Taking Sides

Is History True?Did the Chinese Discover America?

Was Disease the Key factor in the Depopulation if the Native Americans in the Americas?

Should Columbus be Considered a Hero?

Is History True?

• Historic Lies You Thought Were True • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyVAXtjqveA

• http://www.ysursa.com/history/Reference%20pages/is_history_true.htm– Closely associated to the question of historical truth is the matter of historical objectivity. Frequently, we hear people begin

statements with the phrase "History tells us.. ." or "History shows that. .. ," followed by a conclu sion that reflects the speaker or writer's point of view. In fact, history does not directly tell or show us anything. That is the job of historians, and as William McNeill argues, much of what historians tell us, despite their best intentions, often represents a blending of historical evidence and myth.

– Is there such a thing as a truly objective history? Historian Paul Conkin agrees with McNeill that objectivity is possible only if the meaning of that term is sharply restricted and is not used as a synonym for certain truth. History, Conkin writes, "is a story about the past; it is not the past itself.... Whether one draws a history from the guidance of memory or of monuments, it cannot exactly mirror some directly experienced past nor the feelings and perceptions of people in the past." He concludes, "In this sense, much of history is a stab into partial darkness, a matter of informed but inconclusive conjecture.... Obviously, in such areas of interpretation, there is no one demonstrably correct 'explanation,' but very often competing, equally unfalsifiable, theories. Here, on issues that endlessly fascinate the historian, the controversies rage, and no one expects, short of a great wealth of unexpected evidence, to find a conclu sive answer. An undesired, abstractive precision of the subject might so narrow it as to permit more conclusive evidence. But this would spoil all the fun." For more discussion on this and other topics related to the study of history, see Paul K. Conkin and Roland N. Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge of History (Dodd, Mead & Company, 1971).

• – The most thorough discussion of historical objectivity in the United States is Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity

Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge University Press, 1988), which draws its title from Charles A. Beard's article in the American Historical Review (October 1935) in which Beard reinforced the views expressed in his 1933 presidential address to the American Historical Association. [See "Written History as an Act of Faith," American Historical Review (January 1934).] Novick's thorough analysis generated a great deal of attention, the results of which can be followed in James T. Kloppenberg, "Objectivity and Historicism: A Century of American Historical Writing," American Historical Review (October 1989), Thomas L. Haskell, "Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric vs. Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream," History & Theory (1990), and the scholarly forum "Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the Future of the Historical Profession," American Historical Review (June 1991).

•

Did the Chinese Really Discover America?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzEWHG9iGI4 Start at 1.74

• http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/arts/24iht-chinam.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Was Disease the Key Factor in the Depopulation of Native Americans in the Americas?

And…Should Columbus be Considered a Hero?

• Effects of European Colonization: Christopher Columbus and Native Americans

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNPKzf_GP0c

• Happy Indigenous People's Day...the truth on Columbus Day • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoApmDQFF8A

• American Holocaust: The Destruction of America's Native Peoples • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qra6pcn4AOE