Historical Facts

                

According to the commonsense view; there are certain basic facts which are the same for all historical are the backbone of history.

As Housman remarks :

            "Accuracy is a duty, not a virtue."

The second observation is that the necessity to establish these basic facts rests not on any quality in the facts themselves but on a proper decision of the historian.

C P Scott's motto was 'The most effective way to influence opinion is by the selection and arrangement of the appropriates facts It used to be said that.. The facts do not speak themselves the facts speak only when the historian call on them it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor and in what order or context.

            The only reason why we are interested to know that the battle was fought at Hastings in 1066 is that historian regarded it as a major historical event professor Talcoff  Parsons called science a selective system of cognitive orientation to retaliation.

Any fact in the course of the next few years we shall see this facts appearing first in footnotes then in then in the text, of articles and books about 19th century English and that in twenty or thirty year time it may be a well established historical fact.

            The element of interpretation enters into every fact of history as Carr says that the picture of medieval man as devoutly religious whether true or not is indestructible because all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people who believed it and wanted others to believe it and a masks of other facts in which we masques possibly have found evidence to the country has been lost beyond recall.

            "The history we read" writer Professor Barraclougu himself trained as a medievalist though based on facts is speaking not factual at all but series of accepted judgement. As Hutton Strachey said ignorance is the first requisite of the historian ignorance which simplifies and clarifies which selects and omits. The historians are so competent mainly because they are so ignorant of their subject.

            The modern historian has the dual task of discovering the facts significant facts and turning them into facts of history and of discarding the many insignificant facts un historians. The  philosophy of history is concern neither with the past by itself nor with historians thought about itself but with the two things in their mutual relations.

            The past which a historian studies is not a dead past but a past which in some sense is stir living in the present. The facts of history never come to as 'Pure' and they do not exist in a perform they are always reflected through the mind of the recorder.