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

Napoleon once said “history is a set of lies agreed upon.”

For most of history, historians mostly took their sources at face value – a ton of obviously biased writing was accepted as neutral fact by, say, medieval people reading stuff by ancient romans.

In more modern times, a massive part of reconstructing history is learning to judge the reliability of each source, understand the motives of each, read between the lines, and figure out what’s most likely to be true when combined with physical evidence. But it’s still a whoooole lot of “our best guess is…”