Turns out there's an entire academic field dedicated to this question! And a word for the concept: historiography! And over centuries, tens of thousands of acad

Turns out there's an entire academic field dedicated to this question! And a word for the concept: historiography! And over centuries, tens of thousands of academic historians have worked out any number of methods for assessing this sort of thing... there's even a history of historiography on the Wikipedia page about it! But you know, who knows if anything reported there is accurate?