On the Misunderstanding of History

I’m going to make a controversial statement.

There is no such thing as Historical Fact.

There cannot be, because fact is, in many ways, the antithesis of what history is. History is a collection of stories that people have told about the past. More to the point, history is the study of those stories that people have told. What enters popular culture and becomes the ‘Truth’ is often little more than an agreed upon, easy to digest, lie. ‘Fact’ has no place here.

The old maxim is that history is written by the winners. This is also not true. History is, however, written by those who have time to write, and too often has been agreed to by the powerful.

But this is changing, as the writing of history is becoming less elitist and more free.

The knowledge that Historical Fact does not exist must remain a constant though, as the telling of our histories evolves over the coming centuries.

Historical Characters and Events

Once you free yourself from the burden of Historical Fact, the study of the past becomes a lot more interesting. The people written about in books; be they biographies, auto-biographies or even just general histories, never existed. Or at least they didn’t exist exactly as they are presented. Think about it, a real person exists for every moment of their life, from birth to death and every single breath in between; a historical figure, in a history, does not. They exist in a vacuum - they enter a story when needed and then they exit when their part ends. And these people are very much a creation of the writer, speaker or creator anyway. No auto-biography will tell you about every single thought nor every waking moment of a person, and no normal biography can. Instead, both create characters who serve a narrative purpose.

But that character, that person, in that story is a fiction; a fiction based very much on the writer’s well researched and coherent view of reality (or a person's view of themselves), but still a fiction.

A person in a history has to be this, or else they become a caricature, with very little human in them. If we are only told about what we 100% know about a person, that figure would be very boring and very little new could ever be gained from studying them. So, where there are gaps in the historical knowledge we have of a person, it is up to historians to fill it, not ignore it. And this takes speculation, and this might further fictionalise the person in order to turn them into a more complete human being.

Let me be clear, this is not a problem. It is simply the truth of history. To get to the truth of a person might take a ‘lie’. But any truth revealed by a lie is no less true.

But if a person in history is a fictional creation, what about events?

Do we truly know with 100% certainty what happened at the Storming of the Bastille, or the Battle of Waterloo or the death of Caesar? No, of course we don’t. What we have are stories about what happened, sometimes associated with physical evidence. But the stories are never 100% true, and what has entered our history is the sum of the stories. Or sometimes just the most remarkable part of the story, with inconvenient parts carefully edited out by a succession of writers, until an easy to understand and digestible narrative is created.

It’s the historians job to put these often contradictory stories into a coherent narrative. And to look over previous narratives to see if obvious errors might have been made, or if new evidence has come to light.

History is the stories people tell, but the creation of history is more like a long running argument between historians about whose narrative is the most true; while never being able to get to something that is undeniably and wholly true.

History as a human construct

History is therefore something created by humans. And it’s created by humans to help us understand our place in the world, and how the world has changed. That’s the one constant in all historical narratives, change; as it is for all stories. History relies primarily on evidence that has been created, either deliberately or accidentally, by humans.

And even if you are telling this history of the natural, that will still be shaped by humanity, it will be a story of what humanity has lost, or destroyed or, in rare cases, what humanity has saved. Because there is nowhere on this planet that is untouched by humans. And nature does have stories that humanity wants and needs to hear anyway. Whispering on the winds, just waiting for a human to put that story into words. Or art.

Another thing humans love is the creation of order; even if that order is slightly anarchic or chaotic. The order humans love is cause and effect. Something happens because something else happened because something caused it to happen. It’s how we tell stories, there is a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end is caused by the events and characters of the beginning and the middle.

Unfortunately, the past is not always as simple as this. An event may have many complex and contradictory causes. Causes that are not easy to explain, or events that are caused by something or someone who is otherwise unremarkable.

Think of a bushfire, the effect of the fire is easy to see. But what of the cause? Is it the spark that set off the fire, something that can just be an act of God, or the unintended consequence of a badly disposed cigarette? Or is it Government Policy preventing the clearing of vegetation before the fire?

Is it climate change?

It is the person or people who construct the historical narrative that decide. And they decide based on the evidence that they have available to them at the time, the bias and interests they have and the time and place they are crafting the narrative.

But then, is the important story about the fire itself or of the victims and survivors of the fire? This depends of the creator of the history and when they are crafting it. Each history has its own perspective and own purpose.

