Considering all the fake news today, how subjective people can be in their account of an event, and how easy it is to manipulate information, how do historians discern fact from fiction?

Question

Curious because even today, there is so much fake gossip, misguiding news, and just people turning things around on each other that makes me wonder how we navigate that when looking at our history.

In: 3

Answer 1

For starters, they don’t accept everything at face value. A lot of the work is in identifying the biases, motivations, and limitations of the various available sources. They look to see if other, contemporaneous sources agree or disagree, and whether or not physical evidence or specimens corroborate claims made by those sources.