According to Mark Twain "The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice." Can the Historian ever be free of prejudice?.
Answer.
Can an historian ever be free of prejudice? This is a question that has been debated by many historians and intellectuals for centuries. As history is a very wide subject and depends on the historian picking out information from a vast selection of facts, can their prejudice or bias consciously or subconsciously never become part of the history they are writing? To fully discuss this question we must look at several factors and how these factors can effect Historians. One of these is what the word prejudice actually means and how we can relate this to history. Prejudice is a preconceived opinion, and an unjustified and or unreasonable bias. As it states in the Expanded Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia (2003), "Prejudice is an unsubstantiated prejudgment of an individual or group, favorable or unfavorable in character tending to action in a consonant direction." (1) With this interpretation of the word in mind, how can we relate this to history and the historian and determine whether the historian can ever be free of prejudice? One of the things we must firstly assess is weather the historians have preconceived ideas and whether they have any bearing on the historical subject that they are working on.
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History is a matter of the historian's views and Interpretations. As history is not just the collecting of facts, but gathering together this factual information, and then trying to put these events into context, the historical information that is written down is open to prejudice and bias. There are so many facts and information to choose from that the historian will choose certain pieces of information and discard others. This selection of facts varies from historian to historian. That information that is important to one historian, another will discard depending on their, this choice itself is a form of prejudice.
New ideas began to take place and from that point on the beginning of the 1790s until the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 was the most violent and harsh time in English history since the civil war. ... All of these things were dreams of hers, which she gave to her character Elizabeth Bennet in her novel Pride and Predjudice. ...
The Goldman's financial situation was never very good, due partly to her father's total ineptness in his business, partly to predjudice towards Jews that confronted him daily. ... On May 1, 1886, mass strikes and the largest spontaneous labor demonstration in the country's history took place in Chicago near the McCormick reaper factory. ...
