History is more than just recording events. How does analysis become “true” or enter the canon?

r/

This may be more of a historiography question but where do opinions and value judgements factor into historical truth or canon?

I got into an argument with someone on Reddit recently where they were pushing the narrative that white slavers treated their slaves better than non white slavers treated their white slaves. I tried pressing them for a source or a historian that would support that but they responded that it’s a historian’s job to record the facts and not to provide an opinion as to whether or not one was worse than another. I do feel that’s a deflection and their original talking point is white supremacy propaganda to minimize American chattel slavery but I still wanted to ask serious historians if the question can even be possibly answered.

Phrased another way, can historians say for example “these factors caused world war 1” or are they limited to saying “these things happened before world war 1, full stop, we can’t know/say/agree what caused world war 1?”

Comments

  1. AutoModerator Avatar

    Welcome to /r/AskHistorians. Please Read Our Rules before you comment in this community. Understand that rule breaking comments get removed.

    Please consider Clicking Here for RemindMeBot as it takes time for an answer to be written. Additionally, for weekly content summaries, Click Here to Subscribe to our Weekly Roundup.

    We thank you for your interest in this question, and your patience in waiting for an in-depth and comprehensive answer to show up. In addition to the Weekly Roundup and RemindMeBot, consider using our Browser Extension. In the meantime our Bluesky, and Sunday Digest feature excellent content that has already been written!

    I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

  2. Halofreak1171 Avatar

    Analysis is the bread and butter for historians. The line between historical interpretation and personal opinion is a very fine one at times, and one which all historians must contend with. All of this falls into what was once the largest debate in ‘meta’-history/the study of history, and what still sparks up from time to time, the idea of post-modernism. Historians can’t just tell the ‘facts’, because, for one, that’d mean we would essentially only write like 1 page dotpoint articles and nothing else for most events. But also, the issue lies in the reality of trying to figure out when facts stop being facts. If I say that World War Two started on September 1 1939 as Germany invaded Poland, is that a fact, or am I providing a value judgement? Should I instead say WW2 started earlier, with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, or the Anchluss, or even earlier with the Japanese invasion of China or Manchuria?

    Now, some postmodernists have gone so far as to say that history is only interpretation, that facts, even if they do exist, are tertiary to what historians really do (which is analyse the past). I want to be very clear here, facts exist, things did happen and acting as if that isn’t what spurs on historical research, is, I think, a bit fanciful (you’ll note that I am now making what could either be considered an interpretation, or a value judgement). Events like World War Two, the Holocaust, the Mutiny on the Bounty, all occurred and actually happened. So in one way, yes, facts are a key part of history.

    In another way though, analysis is also a key part. Historians can absolutely state that certain factors, above others, caused World War One for instance. And very many have argued that one or two factors over the others are the main ones. That is entirely valid. Now, how they become ‘canon’, as you ask, is entirely up to how both their peers in the same research field, the broader historical community, and the mainstream populace all take to their interpretation. If one writes well, and their interpretation is backed up strong research and evidence, it is possible that their interpretation becomes the mainstream. Even then though, if another historian, say one who believes in a different overarching historical or political theory, comes across that interpretation and disagrees with it on a personal level, they may be motivated to research and shift the ‘narrative’ so to speak. Of course, you may argue, that’s bias! But, as many of us always say, that’s a feature of history, not a bug. Some of the best works have been written because someone disagreed with the mainstream thought and wanted to challenge it, but than again, so have some of the worst. In the end, part of the future historians challenge is to parse all of this and analyse, because in some ways history is a forever evolving field.

    Now, all of this is a very long-winded way to say that yes, historians can say “these factors caused world war 1”, and yes, historians are more than okay to argue and discuss whether various events are ‘worse’ (whether that is good history though is another question entirely). Historians, since day one, have been interpreting the past through many lenses, none objective, and even the most ardent of empiricists from the 19th century is engaging in this same way. If you want to read more, I can offer John Tosh’s The pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of history as a great place to start.

  3. dapete2000 Avatar

    For purposes of your discussion on Reddit, a historian would ask your interlocutor these types of questions about their statement: how do you define “better” in the context of the treatment of slaves? What sources are you relying on to say that the treatment was better? What kinds of biases do those sources themselves show? For example, are they the memoirs of enslavers write about how happy their negroes were (none of them ever voiced a complaint to me? If the sources can be trusted, how do they demonstrate the “better” treatment?

    In fact, the early professional history of the American South was dominated by Ulrich Phillips and his acolytes, who depicted slavery as a fairly benign pre-capitalist institution that was easier on the slaves than northern industrialism was on free workers. Later historians argued that slavery was much less benign and more recent scholarship has argued (pretty cogently in my mind) that slavery was actually an extremely effective way of mobilizing human power within early capitalism and became increasingly exploitative through the pursuit of scientific management. (If you have trouble with this, just think of slaves as pieces of capital equipment that reproduce themselves and it falls into place.). The succession of different ways of looking at the history of slavery in the United States reflect different opinions and judgments about who the slaves and enslavers were, how they interacted, and the efficiency of souther slavery as an economic system. Most historians would avoid crude “slavery was bad” judgments, but their values show up nevertheless.

    Reasoned opinions and educated value judgments are an important part of historiography and historical work. The kinds of sources a historian chooses to work with will in part be a judgment of what’s most reliable and what the historian thinks those sources can tell us. Historians, especially those of controversial or ugly topics, will usually spend some time explaining their value judgments at the outset while positioning themselves to offer a more dispassionate discussion of evidence and conclusions. The very choice of topic tells you something about the values of a historian—women’s and labor history used to be considered of little interest until the profession began to incorporate women and the children of the working class.

    Over the past 50 years in particular there’s a great deal more awareness that there isn’t really a single historical “Truth” available. To use your World War I example, while there may be a reasonable consensus on various things that caused the war (as well as a consensus on what had nothing to do with it), there will always be debates about which causes were more important than others, which are usually informed by the individual historian’s judgments.