Are Books About History Historically Accurate?
Monday, November 15th, 2010You might wonder how relevant history is to the present. After all, it’s in the past. But you might have heard that you’re doomed to repeat history if you don’t learn from it. You should at least learn enough about it to pass history class. Joking aside, history is an important part of our lives because the past is what leads up to how things are now. If elements of the past were changed or if things had run along a different course, the world that we live in today wouldn’t exist. It’s because of what we’ve learned from our ancestors that we’re able to progress. They forged the way for us so that we know what not to do, and what hasn’t been done yet.
But being in the past, history only exists now in our minds and in the books about history that are left behind or continue to be written. So the accuracy of our historical knowledge really depends on how we recall things and how we record them, and unfortunately these methods aren’t completely reliable. We have the power to rewrite the past in terms of rectifying past mistakes in the future, but we also have the power to rewrite books about history so that they recall past events erroneously.
Historically, books about history haven’t always told the whole truth. For example, Christopher Columbus’ atrocious treatment of the Native Americans upon his arrival was frequently omitted from history book text. So was the fact that it was the Native Americans who saved the Pilgrims by providing them food at Thanksgiving, not the other way around. We don’t hear much about Woodrow Wilson’s racism or the fact that Helen Keller grew up to be a radical Socialist. Outside of America, it took a while for Japanese history to acknowledge the Rape of Nanking and some text has denied the Holocaust. Today, few people would deny the occurrence of these two events, yet we depend on books about history for knowledge regarding them. History might exist in some people’s memories, but in the future they will pass on and only books and word of mouth will remain. It makes you aware of how precarious the nature of historical knowledge really is.
How much can history books really document? There’s only so much their pages can hold, and inevitably some details will slip through the cracks. People of the past didn’t always leave behind specific descriptions of what happened to them, what they were like, what they were thinking, so we’ll never truly know. Yet it doesn’t seem plausible to toss out all the history books in existence because of their possible fallacies.
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