[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. In a way, this Reader is a repeat, from a different author, about the relativity of what our learned history tells us. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Note: You can easily translate the Readers to many languages, Use the app deepl.com and it is done instantaneously. It takes seconds to download the app into your computer or phone and translations are of high quality.
[Only recently did I write a Reader on the need to reinterpret history not discarding the human rights perspective (HRR638). I then came by a piece that points in the same direction. Hoping not to take advantage of your tolerance, I use this piece in this Reader since I always say that all the good and wise in these Readers has come from others; that of lesser importance has been mine].
1. Ever since Thucydides dismissed Herodotus, historians have differed about the past. (Thucydides curtly dismissed Herodotus’s pathbreaking work as “a prize essay . . . attractive at truth’s expense.” In other words, so as to please its readers. Thucydides was “the first revisionist historian.” i.e., the historian of warfare, politics, and statecraft –the traditionalist, male-oriented historian that long held the center of Western education).
2. At the very dawn of historical inquiry in the West, historians were already wrestling over the past. They engaged in what we know as ‘revisionist history’ where historians take it as indisputable that interpretative contents are inherent in all of their efforts to advance historical understanding.
3. What we call the past is just that: It is what happened at some point before now. Once it occurs, the past is gone forever –beyond repeating, beyond reliving, beyond replicating. It is recoverable only by the evidence, almost never complete, that it leaves behind; and that evidence must be and is interpreted by individual humans, historians principally, all of whom differ in all sorts of ways. Distinct from the actual past are the narratives and analyses that historians offer us about earlier times. That is what we have been taught to call ‘history’, i.e., what most of us make of the forever-gone past. Indeed, history is created by the application of human thought and imagination to what is left behind.
4. And because historians are individual human beings –differing in politics and ideology, they come to hold different views, have different purposes, create different interpretations, and put forth their own distinctive understandings of the past. And, as the world in which they live changes, historians change as well.
5. Historical interpretations tend to grow and adjust in some synchrony with the times. As time passes, new evidence and new methods for examining old evidence emerge and new subjects of historical inquiry make their appearance. Consequently, historians’ histories change. Works that does not speak to the times in which they are created are likely to have short shelf lives.
6. It is therefore a mistake to think that historians can fully isolate themselves in majestic, objective, intellectual solitude from the world around them. As hard as they may try to keep their own hopes and views out of what they write, historians, like others, try to find meaning in the past. And when they find it for themselves, they wish to share it with others –their students, readers, and scholars. If they do not share it, they fail in one of their principal aims: to make knowledge of the past illuminate, deepen, and enrich the present.
7. Only recently have conventional historians been confronted by others with which Herodotus was more comfortable —those coming from social and cultural (and human rights) history, through whom the history of women, slaves, laboring people, African Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others whose rights have been and are violated have been given greatly enlarged attention. This marks the emergence of all people as historical subjects not avoiding public and political historical frictions.
8. The fact that that tension has endured so long suggests that the kinds of interpretative differences that constitute historians’ arguments with each other are part of history’s inextricable genetic makeup.
9. The Marxist worldview and the more recent introduction of human rights and women’s rights in particular into the historical record have proved powerful, permeating, deep, and enduring on the way we consider the past. Most revisionist history is normal in the sense that it is embodied in the histories that all historians write; all new historical arguments and perspectives must be then assessed as to their accuracy and impact on existing knowledge and deep-rooted convictions.
10. It does not, however, require new evidence to shift historical understanding! It can entail the application of newly available methods to long-existing material. Over the past half century, the emergence of a political, economic, cultural and social authority on the part of women, of racial African Americans, and other people previously omitted from accurate historical consideration, have led scholars to learn more about different groups’ histories. The results have been profound. Historians now take it for granted that it is impossible to understand any part of the past without taking into account the realities of all and all kinds of people and thus creating an understanding of the past that better speaks to the living. There is nothing unusual about debates among historians of women about how to frame and understand the historical suppression of women’s agency in human affairs.
11. History can never be walled off from the present. It should thus cause no surprise that many people find it difficult to accept such frequent challenges to what they were taught to think of as unalterably fixed and true. It is not surprising that they ask in bewilderment: If the past cannot change, then how can the history about it do so? They are offended to learn that at least some of what they were taught early in life as history is no longer fully accepted by historians and is instead taught in different ways. They badly want to believe what they learned when young.*
*: They may ask: You mean to tell me that the US Constitution was written in part to protect slavery and not only for its, and the Declaration of Independence’s, lofty stated ideals of independence, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and the general welfare of all Americans?
12. Many people also resist accepting the simple truth that historians, whom they consider experts, disagree about the facts and what to make of them. For many non-historians, disagreement among experts fits uneasily with their desire for certainty. Many condemn historians’ changing interpretations as evidence of political bias. Still others see challenges to conventional historical orthodoxies as threats to the historical tales congruent with their political aims and thus to their power. They ask themselves, too, since historians themselves often do not agree about the past, why anyone should have confidence in historians’ professional claims to be experts. Why should anyone cede to historians’ authority over what happened when those historians challenge what was long taught as gospel truth? Of course, nothing requires people to cede anything to historians. Adjustments to existing knowledge, adjustments grounded as much in known evidence as in new thought and new perspectives, allow for the potential increase and deepening of knowledge about human existence for everyone.
13. Battles over the past are inescapable because they’re hard-wired into human nature and existence. All of this means that rarely, if ever, can ‘Case Closed’ be stamped on a historical subject. But if no subject is immune from reconsideration, what about the widespread conviction that history can and should be objective in the sense of being an accurate and full account of what actually occurred? It is likely to surprise most people that today’s historians believe that it cannot be. What does remain is a result of such factors as its collectors’ partialities, their speed and intent in saving it, their point of view when reporting it. Each historian, indeed all people, will bring distinct interests, sensibilities, and minds to bear when they examine the same evidence.
14. Here is where differences over interpretation –the opportunities for revisionist history– enter the picture. Whether they arise from disputes over evidence and what it means or, as is sometimes the case, from different social or ideological views, all such differences must be, as they always are, subjected to hard-headed examination by any and all who enter such interpretative battles over the past. Because none of them could observe and record everything that occurred, much evidence was simply lost: A sign of bias? The result is that what historians know of anything in the past is only a part of what occurred, was witnessed, and was reported; and some of that may be inaccurate. We should keep in mind, too, that there is nothing novel in the interpretive variety of historical knowledge. Historians’ debates and shifting views of their subjects are the principal means by which they approach, while never reaching, their goal of understanding the extraordinary complexity of human life in times before their own. Renewed, reconsidered, and repurposed, history can then fuel fresh struggles to understand the past. (excerpted from James Banner)
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
All Readers are available at www.claudioschuftan.com