Quote Originally Posted by Howard Wood View Post
However that other well known historical archive, the TNF, seems to have degenerated into a forum for strange men spewing ego and insult at each other.
Which, alas and alack, is not at all what I intended when I founded it close to a dozen years now. David McKinney is trying to salvage something from the wreckage, so maybe not all is lost....

Switching gears a tad: I think that English is quite inadequate at times as a language, one word having a multitude of meanings and shadings, but rather than an "enthusiasm" or even an "interest" in history, one can have a "love" of history. It is the genuine joy the comes from being involving in research and sorting things out that drives people like me. We strive for objectivity, clarity, and definitiveness in our work, which are, of course, goals we rarely achieve -- at least to our satisfaction. We tend to be a pain in the butt to many because, among many other things, we tend to look for context as well as often asking questions that can be awkward. We also tend to contrarian, a trait that can be infuriating to say the least. That is simply the result of habitually asking questions and probing for possible interpretations -- or simply taking a different view and being tactless enough to blurt it out....