What is History but a fable agreed upon?

What is history but a fable agreed upon? Napoleon

With this sentence we commenced the lecture, and we agreed that history is the search for truth. Furthermore, we study history because it provides an understanding of the present by looking at how we got to where we are. Hence, I believe that we are condemned to repeat mistakes, if we don’t study the past; this is the reason why this area of knowledge is essential. We also study it because it provides a sense of identity, “a country without history is like a person without memory.”

What called my attention was that when we were asked to organize a set of events from the most important to the least important, not one group in the class had neither the same order nor the same events. This fact allowed me to understand better and link this topic with other areas of knowledge: everyone’s sense of identity is drastically different from each others even if they were raised by the same parents, in the same place. This is because our way to perceive the world is unique and different from anybody else. As a consequence, what I consider to be extremely important might not even be of someone else’s interest.

For example, if Dana buys a dress that she considers to be the prettiest that she has ever seen but that cost 800 dollars, she would consider this purchase to be one where she bought the greatest dress ever. On the other hand, her parents would consider this purchase as one where she spent the greatest amount of money in unnecessary pieces of clothes and will probably punish her. In this example we can see how the same story is considered to be significantly different, in Dana’s opinion she was punished for invalid reasons but for her parents she was punished for wasting money, a very valid reason. Therefore, we can see how one simple story and its development will most probably be very biased and creates knowledge issues.

But how do we arrive to a historical truth or one that is neutral? The answer is that we can’t but we can get really close to it. We need to agree on what happened on the past using evidence and always trying to be objective. However, this is not an easy task. First, the evidence in which we rely might not be completely relevant or uncertain, evidence of what happened thousands of years ago will not be as trustworthy as one of what happened yesterday. Additionally, if we consider witnesses of the event, their testimony will not be entirely reliable since it is affected by the person’s emotions and senses during the event. Secondly, it is debatable whether history can ever be neutral since there is no formula as the ones in mathematics or physics and will permanently be bias. Finally, the way in which a historian choses what evidence to be based on depends on his means at his disposal and the culture and era he is in. If a person in China wants to find out about an event such as what happened in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 5, 1989, they will find few or no information about this event since the government compelled all Chinese search engines to block it. However, if I looked for this event in Google while being in Colombia, I will find lots of articles and even videos about it.

In conclusion, in my opinion, history will never be neutral. One same story will be affected by many factors such as feelings or points of views which will always be present when writing or studying history. Hence it is a sensible area of knowledge since it contains various knowledge issues.