BootsnAll Travel Community

Sorry this is going to be a rant... As someone with a certain knowledge of history this is one of my pet peeves. I have seen historical inacurracies in a number of guidebooks now.

For an example I'm going to pick out the latest LP Guide to France (since I have just been reading it). French history isn't my strongest suit, but there are 2 topics in French history that I know pretty well - The Albigensian Crusade and the Hundred Years War - and the guidebook writer makes errors on both of them. In the former he/she gives the impression that Languedoc was ruled and mainly populated by Cathars (it wasn't). In the latter he/she takes the romantic myth that Joan of Arc saved France from the English (she didn't) and reports it as fact.

These are just the mistakes in the 2 topics I was able to recognise. Without months of reading and research I have no way to know whether the rest of the guidebook is (apart from obvious dates and place-names) historically accurate.

I sometimes wonder where guidebook writers get their history from, and sometimes suspect that the answer is wikipedia. A guidebook writer cannot have the time or money to properly research and understand the whole history of a nation. So inevitably there will be mistakes and inaccuracies. Yet millions of travellers will read their work and go around thinking that X and Y happened, that is what bothers me.

So, in the interests of proper accuracy, i really feel that guidebook publishers should use professional historians with appropriate background knowledge to write their history chapters. Alternately if it was co-written by the guidebook-author and historian together then the historian would hopefully spot any mistakes by the guidebook-author.