Historians Work With Incomplete Information On Unrepeatable Events
- Unlike scientists who design controlled experiments, historians work with materials that were never intended to provide complete or accurate information for future scholars studying unrepeatable events.
- These include propaganda, personal communication, administrative record-keeping, artistic expression.
- This creates fundamental constraints on what historical knowledge can achieve.
- The past must always be interpreted through surviving fragments that reflect the biases, limitations, and agendas of their creators.
Definition
Historical knowledge
Understanding constructed from fragmentary evidence about unrepeatable past events, requiring constant interpretation and reinterpretation as new sources emerge and analytical frameworks evolve.
This evidence comes from a variety of sources, which historians critically analyze to build their accounts.
The Source Reliability Problem
- Historical sources are shaped by the motivations, biases, and limitations of the people who created them:
- A general's memoir emphasizes how strategic and smart they were.
- A newspaper deadline shapes which details get included
- Personal diaries record what people think are worth remembering.
- So, instead of seeking objective truth about past events, historians interpret subjective accounts to understand how people experienced and made sense of their circumstances.
The subjectivity becomes the data rather than the problem.
Hint- A diplomat witnessing the outbreak of World War I had no idea he was observing the start of a global conflict that would reshape the world.
- His reports would focus on immediate diplomatic concerns, not the historical significance that only became apparent decades later.
- Proximity to events often produces confusion rather than clarity.
Corroboration and Its Limits
- Historians seek corroboration by comparing multiple sources, but this can still complicate things.
- When sources agree, it might indicate reliable evidence.
- Or, that they're all copying from the same original source, reflecting shared propaganda, or representing similar social positions rather than independent verification.
- Disagreement between sources can be equally informative.
- When Union and Confederate soldiers described Gettysburg differently, both accounts contained valuable information about how the battle was experienced from different perspectives.
- The Union emphasis on strategic victory reflected morale-building needs, while Confederate focus on miscommunication revealed internal problems with command structure.
- When three friends describe the same party differently, one focusing on who showed up, another on the music, and a third on the drama that happened.
- Each version reflects what they cared about and how they want to be remembered.
- The person who started the drama might leave that part out entirely.
- Historians face the same problem, except instead of reconstructing one party, they're trying to understand events that shaped entire civilizations based on similarly selective and self-interested accounts.
The Construction of Historical Narratives
- Historians make interpretive choices about causation, significance, and emphasis that fundamentally shape what becomes accepted as historical knowledge.
- The same evidence supports radically different explanations for major events.
