Let’s go back to the 1600’s. Stuff happened. How do we know this stuff happened – the way people dressed, ate, acted? Is it a collective of surviving evidence gathered from the time? How do we know that written statements from the time period weren’t bullshit? Do we just agree that we can form a general picture of what happened in the past from the surviving evidence?
(1600s used as an example, this applies to general history. I assume things get more questionable the further you go back)
Thank you for indulging a historically-challenged idiot who’s had a few whiskeys.
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History is something that’s always evolving because we don’t have a complete picture of everything that happened in history and as we learn more, what we know changes.
Take for example, the city of Troy and the story of the Trojan War. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed they were real, but history back then wasn’t very rigorous and the focus was more on the story. When history became a more rigorous field, a lack of evidence meant that for a while Troy and the Trojan War were thought by most historians to be entirely mythical.
However, in the late 1800s, a the ruins of an ancient city was discovered and was close enough to the descriptions of the ancient stories that it’s believed to be Troy so now the stories are believed to have been loosely based on actual events.
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