Memory, Sources and how to tell true stories

History is almost always based on memory.

But memory is not infallible. And, as previously mentioned, humans like to create order out of chaos. And like to create stories out of the same chaos. If there is a gap in evidence, humans are likely to create something to fill that gap.

Humans are also quite likely to make themselves the hero of their own story. Whether this be to maximise or minimise their involvement in certain events.

And their memory is likely to either over- or understate a person’s own importance in those events, especially if it was an important event to that person. But while it may appear that this would make history impossible to write, luckily there is very rarely only one viewpoint or perspective of an event.

And this is where we go back to the first principle of history - sources. Not only Primary Sources, which as we have seen can be flawed - closeness to an event does not mean most accurate - but also to secondary and even tertiary sources which have much value as well. Because we can see how a story has developed over time from the event right up to the present.

And the product of history should always become another source. Good history will either build upon or cut down a previous history. A history which simply restates what was always believed is not of much value, unless of course it is claiming that an earlier history is in fact more accurate than the current accepted history.

History, then, is one of the most important things to write and study. For the writing of history reflects not only the time it is writing about, but also the time it is being written. Likewise, the studying of a history will always be framed by what we believe now.

The Denial and Importance of History

History is here to tell us why these things happened, how these things happened. That is its point and purpose. And viewing history as a completely human construct, that is to say, flawed, allows us a much greater appreciation of the whys and hows. If you simply view Hitler as evil, that is, not human, then how can we prevent the rise of a man like him again?

If we view Stalin’s inner circle as simply his pawns, men with no agency, that does not help explain how he consolidated power. People are living things, with their own wants and needs. The crimes of the Soviet Union, of Nazi Germany and of all other authoritarian regimes need to be explored so they can be explained - but never excused.

Too often a line is drawn under an event because finding out why something truly happened might be inconvenient for a few powerful people. Or for an entire society, or class, or group. Sometimes a history might just be uncomfortable for the public and therefore hidden and not studied or given the air and light it needs.

It’s in this scenario that historical myths arise. The myth of an innocent Germany, the myth of peaceful colonisation, the myth of clean and unharmful industrialisation.

And this use of the past to try to deny the crimes of a regime, country or individual is an abhorrent act.

But let’s take a less serious, more contemporary example. The recently discovered letter between Don Bradman and Malcolm Fraser basically confirmed a few things that people already knew about Bradman himself, stuff that was on the historical record. But for some, the reporting of this letter was a crime equivalent to the burning down of the MCG; such is the myth of Bradman.

For those people, Bradman had become more than a human, he had become a legend. And legends cannot be questioned. All that matters is that he’s “Our Don Bradman”, the average of 99.94, 334 runs in Leeds and the Invincibles of 1948.

So, for them, any history must be denied in order to protect the myth that they had created. Because history will transform the legend back into a man, a person who had opinions and issues and flaws and blindspots.

History must be denied and fought against to protect a perfect, mythical, legendary hero.

With Don Bradman, this really doesn’t matter; but it’s a fun example of something that can be much more sinister.

Why does this matter?

There is a general ignorance in the community about what history is. It is widely believed that history is a settled set of facts about the past, or worse, simply "what happened in the past".

And this viewpoint is dangerous.

It leads people to accept only a flawed, simplified view of what happened in the past - and any new ‘history’ is looked upon with suspicion and is ultimately rejected.

And that means that history is static and dead and settled. But as we have seen, ‘settled historical fact’ is a myth. A myth that leads to wrong beliefs that some people mistakenly but wholeheartedly believe are based on fact.

This then leads to a Conservative view of history, because the powerful will always push that the ‘settled, official history’ (conveniently the one that paints them is a good light) is the only version of a history that can be accepted.

But history is a living, human thing. It changes, develops and grows over time as the stories we tell evolve, as our study of the past gets more complex. And the way we tell these stories changes too, as our technology changes and our understanding of the human self gains complexity.

There is never one, true history of anything. The definite article needs to be done away with when writing any history, the phrase “The History of…” should be consigned to the dustbin, replaced by the simple “A history of…”

What was once viewed as a simple story of “what happened when and to who” takes on a lot of different layers once the human experience - that is a history - of something emerges.

The past may be dead, but history lives. And people need to be taught what history truly is.