“Doing History”

Lee brings up important points about the “doing of history” especially in regard to evidence and accounts, and how historians collect and analyze these. In many ways, historical integrity mirrors journalistic integrity. The practice of history requires finding reliable primary sources and comparing them to others in an attempt to find out “the truth”. Obviously, details are going to be exaggerated, wrong, or omitted and historians are left speculating as to what actually happened. Historians also need to be culturally literate. Depending on the particular culture and time period being studied, the source material may use different kinds of figurative language, forms of expression, or frames of reference. This is especially difficult because for many cultures and in many historical periods the idea of objective truth is not a very important one at all. A classic example is when the early historian Herodotus claimed that there were several million Persian troops at the battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus may have claimed to care more about historical accuracy than his contemporaries, but he was probably still more concerned about communicating how the battle must have felt to the Greek forces than he was about making sure his figure was realistic. This makes things difficult for modern historians. Another famous example is the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a work of literature written about the Three Kingdoms period of China. This work is not intended to be factually accurate, but can we fault its author? It was written before digital records could be kept, before scientific dating processes had been developed, and even before widespread literacy. If you lived in a world where I could tell you that there were dragons over those hills, and you couldn’t really do much to prove me wrong it would make sense for your whole notion of facts and accounts to be held from a different perspective. Teaching these investigative historical skills is equally as important as teaching content and Lee does a good job of creating hypothetical conversations between students that approximate what their reactions could be. Overall the reading reminded me of a video I saw awhile ago and I decided to include a link to that instead of a picture.