Why historian disagree

Communication skills. The job of the historian is to critically analyze their sources, identify problems or sources of bias, then take what they? Much like today, people of the past were biased in the way they presented information.

Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel. Skip to content Home Essay What are some reasons historians so often disagree? Ben Davis May 2, What are some reasons historians so often disagree? What do historians argue about? What are historical interpretations? When two sources disagree and there is no other means of evaluation What should the historian do? Let us know in the comments!

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Home Culture Why do historians disagree? By Marie C. On Sep 24, Contents hide. Related Answers. Oct 15, Prev Post Who is the 1st doctor in the world? Next Post Where is the water diviner filmed? You might also like More from author. Prev Next. Some historians have aspired to a kind of complete history. He describes attitudes toward courtship, marriage, and sex; the naming and raising of children; the veneration of elders; and the omnipresence of sickness, disease, and death.

We peer inside happy and unhappy marriages, follow the sexual adventures of William Byrd II, attend feasts, hunts, and dancing classes. We follow the lives of slaves and indentured servants as well as those of aristocrats. After Vietnam and Watergate, we look for flaws. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Governor William Bradford murdered Native Americans. In the American Experience series, The Pilgrims , a grim William Bradford describes a harrowing voyage from England and a first winter in Plymouth in which half of the settlers died.

Vengeful soldiers burned to the ground the Pequot village near the Mystic River, and, in placed the head of the chief called King Philip on a pike. By the end of the century, blacks have been made slaves and the slave trade from Africa flourishes. Historians acknowledge that a painful past can result from their desire to be comprehensive, honest, and realistic. They assert, however, that it is not their mission to idealize or inspire. Educators worry about the effect of a dark past on the civic idealism of students.

Grim and gloomy history can produce pessimistic, passive students who conclude that the world is a hopeless place. Some critics remind us that surviving sources emphasize the negative in human history, perhaps creating an excess of pain.

Contemporary historians feel confident that they have won the battle with older historians who focused on great men and political history, who looked for consensus instead of conflict, who believed in American exceptionalism. They celebrate total history with its commitment to digging deep, its insistence on reality, its sensitivity to race, gender, and class. Simultaneously, they admit the shortcomings of their craft.

They acknowledge that objectivity is difficult and that we bring to the past individual temperament and the times we live in. To Samuel Eliot Morison, an optimist and a patriot, Christopher Columbus was a courageous explorer; to Howard Zinn, convinced that American history is permeated by greed and exploitation, Columbus was a cruel conqueror. History is not a science. Events now past were once in the future and our ancestors, like us, were future blind.

Contributing to future blindness is chance and accident—the role of contingency. Neither an American victory nor the Constitution was inevitable.

Since sources are incomplete, historians subjective, and the past contingent, there is room for another kind of battle: a contested past. How many indigenous people inhabited the New World? How many were killed by disease, how many by bullets? To what extent were the Puritans idealistic, tough-minded reformers or superstitious, pleasure-hating fanatics? Did they try to live peacefully with Native Americans or cheat them? How did slavery get introduced to the Americas?

Did racism produce slavery or did slavery produce racism? Of course, the reputations of individuals rise and fall.

In the s, debunking writers found George Washington ordinary, a man with little learning and less vision. Now he is unassailable, the indispensable general, the architect of victory, who gave up his sword and freed his slaves. All nations want noble origins. So the founding of America, whose identity is based on ideals such as freedom and equality rather than on ethnicity and language, is particularly contested.