What is a historical fact

1
What is a historical fact?
2
Facts as evidence

• Facts provide historians with the evidence they
  need to support their interpretations
  
• BUT, what is the impact of
• MISSING facts?
• BIASED or UNTRUE facts?
• SELECTED facts?
• CONFLICTING facts?

3
Acton 19th century historian

• Acton wanted history to be non-culture specific
• our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French
  and English, German and Dutch alike that nobody
  can tell, without examining the authors, where
  the Bishop of Oxford laid down the pen, and
  whether Fairburn or Gasquet, Liebermann or
  Harrison took it up.
• (Acton, Lectures on Modern History, 1906, p.318)

4
Are facts socially constructed?

• A fact must have given rise to some effect in the
  past
  
• But it cannot do so except through public
  opinion
  
• This means that it is social opinion that gives a
  particular fact its historical character
  

5
Facts as symbols

• In the year 49BC Caesar crossed the Rubicon
• What gives this statement the status of
  historical fact?
  
• It is the generalisation of a multitude of other
  related and concurrent facts and it stands as a
  symbol for all of these

6
Does professional consensus make the facts?

• At a small town English fair in 1850 a seller of
  gingerbread was kicked to death by a mob over a
  small dispute
  
• Is this a historical fact?
• Only if historians decide that it is worth
  recording, because only then does the public come
  to know of it
  

7
Whose facts are they?

• Until recently, records were made only of kings
  and generals and other leading figures
  
• Greek history almost entirely based on accounts
  by Athenian citizens little knowledge what it
  was like to be a Spartan, Persian, non-citizen,
  slave in Athens

8

• Our picture has been preselected and
  predetermined for us, not so much by accident as
  by people who were consciously or unconsciously
  imbued with a particular view and thought the
  facts which supported that view worth
  preserving.
• (E.H Carr, What is History?, p.13)

9
Rediscovering facts

• Until recently, only a small section of society
  was able to write the records
  
• Only in the last 30 to 40 years have historians
  begun to look into the history of ordinary people
  or into specialist areas
  
• More interest in thoughts/values/lives of the
  common people
  
• e.g. French Revolution

10
The Sceptics

• the facts of history do not exist for any
  historian till he creates them
  
• (Carl Becker, Atlantic Monthly, October 1910,
  p.528)

11
The Sceptics

• St Augustine looked at history from the point of
  view of the early Christian Tillamont, from that
  of a seventeenth-century Frenchman Gibbon, from
  that of an eighteenth-century Englishman Mommsen
  from that of a nineteenth-century German. There
  is no point in asking which was the right point
  of view. Each was the only one possible for the
  man who adopted it.
• (R. Collingwood The Idea of History 1946, p.xii)

12
Is there any objective truth?

• Carrs metaphor just because a mountain can be
  viewed from different perspectives that doesnt
  mean it have shape or substance
  
• Not all interpretations are as good as one
  another!
  
• Carr argues that the more aware a historian is of
  his social environment, the more he becomes able
  to transcend it

13
Reflecting society

• the search for causalities in history is
  impossible without reference to valuesbehind the
  search for causalities there always lies,
  directly or indirectly, the search for values.
• (Meinecke, Varieties of History, 1957, pp.268,
  273)
  
• See cigarette/drunk driver example
• (Carr pp.104-107)

14
Where do we start?

• History is a, somewhat contradictory, process of
  both gathering a wide array of materials for
  analysis, yet needing to simplify it down to a
  few key points
• In Carrs words to introduce some order and
  unity into the chaos of happenings and the chaos
  of specific causes
  
• (E.H. Carr, What is History?, p.91)

15
Who is a good historian?

• What do we mean when we praise a historian for
  being objective?
  
• she has the capacity to rise above a limited
  vision of her own situation in society and
  history recognising the impossibility of total
  objectivity
• she has the capacity to project her vision into
  the future in a way that gives her a more
  profound and lasting insight into the past some
  historians write history that is more durable
  than others

16

• History as a constantly moving process, with the
  historian moving within it
  
• (E.H. Carr, What is History?, p.133)