Discuss the roles of language and reason in history
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Introduction
Discuss the roles of language and reason in history The country without a history is like a person without a memory. History doesn't only tell us about the past but it also helps us to understand the present and predict what will happen in the future. The foundation on which history is built, are facts and evidences that are useable by historians who create the historical records. There is a distinguish between historical evidences - primary and secondary sources. A role of language in history is very important, because history is written and is presented to people through language. The reason is also an important factor in history; with a certain reasoning historian create a historical record of certain event in a certain way. There could be bad reasoning and problem of bias in history. In this essay, the roles of language and reason in history will be explained more deeply with the supportive examples. "First of all historians make history by selecting facts and processing them and it is the processing that creates history". ...read more.
Middle
Describing event will depend on such a thing as that person's interest, expectations and cultural background. For instance, if I witnessed the invasion of another nation in my country, I would probably see this event in a victim's point of view and describe it as a violent thing that I have ever seen. While the troops who invaded my country would describe their invasion like it was one of things they really needed to do for their country and it wasn't that aggressive than the other invasions they did before. This kinds of things may lead the bias in history. However history is not a record of every single thing that happened in the past, it's about only unique or significant events. In order to decide whether or not the event is historically significant, we need to know the reason why one event is important to the history of the world but why not the other one. Affecting on many people's lives or bringing big difference to the world makes the event to be historically significant. ...read more.
Conclusion
Also they should be aware of both the intention of creator of the document and the biases and prejudice of generation which he himself belongs. But everybody knows that not all historians have had imaginative understanding when they created history. Sometimes people abuse the history by resisting the evidences and writing the history that sounds good for them selves. The historical event that we read from book is judged by those who witnessed it, and then by the historian who wrote about it could make it hard to establish the truth. Unfortunately people see bias in every country's history, since most governments involve how history should be taught in schools. Historical record should be considered to be written in biased way with some reasons. For instance, while Mongolian historians write and try to prove the fact that Mongolia has always been independent from Chinese rules with the big support from Soviet Union, Chinese government makes the school to teach their students that Mongolia had been part of China until 1921. Here you could find the intention of national bias, which both Mongolia and China wants to show their national strength in history. ...read more.
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