“You learn something old every day.”
X the Owl, a character in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
This article is inspired by a comment on the askHistorians subreddit. It highlights a fundamental difference in how historians approach facts compared to those from fields like science or engineering (my own background). Many assume historians can offer definitive truths about past events, but the reality is more nuanced.
And one thing that I, and I suspect others around here who’ve been trained as historians, learn is that the way we are encouraged to view the past is pretty different from the way that others with, say, a scientific, or maths, or engineering background think. We get a large number of posts here that are rooted on the premise that the people who respond here can offer up “the truth”, or strip the bias out of history, or summarise the “consensus view” on some topic or another. And for the most part, that’s simply not how history works.
u/mikedash in Was told to post this here. Unbiased history sources
Historians are trained to recognize that every source is biased, and so is every historian interpreting those sources. It is inevitable, as each person is shaped by their experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and the cultural norms and laws they have lived under. While historians strive for objectivity, they recognize that their various backgrounds, perspectives, cultural ideologies, or limitations of sources strongly influence what and how they write about history.
History is inherently multidimensional: there is no single “truth” because there are multiple ways to understand the past. On one hand, we have the concrete facts (the Battle of Stalingrad did take place between 17 July 1942 and 2 February 1943). On the other hand, we have the interpretation of those facts (Why did the battle happen? What motivated the leaders’ decisions? What were the consequences, and why is its outcome seen as a turning point in World War II?)
Evidence and arguments are the bread and butter of history; both are inherently subjective. Using the same evidence, two historians can reach entirely different conclusions about the same event based on their unique perspectives and interpretations.
Christopher Browning and Daniel Goldhagen examined the actions of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in different accounts. Composed mostly of German middle-aged men from working- and lower-middle-class backgrounds, the battalion was not made up of fervent Nazi ideologues but rather ordinary citizens conscripted into service. Despite this, they were responsible for committing atrocities, including mass shootings and deportations of Jews to Nazi death camps.
In Ordinary Men, Browning applied social psychology theories, especially the Milgram experiments, and concluded that the men of Battalion 101 killed mainly due to obedience to authority and peer pressure rather than ideological commitment.
Evil that arises out of ordinary thinking and is committed by ordinary people is the norm, not the exception.
Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances, what group of men cannot?
I must recognise that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader… What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.
― Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen examines the actions of Battalion 101 through a cultural-ideological view. He argues that deeply ingrained antisemitism within German society was the primary motivation behind the men’s actions, claiming that they acted not out of obedience but from a voluntary commitment to antisemitic beliefs.
The conclusion of this book is that antisemitism moved many thousands of “ordinary” Germans— and would have moved millions more, had they been appropriately positioned—to slaughter Jews. Not economic hardship, not the coercive means of a totalitarian state, not social psychological pressure, not invariable psychological propensities, but ideas about Jews that were pervasive in Germany, and had been for decades, induced ordinary Germans to kill unarmed, defenseless Jewish men, women, and children by the thousands, systematically and without pity.
― Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
What to make of these accounts?
“What, then, is one to conclude? Most of all, one comes away from the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 with great unease. This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.”
― Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland
But how do historians piece together the past and write their accounts? They rely on the historical method, which gathers and analyzes evidence (primary documents, secondary analyses) to formulate interpretations of the past.
Primary sources are original documents, artifacts, or materials created during the time being studied. For example, when studying World War II, primary sources would include letters from soldiers to their loved ones, government documents, battlefield footage, photographs, and even physical items like uniforms and equipment.
These sources are generally more valued than secondary sources, which analyze or interpret primary materials. Books and articles are typical examples of secondary sources, providing insight but often removed from the original events. Therefore, the conclusions historians reach through the historical method are themselves considered secondary sources, as they interpret and synthesize primary or other secondary evidence.
Another key form of historical evidence is oral tradition. This includes stories passed down verbally, often from eyewitnesses to later generations. While sometimes considered a primary source, oral tradition occupies a unique category, as it exists outside traditional written documentation and carries its own complexities in interpretation.
Let’s consider translations. Are they primary or secondary sources? As with all historical text, it depends.
Translation as a Primary Source: If the historian’s research focuses on the translation itself, examining the translator’s choices, language, or the historical context of the translation process, then the translation is a primary source. This is especially true if the original document is lost, making the translation the closest available material for understanding the past.
Translation as a Secondary Source: However, when the research is aimed at understanding the content of the original text, the translation becomes a secondary source. It reflects the translator’s interpretation, which may involve biases, inaccuracies, or subtle shifts in meaning that must be carefully considered.
What about Wikipedia?
Wikipedia itself is not typically considered a reliable source for citation in scholarly work because anyone can edit its content. Instead, it is better to use Wikipedia to identify primary and secondary sources listed in its references and then locate those more credible sources.
So, one of the most important aspects of the historical method is source evaluation, where historians assess the reliability of sources, prioritizing firsthand accounts and original documents over secondhand information. Additionally, historians form hypotheses, analyze data, and synthesize information to answer specific historical questions. This process often involves an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating methods from archaeology, anthropology, or sociology (e.g., Browning’s book Ordinary Men).
