issue110 历史学家和讲故事的人～～很痛苦！

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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." [05/18; 06/0]

当我们研究历史时，我们变成了讲故事的人。因为我们无从直接知道过去发生的事情，必须通过一些证据来构建，所以历史研究是一个有创造成分的领域，而并非一个客观的学科。所有的历史学家都是讲故事的人（storyteller）。

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The history of human being's society is so long that historians have difficulties to explain every historical events and figures. Whether all historians are storytellers, and exploring history needs is more of a creative enterprise? In my point of view, the majority of historical records are objective; the most of historians have try their best to clarify the historical events, although there exist some flaws.

Admittedly, take from the perspective of historians, most historians could not experience the real events of history. By researching through thousands of old letters, legal documents, family heirloom and like, historians must analyses fragments of history and somehow put these together to reconstruct what actually happened. If confronting vague materials and data that do not explain or remark the truth process of historical events, historians only make their hypotheses about the sense of past time and proposal some infer basing on some remained materials even on the personality of main historical figures.
For instance, there are few historical materials and records about a famous war which happened in Mediterranean Aegean, the Troy War. Many legends and mysteries are spread in centuries. The only confident material is the Greek epic poet Homer’s great work “Odyssey” and “Iliad”. Although the epics have some creative elements, modern historians successfully find the Troy’s site and a large amount of treasure. In this sense, the historians are storytellers because they have historical stories to tell, their personal insights become part of what others will see when they read the historian’s works.  

However, there is no clear scope/area/realm for defining “storytelling” here, all concrete historical conclusion can be defined from facts. Theorizing is different from storytelling, storytelling is a creative art which are inherently fallacies. They assume prior knowledge that the author is creating his or her own version of the truth, which add some personal style and fictional elements. Through changing some truth of history to suit own needs, the storytellers show another kind of history that have distinctively difference with the truth of history. History also a science, which research the development process of human beings; historians use all various objective methods to reconstruct the past, at no level can it be considered unsubstantiated or arbitrary.


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[ 本帖最后由 gongzhen 于 2007-2-4 12:08 编辑 ]