[OT] How much of history do we really know?

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I can sum up our knowledge of history is one sentence that I'm sure all historians could agree with:

We have more than we want, less than we need.

joe b.

Bravo! Though I am always happy to read more.

I'm not really certain that history comes from his story. That would be way too simple.

The winner doesn't always write the history. Certainly the winner will write a history, but it is more likely that the winner will write several conflicting histories and stopping a looser from writing a history is near impossible. Sometimes loosers don't sometimes they do. If the loosers can't write it becomes easier, but all too often the winners can't either.

The second history in the Western tradition, the originator of the tight prose narrative, and the first case of prose dialogue is Thucydides' History of the Pellopenesian War. A document that is very much written from the loosers' point of view but openly critical of both sides.

The writer goes into a great deal of detail on his methods and his expectations of the text. He even gives as a goal the idea that he wants not to record the time as it happened, which he believes to be impossible, but to summon the spirit of the time so that people can understand it and remember it more strongly.

That idea has haunted everything I have ever read since then, this notion that you can summon thing though you do not understand it and that is both important and enough.

That's an important thing for my ideas of history and the other is a literary convention. That is everyone in literature criticisizes the cannon of books everyone should read but noone wants to do away with it. We all recognize that it is 'offical,' blind, and often shallow or short, but it's also a good basis to work from.

In many cases that is the ideal that offical history should work from. A textbook is going to do a horrible job going into detail, but even if your textbook can't or won't tell you about shady American dealings in South American politics it can, at the very least, give you an idea of the climate and events that surrounded those dealings.

What's vital and necessary is that textbooks be handed out and used by people who know how to deal in detail, know how to deal with text, and know how to direct questioning around and through that initial official basis.

 

[green slime]

I think some of it comes in part from our culture of questioning authorities to greater degree than many societies, both present and past.

Case in point, not many in the west would suggest that the massacre of Nanking never occured. Yet in Japan, this scandolous episode is not only missing from their history books, it is flat-out denied by the Japanese government. This leads to most Japanese laughing at you when you suggest such an event occured. In Japan, it is a non-event (along with many other atrocities).

 

[hunter1828]

From Random House Webster's College Dictionary: history [1350-1400; Middle English < Latin historia < Greek historia - learning or knowing by inquiry, derivation of histor - one who knows or sees; akin to Wit(2).

wit(2) Archaic for to know [before 900 AD; Middle English; Old English witan, Old High German wizzan, Old Norse vita; akin to Latin videre < Greek idein - to see; akin to Sanskrit word for (he) knows.

------

Since the etymology of history goes back to histor, which is akin to wit, which traces back to idein, which is akin to a Sanskrit word that means "(he) knows", I suppose a case could be made that history means "his story"...but I think it is far, far more complex than that.

hunter1828

 

[tarchon]

this has been eye-opening for me. i guess i have a different definition of history and fact than most folks.

i see history as being pot shards (sherds, cherds, chards) and standing walls and heiroglyphics and bone fragments and cave drawings and stone.

everything else is stories form history. these vary wildly in accuracy.

In an academic sense, "history" is usually regarded as the reconstruction, description, and analysis of past events. The evidentiary disciplines are fields like archaeology (material remains), palaeography (documentary remains), and epigraphy (inscriptions specifically). History is a synthesis of the results of those fields, and other even more obscure ones. From that perspective, history is a sort of construct, but it can be extremely sound or extremely speculative, depending on how far and how well the historian extrapolates from the evidence. From Kenniwick Man and a couple other specimens one can conclude that very early American populations were genetically very different from the ones encountered in "historical" times, and thus that there must have been some subsequent immigration to the Americas, which is a very sound conclusion. One can also conclude from them that there must have been humans in America before the Clovis culture, which is speculative, because it's based on more indirect arguments and reflects a decision to discount several other possible explanations for them. It may well turn out to be true, but it's speculative with the evidence currently available.
History is really only as good or bad as its arguments, so the whole idea of history being "bunk," as Henry Ford famously stated, is as off base as saying that all journal articles are bunk. Some are, some aren't.
True sophistication lies in developing the ability to tell the difference between the sound and the speculative (and the ridiculous), not in either blindly accepting the whole body of history as true or flatly decrying it as a skein of lies.

 

[Limper]

Modern (cognitive language using and tool developing) homo sapiens sapiens became what we are today physiacly and menatly about 65,000 years ago.

