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Can we ever 'know' history?

Anachronous Rex

New Member
arg-fallbackName="Anachronous Rex"/>
This thread is largely inspired by the book The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History, written by Gordon S. Wood.

We have, of course, heard that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It has also been said that history is written by the winners. Thus the question must arise: is it possible to ever truly know history?

Can the reality of past events ever escape from the mire of misconception and popular memory? And, if not, are the vast efforts of historical revisionists to extricate the truth nothing more then waisted energy? What is it we can reasonably hope to learn from the past?

I eagerly await your thoughts...
 
arg-fallbackName="MRaverz"/>
When I first heard of the giant super computer from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy as a kid, I hypothesised that even if a computer could be created which was guaranteed to tell us the truth of something (be it history or the existence of god etc.) - we would still be sceptical of the results.

I therefore conclude that we cannot 'know' anything, but we can 'know' something 'beyond reasonable doubt'. The problem is determining what 'reasonable doubt' is.
 
arg-fallbackName="PAB"/>
Isn't part of the problem regarding history , the debatability of the ''present''.For example interpretations of recent events will effect how it is perceived 'now'. which could then can be further interpreted in the future.
 
arg-fallbackName="Anachronous Rex"/>
PAB said:
Isn't part of the problem regarding history , the debatability of the ''present''.For example interpretations of recent events will effect how it is perceived 'now'. which could then can be further interpreted in the future.
Exactly. If there is so much contention even regarding the present then how might we hope to accurately understand the past? And if we cannot do that then how might we hope to learn from it?

I must admit I do like the judicial/scientific response to this question: that rather then simply trying to 'know' past events we should instead endeavor to produce a superior working model of them. The problem, of course, is that history's evidence is confined mostly to primary, and some secondary, sources; many of which are contradictory. This data can almost never be as accurate as careful experiment conducted in controlled conditions might be.
 
arg-fallbackName="lrkun"/>
We can only know what has been accepted as this generation's history, because in reality, until man creates a time machine, we can only see a glimpse of it through the eyes of unclear evidence, and testimonies, which may or may not have been altered by the winners.

The question is, how does this affect our present? What is the important question we need to answer? Hehe
 
arg-fallbackName="BoundToTell"/>
lrkun said:
We can only know what has been accepted as this generation's history

We can know many different versions of history than merely what is accepted by most of the generation. That's the entire point behind the study and research of history, to constantly test our knowledge of the past. Unless you have a society where all dissenting interpretations of current events are destroyed, common conceptions can be completely overturned.

Now, to the original question. It really depends on which bit of history you're talking about. Surely we know that in our recent history, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. The evidence is still around today, yet hardly any of us (meaning humanity in general) directly witnessed it. Can we know 100% that it wasn't some giant elaborate hoax? No, but that's where beyond a reasonable doubt comes in. Of course, unlike law, history is always open to change. At least, it is in academia. Mainstream usage of history is a perversion of the study since we have entire political movements built around the Boston Tea Party, which, if one looks at the historical event from outside of an elementary school perspective, it becomes quite clear that it was about the opposite of what the modern political movement stands for.

So can we know that things happened as they were written before anyone still living was born? No, but of course, this gets into the whole thing of we cannot truly know anything. What we can do, however, is utilize a variety of sources (usually primary, sometimes secondary, as another poster stated) and come to conclusions based on it all. Of course, one must have sound reasoning behind the arguments for them to even be debated, but it's as close to objectivity as we can.

I know this is a place of science nerds, so no, history cannot be verified through experiments. This doesn't really mean anything, though, because that's never been what history has been about. A significant amount of my time is spent doing incredibly meticulous research, and then arguing about shit. This will likely be what I do for the rest of my life, haha. Never do I perform experiments in the scientific way. But of course, science is not the only way to know our world, hence every other discipline of academia around. Mostly just pointing this out 'cause I know this place really big on science.
 
arg-fallbackName="Mapp"/>
Actually a great deal of history is not written by the winners. This has been especially true in the last three decades with the rise of post-colonialism, and the various branches of history that came out of the civil rights movement and second wave feminism. There has been a major push in historical circles to recover "lost voices" women, slaves, the colonized, things which can often only be inferred through examining what white people wrote. I'll give you one good example. I remember reading a narrative of a Jesuit priest visiting a slave plantation in Hispanola. While there, he witnessed a slave woman give birth. According to the document, the woman, crying profusly, then took the baby and began a strange "tribal dance." Before anyone could stop her, the baby was dead. Now, to anyone reading this, it seems clear that this woman, shook her newborn baby to death, rather than let it live a life on a plantation. It didn't even occur to the Jesuit and his companions that an African woman could be capable of that kind of thinking. They had so internalized the rationalization that these were dumb animals that they were simply incapable of thinking about them any other way. That kind of re-contextualizing leads to extremely valuable insight into the development of these mindsets, which are themselves historical processes.

Gordon Wood's book is interesting because he examines history's "use." In other words, how can one be in any way objective when one is operating from a pre-existing narrative. How can we apply terms like nation to pre-ethnic people? Thus, in a way, we are undone before we've even started. His example is historians who attempt to tackle the revolutionary ideals of the founding fathers. By wrapping these ideas within modern concepts of liberalism, they lose the context in which those ideas actually germinated. As a historian myself, I fully recognize the problem, and I study things that aren't even a century past yet.

It's when we become aware of these differences in context that real history is done, and what's amazing is how deep the differences are between past and present. Queer theory, for instance, examines how sexuality and gender have changed. How can we speak about homosexuals in early Republic Venice for instance, when the very concept of a homosexual is a 20th century invention? While this kind of study often presents a problem- what happens when you've deconstructed language to a point that nothing has any meaning anymore- it has made the study of history infinitely more vibrant.

History is not a science, but it still maintains the peer review process, and requires rigorous showing of sources. While it will never be possible to write THE HISTORY OF MANKIND, it is possible to vastly enrich the picture of the past. This is why I so often despair when I go into bookstores and see what passes for "history." The actual conversation is so much more interesting then the triumphalistic, militaristic shit that makes up the most bookstore selections.
 
arg-fallbackName="BoundToTell"/>
Mapp said:
This is why I so often despair when I go into bookstores and see what passes for "history." The actual conversation is so much more interesting then the triumphalistic, militaristic shit that makes up the most bookstore selections.

I'm not alone! Yay.I'm only an undergrad student of history at this point, but it was when I got to college and studied something other than military history (which all of my high school history teachers had graduate degrees in) that I realized I have a love for it. Since I've been only even slightly exposed to the real study of history, I find I can't get enough. I get significantly disappointed whenever I enter my local used bookstore and that's all I find: books that regurgitate the same thing that high school textbooks state or intense studies of specific aspects of war. It wasn't until a few months ago that I even realized that the history of science was an actual field of study.

Not exactly on topic, but I felt a need to elaborately agree. I've only been slightly exposed, and already the history of academia fascinates me in a way no generic bookstore could.
 
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