The older I've gotten, the more I've become aware that history is simply a matter of trust. No matter who you're dealing with, a large group of people will igno

The older I've gotten, the more I've become aware that history is simply a matter of trust. No matter who you're dealing with, a large group of people will ignore facts or historical details simply on the basis of deciding that they don't trust the source. It's probably the main reason that people spend so much time attacking news outlets rather than the specific stories coming out of them (ie, Fox/CNN) to call out a specific bias. It just means that if you actually want the entire picture, you're going to have to go look for it and then look up citations yourself. In theory, something like Wikipedia should be the ideal way to handle this but even then you end up with "edit wars" as people actively work to remove details with valid citations. As a reader of a subject where you don't already deeply know the information, you have no way of knowing what's missing. This allows people to selectively include facts while leaving out others. All the "facts" may well be accurate, but the author has opted to skew the context. I call it the Bob and Tim rule. "Tim punched Bob." "Bob punched Tim." "Tim and Bob shook hands and made up." If you only report "Bob punched Tim", you've shared a fact but entirely skewed the context and that's why knowing an author's bias matters. It can give you an idea of how much harder you need to look for what's missing. The simple rule I've adopted when reading any headline or history that includes something bad that a person or country did is to ask, "What caused them to do that? Why?" Cause and effect works with history too. Read history with a lens where you assume people are good by default and ask "Why" when people do something that seems bad/evil. It will often point you in the direction where you need to be digging a lot more to get the complete picture.