Our recorded history covers about 9000 years at best (China has the longest records) just from the numbers we don't really know a damn thing about our history.

Everything we have to day could be erased and after 10,000 years there wouldn't be a trace for the next group of us who rises up to find.

Its naieve to think it hasn't happened before and that it can't happen again.

We know nothing just do the math.

 

[Amos_Sten]

Modern (cognitive language using and tool developing) homo sapiens sapiens became what we are today physiacly and menatly about 65,000 years ago.

Our recorded history covers about 9000 years at best (China has the longest records) just from the numbers we don't really know a damn thing about our history.

Everything we have to day could be erased and after 10,000 years there wouldn't be a trace for the next group of us who rises up to find.

Its naieve to think it hasn't happened before and that it can't happen again.

We know nothing just do the math.

What math would that be?

Because we do know some of what happened before written records. We know about population migrations, hunting techniques, clothing, burial rites, examples of art, technological development even musical development.

Its not perfect and certainly not complete but its alot more than nothing.

And by the way China is beaten by quite a few people when it comes to the oldest written records.

 

[alsih2o]

Everything we have to day could be erased and after 10,000 years there wouldn't be a trace for the next group of us who rises up to find.

Its naieve to think it hasn't happened before and that it can't happen again.

We know nothing just do the math.

what? being married to a geologist this strikes me as exceptionally naive. people don't have to write to leave their history behind. and we can follow the tracks of small cellular clusters that have been dead for millions of years across the ocean floor. i know if we disappeared today anybody worth their morning oats could find out we were here with little effort.

how could we doisappear without a trace without the whole planet being literally destroyed?

 

[Limper]

what? being married to a geologist this strikes me as exceptionally naive. people don't have to write to leave their history behind. and we can follow the tracks of small cellular clusters that have been dead for millions of years across the ocean floor. i know if we disappeared today anybody worth their morning oats could find out we were here with little effort.

how could we doisappear without a trace without the whole planet being literally destroyed?

Where is the rest of the human fossile record? The trace residue you speak of is a rare occurance and offten time you need to know what to look for in the first place. If things fall back (our advanced civ) and have to rise again (from scratch) things will be different correct? They will look for what they have or produce just like we do now... it taints the data as well as excludes findings.

10,000 years is ALOT of time. More than enough to render anything built in the modern era at best a heap of ruble which will offer more questions than answers... IF they know to look.

The Carnacs went unfound till by accident someone tried to cut a road through one. We hadn't even concidered that many hills in our world might not be natural but made by hand 5,000 years before recorded history.

 

[MerakSpielman]

We can deduce a lot from the trace evidence we have found, but that doesn't mean we're right.

Like I said, it's impossible to quantify the amount we don't know. For example, we have found fossil evidence for thousands of species of dinosaur. This data can never tell us how many species left no fossil record because their natural environment was not conducive to the formation of fossils. We jump to conclusions all the time. If we find an herbavore with the remains of several predators, we deduce the predators must hunt in packs. For all we know, the predators were scavanging and fighting with each other over the remains. Perhaps all the animals were fleeing a larger animal or a forest fire, and simply injured each other in the course of trying to escape. There could be dozens of reasons for the find other than the conclusion they arrive at. We should not be too confident in our own abilities to deduce.

Imagine humanity 30,000 years ago.

How sophisticated was verbal language? How elaborate was the social structure? When did we begin giving names to individuals? Did religious beliefs vary greatly between different groups? Were there few enough resourses to fight over (i.e, was there warfare)? Did most groups migrate over a set pattern or just pick a direction and go? How did they decide which way to go? Was there agriculture (It is perfectly possible that agriculture was discovered and lost multiple times over the millenia)? Was leadership heriditary? In what year did humans first develop a system of religion/spirituality/mysticism? When did humans learn to swim? How many of these answers had significant variations between different groups of people, and how many were universal?

I assume a lot of you could make up answers to these questions, and there might even be a couple of questions up there that somebody can "deduce" the answer to, but really they can't be known with any degree of certainty. Somebody could probably answer all of these questions and sound very intellignent and thoughtful about doing it, but anything anybody says is little more than an educated guess, and is almost certainly wrong to some degree.

 

[Wombat]

All I can add is there is a vast difference between not knowing everything and not knowing anything.

To assume we know nothing of history is ridiculous and arrogant; to know we don't know everything that happened is correct.