When We Study History We Are Not Studying The Past But What Historians Have Constructed About The Past

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‘When we study history we are not studying the past but what historians have constructed about the past’ (Keith Jenkins). Discuss.

History is supposedly the process of reporting the past in the most accurate way possible, however, this inevitably is not always the case. Our study of history is rarely, if ever, based on first hand experiences but rather the accounts of such experiences by other historians. In this way the basic and obvious facet of the question is answered as indeed in the act of studying it is necessary to have material to study which inevitably is written by a historian, as Jenkins comments “all history is historiography”. Pg11 This though does not mean that opinions become uniform and although the same set of key facts are largely used they can be interpreted in endless different ways in pursuit of a ‘past’ closer to the truth.

The clearest counter argument to Jenkins statement is the use of primary sources which could be said to be unbiased as they are predominantly objective such as facts and figures. They are the first report of fact which has not been lost in the translation of interpretation by various different historians. However, even these are vulnerable to inaccuracy, whether it is incomplete archives “perished by accident or design”, being “Tainted by the less than pure intentions of their author”, human errors or inaccuracies, or simply ambiguity such as that represented by a photograph. Considering this it would be reasonable to say that there is no historical source that we can be certain is completely accurate. However, once again this may be to underestimate historiography as an expertise “when properly applied, the critical method enables the historian to make allowance for both deliberate distortion and the unthinking reflexes of the writer”. Part of historiography is the evaluation of sources through scrutiny of possible influencing factors such as context, subsequently if we accept that this process is a given in the study of history then it becomes permissible that even though we may be studying a construct of another historian we are also looking to extract what we consider reliable and so constructing our own view on the past.   Pg 169 Tosh

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Rationalists believe that anyone is justified to write history whether or not they have experienced it first hand. In this light all historians are rationalists and so whist they would indeed be studying a construction of the past they would be completely vindicated in doing so as a genuine attempt to seek a more accurate account of historical events. Empiricists, in contrast to rationalists, would argue that historical accounts should only be considered valid if they are written from the first hand perspective and should be structured around reaching a conclusion from analysis of the facts. This method does ...

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