No. History is NOT objective. History will always be written with a bias. But the REAL question is, does the bias of the historian distort and discount the FACTS that the historian presents, or does that bias affect merely the emotional quality of the history?
The truth is, some historians are more reliable than others. Some historians' facts cannot be trusted. But our scrutiny of history has discounted most of those histories as unreliable documents.
The history that we DO trust today is history that has proven itself reliable in comparison with other texts whose biases oppose one another, yet whose facts parallel one another. For example, German accounts of World War II prove the same facts of the American account of World War II, even though they have different winner-loser biases. However, their biases obviously differ because of the different historical perspectives.
Our homework, therefore, is to read various historical accounts of events in order to distinguish bias from fact. Because both are present in every reliable historical account.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)