History

The idea that someone has captured the truth of a period of time in a page or chapter of a book is cloyingly sweet. You want it to be true. We need it to be possible. There it is, without question or variation, and it reads the same to us every time. We pretend that history only started when folks started writing things down. As if that had any impact on whether folks did anything. We like to imagine we understand history, because we want to think we are prepared for the future.

We look to history to better understand the present. We need the certainty of historical records to balance our law and true our investments. We depend on historical accuracy and yet we know that perspective, timing, class, and politics all introduce variants, omissions, embellishments, and lies. So the study of history is either the blind acceptance of perfidy, or a careful review of conflicting and sometimes deliberately misleading accounts.

Most distressingly, there have been several notable times in European history in which vast quantities of written materials have been consumed by fire. The rare volumes that survived this were often scraped clean and used to capture church records. Consequently, there is a great deal of material we simply no longer have access to that would probably dramatically alter our perceptions of actors in and interactions of history. Instead we are left with materials both suspect and clearly fictitious.

My view of the past is obscured by what I think I know, and also by what I don’t know. How I decide to make sense of the materials I’m given is largely based on the materials I’ve seen previously — and this is true for everyone. I can disagree with an author that I am normally sympathetic to when I realize that I have been exposed to information they have not seen. And this different information can radically change ones understanding.