Essay - Unless We Have Thought About It A Great Deal, We...

Unless we have thought about it a great deal, we have probably always thought about history as being either more-or-less truthful or m*****e-or-less mendacious. Under the former category ***** would put most of the kind of history that we learn in school. This is the kind ***** history that we believe to be accurate, written from the best intentions of shedding light on the past. What errors enter in***** historical records like this, we tend to believe, exist because of human error or simple wholes in the ***** record. His*****rians find out what there is to be found out, interpret the facts that they find according ***** the ***** ***** *****ir abilities, and create hypothetical scenarios to bridge those gaps that ***** in the historical record and to create coherent narratives out of conflicting accounts.

The mendacious historical narratives ***** generally do not call history at all but believe to be propaganda. These are documents ***** those th***** claim that the Holocaust did not exist. While purporting to be his*****ry, these are in fact not attempts to create *****ually ***** descriptions of the past. These ***** persuasive documents intended to make people believe in one version of events for some specific purpose - ***** believe, perhaps, that Jews just like to pretend to be victims, or that slaves really enjoyed their lot, ***** that the United States was founded by extraterrestrial **********. Such ***** we may look at as analogous to the cre*****ion stories of religions, having a b*****sis not in fact but in theology or philosophy.

***** nice and tidy: History on the one hand, propaganda on ***** other.

But *****to this nice dichotomy Robert Berkhofer throws the m*****key wrench of postmodernism, reminding us that the distinction between true and false history, good and bad history is in fact has so complicated as to seemingly meaningless.

But not quite meaningless.

The major argument ***** Berkhofer's is ***** it is imperative to remember, after all, that there are a number of different ways in which ***** write the h*****tory of a time and when two ***** versions ***** history differ this ***** general h***** far less to do wit***** ideas about au*****nticity than with the fact ***** history is no ***** subject to *****ation and renegotiation than the present. Most of ***** *****, after all, is sufficiently far away ***** us in ***** and sufficiently ill *****cumented that we can of course never be exactly sure what life ***** like dur*****g a past century.

Moreover, it ***** ***** necessarily true that all ***** is teleological; ***** all, one is always writing it from what is at that moment the end-point of history. Thus historians, no matter how hard they ***** try not to be, ***** ***** in fact writing the same story, a ***** that begins at different points in the past certainly but that st***** ***** necessarily ends up with themselves, with us, with the here and now.

***** reminds us that every piece of ***** description actually describes