The Historian and His Facts

 always thought of history as one of those subjects that we study, it interested me, no more no less. I never really questioned the significance, and how history is written. Im sure thats how most of us have been looking at it.  Now when I actually think about it, a lot of questions come to mind. They are not groundbreaking questions, and I wonder why I haven’t asked them before. But I realise how easily we are just accepting of things, no questions asked, they are the way they are.
The past intrigues us. The past at a global level, but also at a personal level. We hope that by studying the past, we can learn from the successes and the mistakes  made by  people in the past. So we read biographies of famous people, we buy unprecedented numbers of histories of failed regimes and disgraced dictators, we eagerly consume the accounts of national rise and fall, all in the hopes of learning something important about ourselves and our future. Many of us hope that the past can explain our present and foretell our future.
E.H Carr says “ No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought - what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he thought he thought”
This brings me to the question of what is an absolute truth? In my opinion, there is no absolute truth. Yes de dates that have been recorded, and the names of the kings, the queens, and the revolutionaries might be correct. But those are not the essence of history. To me the essence of history is the events and people from the past that have affected our state of being today in some way or another.  As Carr says: “ The past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present”  but a past act is a dead act i.e meaningless to the historian, unless he can understand the thought that lay behind it. Hence “All history is the history of thought” When it comes to thought, it is impossible to get factual, (even though I think at times it would be comforting to know that it is) and all we can depend upon is interpretation, ideally correct and objective. But we dont live in a ideal world, and we will rarely be able to see all sides of a story.
If we are willing to learn from our past mistakes I feel that constant re-evaluation should be taking  place on how we study history.  History is constantly evolving and in our era of media and communication the way history will be written in the future will probably be very different. Today we live by the Internet, a created territory opened instantly before us, available for the taking, free and unchallenged in access, undisciplined and wild in its behaviour. The amount of  information that will be available will be vast and expansive, filled with both biased and not so biased articles.  There will be so much available that it will be difficult to see what is truthful and what is not. On the other hand, we will have a large spread of information from different view points available so with a lot of  sifting and interpreting our future historians may be able to create a  more well rounded history.
Im going to end with a quote that describes best what I feel about the history we know today, by the twentieth century Austrian-born philosopher, Karl Popper: "There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world." Going into this would be another story altogether so all I am going to say is that I hope, that with the resources available today history will turn out to be more complete and inclusive.

Myrthe Lanting