Historians and Biasness

Historians and Biasness

Introduction

The document that I have selected for precis writing is “Bias in Historical Description, Interpretation, and Explanation” written by McCullagh, C. Behan. This article is about the biasness of different historians while interpreting the history involving several factors. The key points of the article are discussed in ther latter paragraphs that can help in understanding the theme of the article more effectively.

Discussion

Historians are only able to write about the artifacts and memories of themselves or others. Because of this, all that a historian can do is attempt to retrieve and develop information about the past and in the process, hopefully discover new facts and information. From this, he or she hope to develop a semi-accurate conclusion of past events based on artifacts, testimonies, and other written documentation. It is a well known fact amongst them and others that neither they, nor any other person can provide a completely accurate and unbiased document stating past history. To try to achieve this, historians use creative writing, artifacts such as paintings and sculptures, letters, court records, and a few other methods of retrieving past history. A disadvantage is that they have almost no way of discerning between fact and fiction. For all that they know, it could have been completely abstracted and biased by the author.

Practical contexts of interpretation

History arises from the experience of time, all history is located in time and historical interpretation can be thought or as addressing the practical needs of groups and communities for orientation in time. Interpretive practice is inherently various: orientation in time is relative to the conceptions of time and questions that interpreters deploy, to the time in which an interpretation occurs and also to the groups and interests that the interpretation seeks to orient.

All histories are practically located in a number of ...