Everyone Writes the Histories

History is such a fragile, mutable, conditional thing: History is ineffable.

It’s all very well to say, no, it is what happened, it’s indelible, it is actual… So it is, an event, an action, plays out its options and leads to its conclusion. But that isn’t history. History is the story of what happened, and that is prey to any agenda, any perceptual filtering, angle of witness, sense of importance and imperative.

This is why we cannot truly know what happened, and the closest we can get to the actuality of the occasion is by getting as many versions of it as we can, by being aware of the sources’ own biases, by taking into account perspectives and pacing of the moment and of the observers of it.

Each and every observer, standing in their own shoes, being within their own heads, possesses the truth of the event from their own perspective.

Every analyst of those observations looks through the filters of their own purpose in looking for the facts of the event.

Professional historians dig deep into the records to find as many angles and versions as they can. They do consider the sources, and work with their own knowledge of how people are, generally and specifically, and how things relate to one another. They look at all the material with some sense of logic and absurdity–both major factors in human actions–and finally come to conclusions with the preamble of, “This is what I think happened.”

So, when history is offered up to students in school, or to the public of a nation, it’s vital to look at why that version has been chosen.

It’s often said that “The winners write the histories.” Glib, but not so. The winners write the school books and the ‘official’ histories. But everyone writes histories, especially the losers who want their perspective known, and the official versions challenged.