History’s eclipse by social sciences weakened evidentiary standards in public discourse

Evidence

This happens partly through simple neglect and partly because history has been, so to speak, colonized, taken up and subsumed in the social sciences, the practitioners of which (let me be cautious in putting this), often have a somewhat different attitude to evidence from that of historians. One notices it also in the media and more generally in the public debate, where references to history are few and far between and, as often as not, inaccurate. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1813