later, by an impostor whose success is the best evidence that nobody knew.

Three further chapters step back from the cases to the machinery: what a certainty column is a judgement about and why the same word means three different things in three different tables; how the inclusion rules and the category system decide what a table can be asked before a single row is written; and what happens to a published record when a re-examination changes the reading, as it did at Jebel Sahaba after fifty years.

Nothing in the book is a quotation. Ancient passages are given by book and chapter so any edition can be used, and modern positions are summarised as summaries. A book about the gap between what a source says and what it is said to say cannot afford to blur that line on its own pages.

Chapters: The Word in the Margin · The Number Nobody Could Check · A River With Two Names · The Camp That Is Not the Town · A Stronghold Nobody Has Found · The Hill That Fits · A Death in a Bulgarian Tower · The Column That Says How Sure · Classification Is an Argument · When the Interpretation Changes · What a Record Owes Its Reader.

Built on two published registers that anyone can open, one of them free to download and reuse. Delivered as a PDF in three page formats and as an EPUB.

Word count: approximately 6,400 words · Format: PDF (A4, US Letter, mobile) and EPUB

In the download: A4 PDF · US Letter PDF · Mobile edition PDF · EPUB. Delivered as a secure download link after payment.