3 ms·

My undergrad degree at Cal was history. One of the required classes for the major was historiography, the study of how history is created. This quote from the N

My undergrad degree at Cal was history. One of the required classes for the major was historiography, the study of how history is created. This quote from the New Yorker article sums up one of the key ideas of the historiography class: > It’s that bias in history-making is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it. I imagine that anyone who majored in history in the USA over the last 20 years is familiar with this idea. I'm not trying to make a value judgment. Just noting that it's a very widespread idea among academically trained historians.

photochemsyn 5y ago
The issue is really whether people are aware of their own biases and actively try to counter them by trying to look at events through the lens of different biases, or just run with their own biases because they're trying to promote them, generally with ulterior motives in mind. Hence George Orwell: "Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future." For example, if you ardently believe in investment capitalism as the best economic system in history, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of Wall Street's close ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, such as the IBM story: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-years-of-corporate-denial/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-yea... Alternatively, if you ardently believe Marx-inspired socialism is the optimal solution, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine: https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine/ https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on... Historians who are merely trying to promote their own particular ideology, or to justify the past actions of their own particular nation-state, are best viewed as propaganda peddlers.
giraffe_lady 5y ago
It's also important to note, I think especially in this context, that this framework isn't really a matter of ideology. I'm not saying you think it is, but I think a fair number of people here are likely to interpret it that way. This view is so widespread because people who practice history find it valuable. When you come across, for example, a widely known primary document that contradicts or undermines a view common to historians for many years, how do you explain that? The answer isn't in the facts of the documents, it's in the social construction of "history." I think there's a really common implicit assumption that historians are just people who know a lot of things about history. But once you get away from that and into the understanding of it as a skill- and research-based social practice, you start to need something to explain why we know what we know, or think we do. This ends up being a fairly useful one!

photochemsyn 5y ago

The issue is really whether people are aware of their own biases and actively try to counter them by trying to look at events through the lens of different biases, or just run with their own biases because they're trying to promote them, generally with ulterior motives in mind. Hence George Orwell: "Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future." For example, if you ardently believe in investment capitalism as the best economic system in history, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of Wall Street's close ties to Nazi Germany in the 1930s, such as the IBM story: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-years-of-corporate-denial/ https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ibm-and-the-holocaust-20-yea... Alternatively, if you ardently believe Marx-inspired socialism is the optimal solution, you might be reluctant to dive into the history of collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine: https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on-ukraine/ https://www.anneapplebaum.com/book/red-famine-stalins-war-on... Historians who are merely trying to promote their own particular ideology, or to justify the past actions of their own particular nation-state, are best viewed as propaganda peddlers.

giraffe_lady 5y ago

It's also important to note, I think especially in this context, that this framework isn't really a matter of ideology. I'm not saying you think it is, but I think a fair number of people here are likely to interpret it that way. This view is so widespread because people who practice history find it valuable. When you come across, for example, a widely known primary document that contradicts or undermines a view common to historians for many years, how do you explain that? The answer isn't in the facts of the documents, it's in the social construction of "history." I think there's a really common implicit assumption that historians are just people who know a lot of things about history. But once you get away from that and into the understanding of it as a skill- and research-based social practice, you start to need something to explain why we know what we know, or think we do. This ends up being a fairly useful one!