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I have been an arm chair historian most of my life. I love biographies and non-fiction accounts. As I progressed through my faith journey, I decided to put my LDS history struggles on a shelf of it’s own and immerse myself in other non-religious histories. I have learned a few things – they have been a source of understanding for me as I try to process LDS history. John Keats- “A fact is not a truth, until you love it.”
Francis Parkman – “You can have all of the facts, and get what happened wrong.”
Shelby Foote – “You have to become attached to the thing you are writing about for it to have any real meaning. It’s absolutely true that no list of facts ever gave you an account of what happened. The bare bones facts are what you use to shape in describing what happened.”
David McCullough – “Facts aren’t necessarily the truth.”
These are from Aurelie GODET
“History is a narrative constructed by historians from traces left by the past.”
“Historical enquiry is often driven by contemporary issues, and, in consequence, historical narratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed, and reshaped.”
“The fact that different historians have different perspectives on issues means that there is also often controversy and no universally agreed version of past events.”
“Well told history is also drama, I for one, fully concede the occasional appropriateness of fudging history for dramatization. One has to make choices from the historical record to tell the story that best suits one’s purposes.”
Love these quotes. Especially the following: mom3 wrote:“Historical enquiry is often driven by contemporary issues, and, in consequence, historical narratives are constantly reconsidered, reconstructed, and reshaped.”
andmom3 wrote:“Well told history is also drama, I for one, fully concede the occasional appropriateness of fudging history for dramatization. One has to make choices from the historical record to tell the story that best suits one’s purposes.”
My particular interest is in historical storytelling and observing what our narratives and depictions of the past tell us about ourselves.
mom3, I completely agree. We often get hyper-analytical about the history of things we care about, and we tend to be very specific, zero-ing in on details, when the truth is that we only have the facts as someone else relayed them to us… and that someone else probably had an agenda, one way or the other. I really liked this quote:
mom3 wrote:Francis Parkman – “You can have all of the facts, and get what happened wrong.”
Great quotes. I try to remember that right now, today, people are seeing the EXACT same things and interpreting them very, very differently. It’s not even simple, minor differences. Watch MSNBC and Fox News any given night, or read the comment section of any article after any major sports event, and it is obvious we collectively can’t even agree about current history – things that we all see first-hand as eye-witnesses. In law, it’s understood that one eyewitness often is a terrible situation with regard to determining what actually happened – and even more so in determining intent.
If history is that subjective as it is unfolding, it is exponentially more so the further removed in time we are from the events in question.
Well facts do not always give you the truth but sometimes it is all we have. No one I know has a time machine that can go back and see what actually happened. So we have to stitch together the information we have and make the best informed judgement we can given the facts that we do have. My point is I do not think we can make statements that “we can not trust the facts” as a justification when the history is inconvenient to our current world view. Is that not what holocost deniers do? Quote:I do not think we can make statements that “we can not trust the facts” as a justification when the history is inconvenient to our current world view.
Amen – as long as we recognize that “the facts” often aren’t as clear as they seem, since they were recorded in the first place by someone with a bias. Then, when we move to interpretation of “the facts” (which can be very subtle in the recording of the facts) . . .
Old-Timer wrote:Quote:I do not think we can make statements that “we can not trust the facts” as a justification when the history is inconvenient to our current world view.
Amen – as long as we recognize that “the facts” often aren’t as clear as they seem, since they were recorded in the first place by someone with a bias. Then, when we move to interpretation of “the facts” (which can be very subtle in the recording of the facts) . . .
I think context is important. I can spew out facts disregarding the context in which they occurred and come up with the wrong conclusion. What is interesting is when people have the facts and the proper context and still dismiss the obvious conclusions. I then it becomes apologetics.
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