"I know stuff about WWII, and the American Revolution, and the Vietnam War, and the Marcomannic Wars, that nobody else on the planet knows. That's the point of a history degree."
I would dispute the poster knows things (facts, he calls them) that no one else knows unless his research has been ground-breaking in each of these fields. In which case you would presume he might share that information with others. I would dispute that knowing what "nobody else on the planet knows" is "the point of a history degree".
"Think about some things that are written, but not books. How are books written? Are they just summaries of other books? Or is there anything more?"
The next question is, is there written evidence which is not in books? The answer is, of course. But unless a student has access to all of the original work they will rely on its inclusion in books. Or videos. Or the internet. I am not talking about how evidence was originated, or what form it took, but how a student accesses it.
And lastly we get to purile insults. Which, as I said, is reverting to type. Some things, and some people, never really change.
+1
For instance, any fool can read about the Battle of Hastings on Wikipedia. However, will this person be able to intelligently discuss the modern signficance of the battle, or how the significance of the same was viewed differently in the nineteenth century, and why?
With a PhD in military history, I often run into people who say things like, "What's the point when I can just google the facts?" Well, the point is that I don't have to google them, because I already know them. Furthermore, there are a lot of facts I know that you can't Google. I ran into someone once who tried the old Good Will Hunting, "Everything you know I can learn in the library for free." Actually, no. There are facts I know which aren't written in any book or on any website. I know stuff about WWII, and the American Revolution, and the Vietnam War, and the Marcomannic Wars, that nobody else on the planet knows. That's the point of a history degree.
I am going to go way, way out on a limb here, and hypothesize that there is just the tiniest amount more history knowledge obtainable via googling, then you have that is "not written anywhere".