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Talk:Christopher Clark

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Odd passages about the views of “mainstream historians”

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I was struck by the use of of the vague, yet sweeping term “mainstream historians” to present a narrative that Clark was somehow breaking entirely new ground when he challenged the “Sonderweg” and “German WWI war guilt” perspectives.

To my knowledge, the Sonderweg thesis has never been uncontested and, similarly, I am not aware that the notion that Imperial Germany was solely responsible for WWI was a solid, historical consensus (hence the huge volume of historical scholarship on the origins and causes of WWI).

In short, it seems that the article sets up something of a straw man in presenting unsourced and undefined “mainstream historians” agreeing on something that have been hotly debated by historians for decades (Sonderweg/origins of WWI) that make Clark’s contributions seem to be more of a paradigm shift than contributions to ongoing, historical debates.

Hence, I would suggest that these claims about the opinions of “mainstream historians” are either more precisely elaborated and sourced or modified to be a bit less bombastic. Mojowiha (talk) 10:00, 16 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]