Do we learn more history from text books or historical novels

From this information we can deduct that textbooks have limited information about past events and they cannot go into much details. For example, in some sections over various wars over the years, textbooks have different battles as subtopics; however, they only pick a selected few battles from the war and are sometimes bias with the battles they chose to pick. If it is an American textbook often times the battles they do choose will be the majority that the Americans did well in, as opposed to if it was a British textbook, they would not have multiple battles where they were defeated by American troops, etc. Also books context change over time therefore if you will read book from about 50 years ago about, for example Stalin, you will find that he came from the good, well-educated family. While if you will read the same topic again in our days you will find out that he actually came from the poor family and he used to rob trains. By hiding this information government was trying to idealise Stalin. However, we don’t know how many facts and events have been covered like this in other text books and how they will change over time.  

Also historical are often a better resource because they can tell you a lot of information about very specific occasion, event or person. From the other hand, novels are written by one person and as we know people are tend to be biased and write from their point of view.

Therefore I would like to say that there is no specific answer to this question because all books are written by people some of them might be more reliable and trustful than others but anyway all of them would be biased. So I suggest that the best way to learn history is to read various text books and novels so you would understand different points of view and sooner enough construct your own.

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