who says its history?

“What is history?... is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past.”- E.H Carr

After reading the article by E.H Carr and looking at all the different definitions people had of history, I feel that the author himself sums up its definition the best.

To me, history for the most part of my life was just annoying dates that had to be mugged up in class. I hated it with a vengeance and cursed the authors of our textbooks. However there always was an aspect that intrigued me. Who wrote this history? Who decided what the inhabitants of the Indus valley civilization were thinking when they made a highly advance drainage system? Who knew what the world actually looked like in the dinosaur ages? Who said that Akbar actually loved painting?

Many say that History is an explanation of past events and their causes, While there are some others who seem to give it no more importantance than any piece of fiction.others go beyond that to scorn it.

“History is the lie commonly agreed upon.”- Voltaire
Im not entirely sure what this statement means , but I sense it could be referring to something similar to what Carr also talks about in his article, where he says that ‘ knowledge of the past has come down through one or more human minds, has been ‘processed’ by them, and therefore cannot consist of elemental and impersonal atoms which nothing can alter…’. Since all history involves people and their points of view every piece of history is as legitimate as another.
The main job of a historian is to evaluate not record. He uses empirical evidence, or facts, and re-plays history in his mind, and this history becomes legitimate for the reader. But how are facts recorded? Facts too come out of some sort of a consensus between historians. One day a historian, bases on his point of view and his ‘findings”, puts a date to an event. This becomes the food for another historian who uses this as a fact and then adds to it his point of view. Overtime as others use it, it becomes a historical fact. So it is essential, as Collingwood says that the reader re-enacts what went on in the mind of the historian, just the way the historian re -enacted what went on in the mind of his ‘dramatis pesonae’. And so, I guess very often if not read and dealt with correctly, as G.K Chesterton says, history can become a “confused heap of facts”, and maybe even lies.
In E.H Carr’s article he talks about an aspect of facts and interpretation. This is interesting. I am not sure I entirely agree with a classification of facts into facts of the past and facts of history . In my view there are a bunch of facts out of which the historian sees just a few and out of those that he sees, he chooses to give importance to a few.
Once a historian has his facts, he strangles with the interpretation. But it is important to get his facts right as for a historian, ‘Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue.” The historian then builds around the past to give his interpretation of what history is.

In summary, History is a complex interaction between events, memories, a perceiver, his interpretation, a reader and his interpretation.It may not be an ultimate truth of our past, but today I feel it helps us share a common experience. It does consciously or unconsciously reflects our position in time, answers questions on our lives and society, and binds us together.