@NoAngst,
NoAngst wrote:I have always been troubled by a vague sense of fraudulence whenever historians claim to know the past. For example, there are no less than five definitive accounts of the Spanish Armada, Macaulay's among them. One historian says that the Duke of Medina Sidonia was puerile. Another says he was a dupe of the King. Another says he was an incompetent fool. Another says he was a tragic hero. And yet another says he was quite simply insane. Each historian in turn points to the same body of evidence, but draws a different and incompatible conclusion. So how are we to decide which account is the truth of the matter? Simpy by considering the probative weight of the evidence each historian provides, determining in our own mind which explanation accounts for the most facts or otherwise is the most compelling, and then make a decision? Isn't this tantamount to saying that it is rather the readers of hisotry and not historians who ultimately determine the past? It seems to me that mere reader assent cannot and should not settle the matter, any more than a patient should settle on his own disease from a number of alternative diagnoses. Shouldn't it rather be the experts who decide these things? So why don't they? I know that history is not like casting out nines in arithmetic, but to say that we can know the past without knowing the truth strikes me as being logically impossible. I do not think that a demand for certainty in historicism is not a demand to be like chemistry or physics, i.e., to demand the rigor and precision of the laboratory in an area where it is simply not possible. I do not expect history to be science. But this does mean that the interpretative excesses of historians do not go far beyond what the subject matter admits. And I think this is why historians disagree about the past more than on the fact of the matter; they all take the same body of facts and then manipulate and characterize those facts to best serve their purpose. In the end, they're doing no more and no different than what a literary critic does when he insists what the correct meaning of a play or poem should be. This is not to say that an appreciation of the past cannot be gotten from reading history; it is to say that I am not looking for appreciation; I'm looking for the truth. And as long as historians play employ emotive language and interpretive license, I am not going to get it. Nobody is. And there's the pity. Because getting history right is a hell of a lot more important than getting King Lear or Jabberwocky right.
You might find this website interesting:
History Is A Weapon
I found it searching for an online version of the afterword in The People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn. This book was written with the premise of presenting an alternative view of history from the perspective of minorities, etc.
A People's History of the United States
It appears the afterword is not in this online version, but to encapsulate Zinn says there is no such thing as facts presented by an historian. There is only judgement. Judgement of which facts are important, for one. In this book, he found it important to illuminate "themes" which were missing in traditional histories.
"There were themes of profound importance to me which I found missing in the orthodox histories that ever dominated American culture. The consequense of those omissions has been not simply to give a distorted view of the past but, more important, to mislead us all about the present."
This seems to represent a larger idea that any type of manifested work, system, society, or other invention can only reflect to a precision the level of enlightenment of its creator and is somewhat tainted by a certain filter of personality or prejudiced interest.
) I would say that it's certain possible (it wouldn't be contradictory) to say that our histories are all lies. It just seems more probable for me and for everyone else that our histories are not lies. Then again, probability doesn't really justify our belief...so...hmmm...
