Lesson 3: History is not what happened, history is what we say happened.

Before college, history, as I understood it, was very simple.  History was a set of objective facts compiled into official text books.  All you had to do was read the text book to find out “what happened.”

In college though, I discovered this fancy concept known as historiography, which is “the writing of history.”  Historiography is a form of history all its own.  For example, not only is the complicated and divisive American Civil War part of history, but so is the way historians have written about it.  Historians from the North wrote about the Civil War differently than historians from the south, and historians living in 1870 wrote about it differently than historians living in 1970.  No matter when or where a historian is from, they just can’t escape their own perspectives and biases and prejudices and cultural values.  And so, Civil War historiography varies considerably.  Now things like dates and the number of men in such-n-such brigade don’t elicit much debate, but questions like, “What caused the Civil War?” or “Who was to blame for such-n-such policy?” are far more complicated.

A few years ago a friend encouraged me to read a particular book on Christian church history from the first century to the present.  He said something to the effect of, “This book tells the real facts.”  Of course, with Biblical and church historians ranging from conservative fundamentalist historians to secular atheistic historians, I was a bit skeptical that this one book had successfully encapsulated all the REAL facts to the exclusion of all the biased non-facts.  But the book sounded interesting, so I opened up to the introduction.

The author of this book acknowledged the many controversies and differences of opinion that have colored Biblical and church scholarship, but he insisted that rather than mere personal opinion, his account would be objective (aka this is what REALLY happened).  I had read enough, and I placed the book back on the shelf to continue collecting dust.

What are the REAL facts anyway?  Are the real facts what the writers of primary source documents said, who of course had their own biases and prejudices, or are the real facts what scholarly writers of secondary source documents say, who also have their own biases and prejudices, or are the real facts contained in high school text books?  (I hear that Texas recently adopted the use of text books which all but completely eliminate Thomas Jefferson from its chapters on early United States history because people on some Texas educational board didn’t like Jefferson’s ideological values.  Bias and prejudice? Check.).

Everyone has biases and prejudices, from Herodotus to that really arrogant church historian; and I have biases and prejudices too.  A historian, or anyone for that matter, is far more credible when he admits what his biases are than when he pretends to be objective.

Now I’m no relativist; I believe certain things did indeed happen a certain way.  And I’m no epistemological skeptic; I believe we can access the past.  But I recognize that it is difficult and some debates just don’t go away very easily, and for good reason.  For most of human history, we simply don’t have any video type records of what happened when, where, and why.  So ultimately history is not “what happened,” rather history is “what we say happened.”  And that story is constantly evolving and being refined.