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将文章吸取建议改了一下, fengboallan若看到了麻烦帮忙再看看, 其他朋友也请尽管批. 不胜感激
第三段我将TS换了一下, 应该可以和论点对上号了.
Recently there is a debate over whether historians are storytellers. Some people, including the author, think that studying history is more of a creative enterprise than it is an objective pursuit. They also claim that the statement that all historians are storytellers. As far as I am concerned, I do not agree with such statement. I maintain that history is a subject only based on facts, rather than historical construction or imagination. Furthermore, I also claim that historians are specialists who honestly reveal the facts in the past, rather than people constructing those facts. The following discussion will substantiate my standpoint.
Firstly, history is equal to the facts existed in the past. In other words, there is no fiction in history. History is not the mythology, story or fable. Correspondingly, historians are not mythology-tellers, storytellers, or fable-tellers either. As we known that the whole academic system of history is based on considerable information on facts happened in the past, which can only be revealed by digging debris, exploring caverns, or turning to documents. The goal of all these methods is displaying the facts in the past honestly. A good case in point is the existence of archeology, also the basis of the whole system of history. All the work pursued in this field is to collect evidence, such as document, fossil, or specimen, to judge whether something or certain events have really existed in the past. Therefore, history is a subject without any imaginative things.
Secondly, those imaginative historical works, including fictions, films, fables, etc, is not ‘history’. Those books are only imagination by using some historical words to make people understand them more easily. Even though most art works includes some content related much with the historical facts, they are not history, but historical reconstruction, or historical imagination. For instance, in a novel (novel is a kind of imaginative literacy style, there are some materials referring to the historical fact about the civil war in America, however, we cannot use this novel as a history textbook to teach American history, since the historical fact in this book is only a tool to create an imaginative background, and all the book actually does not reflect the history in America, and even distort it. Thus, we cannot call those imaginative books “history ", even if they have some historical fact.
Thirdly, when people talk about history, often they are prone to constructing it by the way that is beneficial to them. In other words, people are more likely to ignore, and even distort those historical facts which may influence their fame or status now. Thus, people construct history not because they cannot know history directly, but because they want to do that. A good example in point is Japan. Nowadays most Japanese politicians do not acknowledge that the Japanese armies have invaded China in the Second World War, which, in fact, is a historical fact known to most people in the world. Those Japanese politicians, also people distorting history, even said that the invasion to China is “help China develop economy". Since they held their own benefit by ignoring historical fact, such kind of interpretation of history is not real history, but ridiculous fiction.
Based on the discussion I have mentioned above I reaffirm without any hesitation that history is a subject only based on facts and historians are not storytellers. Imaginative art works, though including historical fact, is not history. Similarly, the fact that has been distorted by people is not history either. Real history is the record that really reflects what happened in the past. |
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