A Historian must combine the rigour of a mathematician with the imagination of an artist. To what extent, then, can historians be confident about their conclusions?

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A Historian must combine the rigour of a mathematician with the imagination of an artist. To what extent, then, can historians be confident about their conclusions?

History…what is History? “It is merely a subject that concentrates all the dates of important historical events that have taken place in the last 200 decades.” This is how history is viewed among many insular people. These outlandish statements are built on no solid grounds and just demonstrate the enormity of this misconception. An article on any historical event may take as long as years or eve4n decades to publish yet do not contain the absolute truth. Why is this?

There are series of never ending obstacles that face all historians; it is entirely up to them to decide how far they want to give up on their quest for obtaining the ultimate truth. The ultimate truth cannot be achieved because it is purely human nature to be biased. It would therefore be impossible for any human being to produce a perfect analysis of any historical event, as we are prone to lean over one side of the story. The Literary Digest conducted a poll in 1936 to determine the result of the U.S Presidential election, which was greatly in favour of the Republican candidate Alf Landon. However “the error arose largely because of biases that caused wealthy people to be over represented in the poll.” This shows that historians will be mislead in situations where some stones may be left unturned. It is decisive that historians work through all their facts and gather views from all directions to enable them to have a much broader perspective of this event. They would also need to draw their emotions and their thoughts far away as possible to be reasonably confident about their conclusions.

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From a mathematician’s perspective, a historian has to follow through the events in a logical manner. A historian needs make sense of things and draw some connecting conclusions between events and this is where most historians differ. One can reasonably place smaller events in to a methodological order, however these sequences of events would not follow if there were no connecting line between them. These connecting lines cannot be drawn by any illiterate person, it requires training yourself one again being unbiased, making logical connections and getting as many sources as possible. Barbara Tuchman a self-trained historian in one of her essay, “Is History a Guide to the Future?” points out one of the many reasons why historians find it difficult to draw perfect conclusion. She says, “The human being – you, I, or Napoleon- is unreliable as a scientific factor1.” It is for this particular reason that historians have to converse with people of all extremes and put forth their logical conclusion.

Historians can overcome all these setbacks to draw their conclusions by training-themselves in these fields.

With the imagination or an artist, a historian can train himself to use his imagination and arouse all sorts of possibilities and link different events carefully. Another imaginative contribution by an artist’s imagination is the means of coming up with more questions to answer. This will lead to extensive amounts of research which will in turn help the historian to expand his confined outlook to a broader spectrum of understanding. This will continuously assist any historian to be reasonably confident with his or her conclusions. This imagination is very important to any historian if he or she wants to be reasonably confident with their conclusions because these are some of the means by which a historian draws himself or herself away from responding like a normal human being would. I suppose one can go to the extreme to say that a historian’s aim is to make their conclusions from an alien’s point of view. I think that an alien is a perfect example because

An alien doesn’t have human nature instincts therefore I presume that they would not be biased. Secondly, not knowing anything about the human race and when asked for their opinion, they would provide the ultimate response. For example, when an alien is asked to give his view on the Middle East Crisis, I personally think that he would provide us with the ultimate truth. Firstly because he is totally unbiased, I say this knowing that aliens know nothing about human beings and have no sort of relations with the Jewish community or with the Palestinians. This means that whatever they conclude will not favor any party.

I have purposely been using one specific word, reasonable to state the extent to which historians may be confident about their conclusion. As mentioned earlier that no human being can achieve the ultimate truth, which means that historian should be confident in realizing that his or her conclusions are not perfect. They may get close to the ultimate truth and that process is entirely up to them. This process is the process of training oneself. This can come through experience or by leaving your conclusions for the public criticism. After getting criticized the first time, a historian should restate his or her conclusion and let it get criticized once again and restate it and the process continues. The historians should take this process as constructive criticism because as I mentioned earlier this process should be undertaken by the historians to get as close to the ultimate truth.

I would finally end by saying that one can argue to what extent historians may be confident about their conclusions and this has a total dependency on the effort put by the historian to make his or her conclusion. Some of the obstacles as I mentioned before that face historians are biasness, involvement of their own emotions and judgment drawing logical conclusions, being able to ask more questions and being able to get as many sources as possible. These obstacles have extensive effects on the final conclusions drawn by historians as shown by the U.S Presidential poll; therefore it is exclusively up the historians to decide how confident they are of their conclusions. I can only say that historians can if they want obtain very close to perfect conclusions if they successfully overcame the above mentioned obstacles and trained themselves thoroughly in these fields. The process of getting realistic conclusions will not take one or two nights but may take as long as years or even decades in some cases. Therefore historians the choice is entirely up to the historians to make and decide how confident they are with their conclusions.