But let's not pretend that historians influence the policy makers as much as sociologists and economists do either.

The damages when they are wrong are orders of magnitude bigger.

They are assumed to be right, sometimes even without proof, until they are tragically proven wrong.

And nobody lose their job anyway.

Have you ever seen a sociologist lose the job because proposed something to a politician that resulted in lots of people having their life ruined?

I never did, honestly.

Have the last three more recent economic and social crisis been caused by historians mistakes?

https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/sociologys...

The thing about textual evidence is that you can't cite an entire text (obviously). You have to selectively choose what to quote in order to support your claims. Additionally, people can write one thing, and then write other contradictory things. Or they can act in ways that contradict what they write. It is from this totality of evidence that non-quantitative methods draw their conclusions. To get to the point, I'm not necessarily claiming that Nancy Maclean (the historian "caught cutting sentences in half") is in the right here, but if you actually follow the debate it seems quite nuanced and the internet critic hadn't actually even read most of the book they were criticizing (and also clearly has certain political leanings to boot). Certainly nothing like "throwing away half the data that didn't support my findings."

After following up on your sources, I surrender my position. It appears that the quest for truth has largely been abandoned in academia, and that integrity is a fools dream.

We truly are as T.S Elot said the hollow men.