Consider how the highly respected historian Barbara Tuchman applies the historical method to her work:
I plunge as soon as I can into the primary sources: the memoirs and the letters, the generals’ own accounts of their campaigns, however tendentious, not to say mendacious, they may be. Even an untrustworthy source is valuable for what it reveals about the personality of the author, especially if he is an actor in the events, as in the case of Sir John French, for example. Bias in a primary source is to be expected. One allows for it and corrects it by reading another version. I try always to read two or more for every episode. Even if an event is not controversial, it will have been seen and remembered from different angles of view by different observers. If the event és in dispute, one has extra obligation to examine both sides. As the lion in Aesop said to the Man, “There are many statues of men slaying lions, but if only the lions were sculptors there might be quite a different set of statues.”
Mahan’s prescription disposes of the myth of “pure objectivity” when used to mean “without bias.” As John Gunther once said of journalism, “A reporter with no bias at all would be a vegetable.” If such a thing as a “purely objective” historian could exist, his work would be unreadable—like eating sawdust. Bias is only misleading when it is concealed. After reading The Proud Tower, a onetime member of the Asquith government scolded me in a letter for misrepresenting, as he thought, his party. “Your bias against the Liberals sticks out,” he wrote. I replied that it was better to have it stick out than be hidden. It can then be taken into account.
Barbara W. Tuchman – Practicing History: Selected Essays
History is not a static collection of facts but an ever-evolving field shaped by interpretation and debate. This inevitably leads to differing viewpoints and disagreements, however…
And you know what? All this disagreement, all this lack of consensus, all these dimensions and these lashings of bias, aren’t really a problem. In fact, they’re the lifeblood of the discipline.
u/mikedash in Was told to post this here. Unbiased history sources
So accustomed are historians to bias, they expect it at every turn. This recognition of bias is so fundamental that it has given rise to another discipline, historiography, which studies the historical method and the various ways history is written and interpreted. Or in short, historiography is the history of history.
History is a vast early warning system.
Journalist Norman Cousins
With the rise of misinformation, disinformation, and AI-generated content, distinguishing fact from fabrication has become increasingly difficult. We face more uncertainty than ever before in uncovering the truth behind narratives and understanding the motivations that shape them. But, while this issue may seem modern, it seems it is not a new problem for historians.
Because we are, you know. And by ‘we’, I mean humans. Every last human being ever born is a lying liar who lies. [original text with bold] And even beyond that, humans are fallible, stupid, blinkered, and biased. The problem is that…history deals with humans. It’s created by humans, studied by humans, learned by humans, told by humans, for human purposes. People have lied out loud, they’ve lied in writing, and they’ve lied in stone carvings. (What, you thought the Behistun Inscription was 100% true? If so, I’ve got a bridge in Minecraft I’m willing to sell you.) That people should lie via photographs, AI, and AI-touched photographs, is just another item on the checklist.
user DanKensington from How do historians deal with potential rewriting of history by people of the time?
Perhaps history is more pragmatic now than ever, and we should all become students of it. Not only AI but also we might have encountered embellished historical claims. Then we have the historian side, who tells us to consider that every single human is a lying liar that lies (including the historian, us, or this article) or that it is better when bias sticks out. It can be taken into account.
We start with a fractured image of the past, and with each layer of bias, preconception, and idealization, we build castles of sand, believing them to be stone, as Jorge Luis Borges once wrote. When the landscapes of ideas shift, as they usually do, we inevitably lose our footing. Our crumbling thoughts are not quite ready to leave our tiny bodies like drops of dew still aching to go on. But we start again, crafting a new fractured image of the recent or distant past, each time a little wiser, or perhaps a little worse, a little more humble, or why not? a little more stubborn.
After all, as Indiana Jones said,
If it’s truth you’re interested in, Dr. Tyree’s philosophy class is right down the hall.
Related Article:
How to Reduce Biased Thinking – as it happens, some of those from fields like science or engineering do approach science as historians approach history:
An example of a trusted naysayer is found in an article about Katalin Karikó, the leading researcher for Phizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine. Dr David Langer, a neurosurgeon who has worked with Karikó, reminisces about Kariko’s ways of experimenting:
Langer thinks it was Kariko who saved him – from the kind of thinking that dooms so many scientists. Working with her, he realised that one key to real scientific understanding is to design experiments that always tell you something, even if it is something you do not want to hear. The crucial data often come from the control, he learned – the art of the experiment that involves a dummy substance for comparison.
“There’s a tendency when scientists are looking at data to try to validate their own idea,” Langer says. “The best scientists try to prove themselves wrong. Kate’s genius was a willingness to accept failure and keep trying, and her ability to answer questions people were not smart enough to ask.”
After all, as famous physicist Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.”
Yet, the Feynman principle does coexist with Planck’s principle, “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”