To Think of Elephants discussion

My writing teacher bought up an interesting question as the topic for this semester: How accurate is the history we read in books?

Some history books just glaze over the Japanese internment during World War 2. Others go in depth on descriptions of the mistakes America made.

Which is the right way to portray history? Is there even a right way at all?

I'm reminded of this quote that I think is William James, and I don't remember it exactly, but the main idea is that we can't have truth until the last man has lived and died.

The "right" way to write about history would probably be to tell the truth, to tell nothing but the facts. But that's impossible. We weren't there. The primary sources are written by people who had an agenda and who were limited in what they know. And there were so many people whose stories were lost because they weren't important or they couldn't write or their experiences were destroyed because someone in power didn't like them. So we can never have the whole story because of the millions who weren't there, who weren't important, but who were still affected but are still a part of the whole story.

Everyone has an angle. Even those who profess to be neutral. They're still telling a story, and they have a limited number of pages in which to fit everything together in the best way possible, which means that something gets left out.

When you write a history paper in school, you're still expected to have a thesis. You make claims and use research to support those claims. You consider possibilities for why things happened and then you go and look at archives and see if what you think is supported. But it's still what you think, and you still don't know if that's what actually happened. Maybe it did happen, but you could still be missing part of the story. You probably are missing part of the story.

There's so much to life that gets left out. Right now, I'm reading a book about reproductive rights and reform in the Weimar Republic; this is not something you'd ever see in a history book because it's deemed unimportant to a general understanding, and yet this is something that affected the lives of average Germans. Women tend to get left out of history books. People pick and choose, and they pick and choose to show a very specific version of history, and that's not necessarily wrong or false. It's just one part of history, and more parts need to be told, and from multiple angles.

To go to your example, Kly: To some people, the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans in World War II would not be seen as a "mistake". It happened, but the US had its reasons, and it wasn't wrong. To other people, this WAS a mistake; the government was stupid (and can still be stupid), and this should be addressed. Personal feelings aside, I'm not sure one side is more valid than the other, as long as BOTH versions are told. (And people are intelligent enough to understand that just because it's nonfiction doesn't mean it's absolutely true.)

I don't want to say that you should tell the story that you want to tell. I don't even think you should do that when writing fiction. However, I do think that you should focus your research on what interests you, and you have to recognise that your story will be incomplete.

And maybe it depends on what you're writing and why. If you're writing an overview, you should limit yourselves to the facts. If you're writing some sort of dissertation, you're probably going to have a thesis and make claims that you need to support. You're going to use facts carefully. You're going to leave things out. Is this wrong? Maybe, but history shouldn't just be a list of facts. History is about people, and people have reasons. Facts don't. So if a historian theorises...I think it's a way to humanise history.

A simpler thought would be to read as many sides (sources, points of view, etc.) of the event as you can.

If Way every checks out this topic, she may have seen my Facebook post on this, but I managed to quote Wicked when the professor first posed the question. Remember this line?

"Well, Elphaba, you see, where I come from, people believe all sorts of things that aren't true. They call it history."

He goes on to make examples, such as the whole idea of Robber Barons vs. Philanthropists, and states "it's all in which label is able to persist."

I love the points that he makes, and how true they are. But, have you ever heard the line, "The winner's story is the one that gets told"?

We harp on and on about how China is controlling the school books that get written, and what their children learn about their history. Yet, we often voluntarily chose to be ignorant to the multiple sides to each story.

I think the right way to define history in the textbooks is to be non biased. I know that everybody is probably thinking I'm crazy, and that textbooks aren't biased, but I think they are.

Like, if a historian is writing a textbook on the Holocaust, and he thinks that Hitler really is a good guy, he'll list things that as a child, Hitler waasn't really that bad. Or that historian could hate Hitler, and emphasize how Hitler killed over millions of Jews. Eh...

:D SO I think that's what should be happenin.' No more bias-ness. (Not even a word, but lets pretend it is, okay?)

It is easy to see.
True unadulterated history would contain all the events as seen by all sides. Since all events can not be contained in one book, the first thing that happens is that a slice of time is covered which is okay as it is not possible to cover everything. From then on everything goes down hill. Without covering all sides which is more than two and by cutting down a books worth of background information into a few sentences you are left with nothing of substance.

You want to know about something you can do it yourself. Read about the event from as many points as view as possible. And make sure they are not all on the same side.

I think there is no right way to portray history, it's just so broad, and there is a lot of it. History must be presented as facts, not as opinions, so it has to be unbiased. In the end, you will base your own opinions about it.

it's just so broad --- that's the whole problem, even if one does stick to the just the facts, the facts that are left out can do just as much damage as opinions masquerading as facts.