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110"When we concern ourselves with the study of history, we become storytellers. Because we can never know the past directly but must construct it by interpreting evidence, exploring history is more of a creative enterprise than it is an objective pursuit. All historians are storytellers."
History concerns the events which happened in the past, and thus the exploring process necessitates a creative enterprise, not simply an objective pursuit. However, in spite of this, since the history studying is based on facts ,realities, logical reasoning and accurate deduction, from this standpoint, historians are more than just storytellers.
Admittedly, we cannot know history directly and this determines the speciality of history studying. We rebuild and reconstruct the historic events and culture through a large amount of evidence, information, heritages , literature and the like. This process needs learners' creativity and imagination. From this angle, historians seems to act like storytellers who use their imagination to create the story. For example, through Egypt's mummy and pyramid, we can learn the culture, medicine science, and decorum of that ancient time in Egypt. But due to limitations of not adequate information, the historians have to use some imaginations to depict the details of that time.
As well as creativity, exploring history also needs the help of scientific technologies, precise logical thought and deduction, which are far beyond the needs and limitations of storytellers. In modern history fields, lots of advanced techniques have been introduced to help the historians best reveal the truth thousand years ago. For instance, historians harness chemical methods to measure the age of historic heritages; historians utilize biological and physical knowledge to learn the health condition of ancient people. Apart from technologies, history studying also needs logical reasoning and deduction. Our knowledge about the primitive society emerges from the discovery of old words graved in the animal bones , the remaining primitive people’s heritages and the according creativity and reasoning. From this aspect, historians are far more than storytellers.
The most point lies in that history is based on facts and realities, and to be practical and realistic is the necessary and basic quality of historians. As a result, historians must respect truth and never add private feelings and opinions to historic facts to change history, which means that historians could not act us storytellers who modify the story casually with their own imagination. This is the most difference between the historians and storytellers. What’s more, historic facts are corrected and modified repeatedly according to new emerging evidence and archeological discovery. And realistic and specific history is optimized time and time again. Hence, to some extent, history is a subject which combines science and literature. All discussed above distinguishes historians from storytellers.
To sum up, although needing creativity, too, historians does not simply equal to
storytellers. When a historian is depicting a special period of history, we should realize that it is showing the facts based on information and data, not showing the imagination of the historians their selves. Respect history, learn from history, and eventually create history. |
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