How can hundreds and even thousands of years of history, which includes entire civilizations, discoveries and characters, so confidently be explained? Not all of it could have happened the way it’s being taught to modern society, right?
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I mean if you wanna be pedantic about it, you really *can’t* know for sure. We could just decide to distrust everything and believe that all history is fake.
But generally, there are records of things happening. In more recent history, we have written records and that sort of thing. If multiple people wrote about a thing happening, it probably happened. Nobody photographed the Revolutionary War, but we can pretty confidently conclude that it wasn’t a big lie, since there are loads of records of it having happened, from written war strategies to correspondence between units to journal entries from soldiers and civilians who were near the combat. This stuff usually comes with certain physical evidence of things having happened—in the case of the Revolution, we have muskets and musket balls, old uniforms, bayonets, swords, and other evidence that a war took place.
Ancient artifacts and Neolithic monuments can be traced through time using carbon dating and similar techniques, so we can tell roughly how old they are. Getting *way* back, it becomes hard to determine conclusively what certain objects or monuments were for (Stonehenge, for example). In those cases, historians and scientists of all sorts will theorize about possible applications for the things, and present evidence backing up their theories. Stonehenge, for instance, is theorized to have been either a mass burial ground or some astronomy-related contraption—maybe both. We’re not totally sure about these things, but large numbers of Neolithic human bones found by the site as well as certain mathematical specifications that line up with certain celestial cycles have led experts to believe that either or both of these theories could be correct.
Every good historian knows that a book is just a mans words. You take as many accounts and as much evidence as you can, and even then, it’s important to not speak in absolutes about it.
I have a BA in History, so I’m certainly far from the most qualified to answer this, but also far from the least qualified, so I’ll try to answer as best as I can:
“History” is not the same thing as “the past.” History is specifically the past of which we have record, or more accurately the study of said records. “Prehistory” by contrast refers to the past of which we don’t have record, so depending on where you are in the world it varies when prehistory ends and History begins.
“History” doesn’t really claim to “know” what happened in the past, but rather is the study of what people of the past claimed happened. By comparing multiple sources, by considering how long after the events in question the sources were written (or spoken, in the case of an oral tradition), and by considering the biases and agendas of those writing, we can begin to construct hypotheses about their veracity. If 3 unrelated sources without a clear bias related to the topic say one thing, and a fourth source that has a clear bias disagrees with them, we can comfortably trust the 3 sources. By the same token, if 2 sources written the year an event occurred claim it happened in a way that isn’t flattering to the powers-that-be, and a hundred years later 4 sources write accounts that all flatter said powers, we can fairly safely assume those later sources are revisionist in nature (regardless of how accurate the 2 original sources were, perhaps they had an anti-establishment agenda). It’s a lot like journalism in that regard, basically Historians are looking for credible sources; one credible source is good, but the more you can find to corroborate it, the better. The fewer credible sources you can find, the worse.
The simple fact is that the overwhelming majority of the past are things Historians DON’T know for certain; the mundane day-to-day of peoples’ lives are rarely recorded, and History is very often “written by the victor,” so we often lose many truths, and need to make educated guesses, often based on partial information.
TL;DR History isn’t the study of what happened in the past, it’s the study of what the past recorded happened, and the analysis of how credible those accounts are, and attempts to build counter-factuals where possible.
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