Richard Kettlewell

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2026/03/20/gap-week-march-20-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gap-week-march-20-2026

https://acoup.blog/?p=34336

Hey folks! I was traveling this week to give an invited talk at Western Michigan University, so I don’t have a blog post ready for you. That’ll also probably be the case for next week (where I will be at the annual meeting of the Society for Military History), though at least there I will have an abstract to let you see.

Now I am always reticent to post up the text of talks that are intended to be delivered live, because the genres are different, they rely on different kinds of delivery and they often aren’t footnoted and such for written publication. But in this case, I can do something a bit different, because the main parts of my talk for Western Michigan University were based around things that I’ve written (and in one case, something someone else has written) which you can read. So this is a chance to plumb the archives, in a sense and in so doing, basically ‘read along’ a version of the talk I gave which is rather ‘meatier’ than what I could have said in the 45-or-so minutes I had to speak.

The core of my talk was the concept of ‘historical verisimilitude‘ that I’ve riffed on here: the use of the appearance of historical accuracy, or a claim to historical accuracy in the absence of the real thing to market or promote something, be that something a film or show or game or what I have begun terming a ‘history influencer’ who makes history-themed social media content.

My initial example of this at work was the disconnect in Assassin’s Creed:Valhalla between the emphasis on visual accuracy and the catastrophic fumbling of other forms of historical accuracy, which you can read about in my “Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications.” I then expanded on this example with a broader one from 2000’s film Gladiator and its initial battle scene, arguing that once again what was prioritized was visual accuracy because that gave the viewers the – incorrect! – assumption that ‘the research had been done’ on the rest, which you can read about in our series on “Nitpicking Gladiator‘s Iconic Opening Battle.”

I then jumped to example of this as a rhetorical strategy deployed by marketing, grounded in a critique of how George R. R. Martin (and the marketing team for Game of Thrones) has framed historical accuracy, using the Dothraki as an example of how this can go badly wrong and perpetuate quite nasty stereotypes about real peoples through the supposedly ‘realistic’ (in fact, deeply flawed) depiction of a fantasy stand-in for those people. You can read about that in our series on the Dothraki, “That Dothraki Horde.”

From there I transition into talking about this strategy used by the aforementioned ‘history influencers,’ with a contrast between how differences in platforms between YouTube and Twitter produced very different environments: where YouTube’s long-form video nature pushed a lot of content creators towards more carefully researched historical content which was often actually quite valuable (I particularly focused, and again this was very brief, on arms-and-armor and historical dress channels), Twitter’s emphasis on ultra-short micro-blogging produced a very different environment.

For the part focused on Twitter, I leaned quite heavily on T. Trezevant’s “The Antiquity to Alt-Right Pipeline” published in Working Classicists in 2024, which I think is one of the most revealing investigations of this particular space and the incentives that the post-Musk Twitter algorithm, which appears to openly and quite strongly prefer frankly bigoted or xenophobic content, created. From my own observations, while some of the accounts that push this particular, generally badly historically misinformed, version of the ancient past emerged in the pre-Musk period of Twitter, Classics Twitter largely held its own until the algorithm was slanted against them, making it all but impossible for a lot of good Classics accounts to compete for eyeballs.

And then I closed with a plea for greater engagement by historians in these online spaces, albeit with a caution that picking your platform is important. The fact that historical verisimilitude, the pretense of historical accuracy or knowledge, is so frequently used as a marketing tool speaks to the public’s desire for an accurate knowledge of the past. Folks want to know what the past was really like, but of course regular folks often do not have the tools to tell what is reliable, rigorous and careful history vs. what is not. So as historians, we need to be more present in these kinds of spaces (though we ought to pick our platforms; there is little point ‘competing’ on Twitter if the deck is stacked against you) to help folks find the accurate historical knowledge they are seeking.

And that, in an abbreviated form (or an enlarged form if you read all of the links as you went!) was the talk! Very grateful for WMU for inviting me out to give it. Until next week!

https://acoup.blog/2026/03/20/gap-week-march-20-2026/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gap-week-march-20-2026

https://acoup.blog/?p=34336