This.
And very well said - although I have taken the liberty of quoting what you have written in another section - SFF - and thread (posters asking to be excluded from PRSI, or those who have already, for various reasons, chosen to exclude themselves from PRSI) and post.
But, it is perfectly true: Sometimes, you don't realise that you have come to hold a view, or why you hold a view, stance, opinion - until you come to write about it, which is when, with dawning insight, you arrive at the realisation that you have thought this, but didn't know it until the act of writing - and articulation - crystallised your thoughts.
As happened to me today, here, when I wrote the above post about Austria; I don't think that a single thought about the unfortunate and tragically assassinated Dollfuss had crossed my mind for decades, but I realised today, when pondering this, with (an almost belated anger) that his murder was important and why it mattered.
When mulling over thoughts about what happened in Austria in those years, the name "Dollfuss" fleetingly crossed my mind in the shower - (yes, I think about history more than sometimes in the shower, each to their own), when I knew that I wished to write a post on Austria in the 1930s, and explore and tease out and think through and explain why I disagreed with
@yaxomoxay's initial exploratory argument that AH's pacman-like progress re the Austrian Anschluss (gobble, munch, crunch, devour, digest) might have been stopped had France moved to stall it (and thank you, for asking these questions - it is very good - and necessary - to be made to return to material one has not looked at in decades, and examine it with fresh eyes, and sometimes, with new material).
Actually, I hadn't known until today - well, until I read your post - that I disagreed with you, and then, I had to work out - to myself, a process that only became clear as I wrote the post - why I had arrived at those conclusions.
Thank you for your kind words.
I've enjoyed thinking about - and writing about - this sort of stuff - you can probably gather that I loved teaching history (and talking about history, and reading about history) in the days when I dwelled in "the groves of academe".
And yes, I remember those "how many Shermans etc does it take"? discussions; very male, and sometimes very self-referential, and borderline esoteric. When I started university and said I was interested in history, this is what some of my male friends (who said that they were interested in history) thought I meant.
However, I, too, preferred - and prefer - the socio-political-economic-cultural stuff, although the military stuff can be of deep - and fascinating - interest at times, such as when it has an effect, a transformative effect - on both military (and political) outcomes.
There were airforces that still used biplanes (yes, as aircrew flight training craft, but still) as late as 1939, whereas the end of the war - a mere six years later - saw the sort of accelerated development of, or introduction of, or use of, atomic warfare, something almost approaching the use of intercontinental rockets, jet engines, parachutes and paratroops, radar, sonar.....the space age beckoned.
