Submitted 1 month ago by PugJesus@piefed.social to historymemes@piefed.social
https://media.piefed.social/posts/VN/7Z/VN7Z0Lj8443etev.jpg
I am reminded of this passage from the Ministry of Time:
“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “History is not a series of cause and effects which may be changed… It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening. History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future.”
And I might point out that it isn’t what history is written that is important, but what history is studied and taught.
Fox News and such write the current truth for many. If the right continues to take over everything and suppress freedom of speech, then the standard understanding for the current time will become what Fox is spouting. This then becomes ‘history’.
Go to any southern state and you can observe the future you’re describing right now. But it’ll also feel like traveling 50 years into the past.
History is written by people who write stuff down.
True, and dead people make poor writers.
tbf that’s just historians minus one step
We know about the Persian empire in the time of the ancient Greeks because the Greeks wrote about them. The Persians didn’t bother. Most Greeks weren’t writing stuff down for history, were they?
Nice try but no.
Who wrote the history of the US Civil War for the first ~100 years or so after?
PROTIP: by and large, it wasn’t the victorious North.
Yeah that’s one example of one tiny portion of history..
History is not written by historians.
We all create and collect historical source by living. And historians collate that information into stories in books.
Historians do not create history. History is a joint effort created by humans.
According to your argument recent history include your private messages and online profiles, but that only becomes relevant once collected and analysed. Sure with modern media that doesn’t only result in written text, but figuring out what part of the past is true fact and what is not is a study done by scholars. Deciding what happens is a collective act, deciding what of that is recorded (and how) is done by a smaller group, and what of that records is considered “true” history is done by an even smaller group.
If you want to know what happened at some place 5 years ago and would like to do your own research you can, but you can’t decide whether your research will be used by others. The further back you go in time the harder it will be to figure it out without using 2nd hand data.
History is not just “the past”. History is, specifically, the discipline interested in recording and creating narratives out of events that happened.
Historians - professional or otherwise - create history, and it is the duty of a historian - and the purpose of the discipline - to do so responsibly and truthfully.
Does that mean both the left frame and right frame of the OP are correct? The victors are historians because they told a story about how great they were?
Akasazh@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Does it follow that historians are the victors? If so o have finally won something!