Dear Reader--

When Bathilda Bagshot first published A History of Magic in 1947, many theories began to crop up about how she got her information. Over 20% of Bagshot’s material had never before been published. Therefore, people began to explain away her immense knowledge. Newspaper headlines read, “Bathilda Bagshot is a Dinosaur Animagus,” and “How did Bagshot Manage to Horde Hundreds of Time-Turners.” Incidentally, The Quibbler published an article some time later calling all of these theories, “utterly nonsensical, as Bagshot is clearly the Overlord of the Kneazles, returned to lead the Kneazle population to world domination.” We can now say with reasonable certainty that all of these theories are false. So how did Bagshot gather her information? The truth is… it was a lot of guesswork.

As Bagshot assembled her book, she travelled the world consulting with numerous historians to combine their ideas and then present a somewhat-cohesive picture. Notably, Bagshot also consulted with members of the centaur and goblin communities to gain their sides of the stories. Bagshot thus managed to gather a great deal of information that few wizards had ever before heard. Bagshot’s volume was remarkably informative. However, we have now disproved a significant segment of her work.

This may seem counter-intuitive, but history is actually an ever-changing field. Magical history is every bit as foggy and whimsical as every other aspect of magical studies. Every day, new data is fathered and new theories are composed. Where does this new knowledge come from? Those that tell us the most are plants and rocks, which endure time far more gracefully than mankind.  Here is yet another situation where the Muggle sciences far surpass our own methods. For a long while, Muggles have used a method called “archaeology” to study artefacts and fossils buried deep below the ground in an attempt to discover the past. While Muggles developed this area of study, wizards focused more on experimental spell-and potion- making. By the time we got to the Muggle archaeological records, they had already succeeded in tainting and misinterpreting many of their samples that were clearly magical. In the past decades, the field of magical history has taken enormous strides by analyzing these Muggle records and discovering ones of our own, allowing us to now enhance and refute several portions of Bagshot’s original work. For example, while Bagshot’s texts on the Goblin Rebellions speak of the fierce goblin leader Colin the Conqueror, recent evidence has revealed that Colin never existed and was actually a character created by a Goblin group to intimidate the Wizarding Armies. While maintaining a great deal of Bagshot’s original work, the Hogwarts textbook staff has worked to update her book. Of course, we are confident that the majority of our information will also need to be revised in the next few decades.

Another reason that history is an ever-changing field is that the lens through which we see the past, as well as the world around us, is constantly refocusing. Modern readers may be surprised to discover how forward-thinking Bathilda’s original volume was. Bathilda’s inclusion of non-wizards that played an important role in our communities was quite controversial during her time. Of course, in the decades following the Wizarding Wars, our views of non-wizarding folk have shifted even more. Our updated version of A History of Magic therefore includes even more information on the non-wizarding communities which helped shape our own societies. We have devoted an entire section to various non-wizarding communities since we believe that their histories are every bit as complex and relevant to today’s societies as wizarding history is.