The Facts and Values of History

A detailed Summary of The Facts and Values of History

The facts of history, the values and interpretations of history can all be a subject of repeated debate; it is contested and perceived differently by different types of groups of people and ideas. At the same time it is important to remember that history is a part of our culture, it is something we all share and no individual group owns it. It is our past heritage and although it is gone, we feel a part of it. People from different interest groups and classes, regions and localities, religions and cultures, have seen and will see history in contrasting ways. History is far from simple.

Historians are mutually exclusive; the things they say are nonetheless true as longs as these things are within the confines of the ideas and values of their creators. What I mean is that there are many ways for historians to tell the same story, each of them equally valid. There is an ability of historians to be objective with regards to the facts, but there are also propositions that there are some aspects of history that are absolute and may not be questioned. It is not about questions of the facts but about how an individual interprets those facts. Facts do not have, "meaning", when you question the meaning of historical events, you ar

e not denying they occurred, it's just interpretations are bound to change from class to class, gender to gender, and of course, over time. These historians never ask, "Did this historical event happen?" but they ask, "What happened in this historical event?" Carr's essay states that it used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when this historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give to the floor, and in what order and context.

Every historian inevitably has a point of view but how can historians be sure that just experiences and evidence really does get us closer to the true meaning of the past? To tell whether a historian can be neutral and objective is like asking if a historian is just the deliverer to the truth of the past or if the historian is the unavoidably the revealer in the meaning for the past. Does the past have just one meaning or several? The historian provides the truth of the past, as he would represent it rather than as he found it. So very few historians are completely neutral. People don't generally record their thoughts unless they have a purpose; design or they're getting something out of creating the text. For a historian to be objective, he needs to reveal the truth free from his values and cultural biases. There is no way that a text can ever be completely objective because all texts are the products of that author's culture in which he lived. The author who claims that h

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Approximate Word count = 1009
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History