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…”
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.
Latest Answers