By Dr. Nathaniel Knight, Seton Hall University
In the retinue of best practices in history teaching, use of primary sources ranks high. Teachers from elementary school on up are expected not just to recount history but to expose students directly to voices, ideas and images from the past. Yet it is often not clear what students are supposed to derive from this experience. What should students be looking for in a historical document, and how are they to build from these artifacts an image of the past?
Many students, and probably their teachers as well, when confronted with this challenge would begin by invoking the concept of “bias.” The first step in using a primary source, our hypothetical learner might explain, would be to determine whether or not it is biased. If it does turn out to be biased, then of course, it should be used with caution if at all. At the very least objective sources should be brought in to restore balance and establish the facts.
If bias is seen as a regrettable, though sometimes unavoidable, shortcoming in primary sources, it grows into a mortal sin when found in secondary historical writings. A biased historical account, conventional wisdom assumes, is a violation of the basic standards of the historical profession. A biased work is more than just untrustworthy—it is unethical.
Implicit in these notions of bias is an ideal of absolute disinterestedness, total objectivity. The historian, it is assumed, should approach his or her topic as a kind of alien chronicler, a stranger from another world, with no personal connections, no axes to grind, in relation to the events and processes under investigation. In the footsteps of the immortal Thucydides, the historian should write history for the ages, eschewing factional entanglements and sticking strictly to the facts “as they actually happened.”
Bolstered by the ideal of pure objectivity, historians can approach their task with a sense of certitude and moral clarity. But in the heat of the research process, these comfortable assumptions often start to unravel. Historical investigations, it turns out, neither begin nor end with raw undigested facts. Throughout the process, data must be assembled, sources accumulated and in the process choices must be made. Anyone who has worked in an archive is has no doubt experienced the sensation of being overwhelmed with data. Confronted with a mass of potential sources, the historian is forced to be selective, sifting through the random and repetitive chaff in search of kernels of meaning. But how is this meaning determined? On what basis does the historian make choices? Implicitly or explicitly, historians are guided by questions that set priorities and establish which sources are most relevant. These questions in turn are a reflection of the milieu in which they were formulated. Whether in response to scholarly debates, social problems, political struggles, personal experience or all combined, historians formulate the questions that guide their research in relation to their world as they experience it. Historians are not strangers from another planet. We are drawn to the past because it speaks to the concerns of our own time.
If the present intrudes into historical research it is all the more ubiquitous in the writing process. Even the driest most descriptive narrative is a product of thousands of subtle choices—which information to include and in what order, when to use direct quotations and when to paraphrase, what tone to adopt in describing individuals and events, how to account for motives and causality. All of these choices are informed by the author’s desire to convey a particular vision of a historical episode–not just what occurred, but how and why. A conscientious historian will take pains to insure that his or her vision is grounded in a close and careful reading of the sources, but the way in which the sources are woven into a narrative reflects the guiding questions and assumptions that a writer brings to the task.
My point, to put it bluntly, is that we are all biased. We all have a perspective, a point of view that reflects our understanding of past and present. Our bias may be openly and persuasively expressed, in which case it is usually referred to as an argument, or it may be deeply embedded in a descriptive narrative, but it is never absent.
The universality of bias does not mean, however, that every perspective is equally valid. Falsification, willful misrepresentation, tendentious selection of sources and shoddy research are not mere figments of the imagination. It is the historian’s task to identify such transgressions and give them the treatment they deserve. But even the most discredited text can still stand as a powerful and significant historical source in its own right, to the extent that it reflects the perceptions, motives and interests of its creator. No one would presume to use the forged manuscripts of Václav Hanka as a reliable source for factual information on medieval Czech history, but they express quite eloquently the spirit of early 19th century Romantic Nationalism.
Therefore, rather than imparting to our students a view of bias as a kind of scarlet letter marking a text as unsuitable for historical consumption, we should focus instead on cultivating a greater sensitivity to ideas and contexts. An aspiring historian should learn to listen for the author’s perspective, tease out the assertions and assumptions hidden in the narrative, place these ideas in the context of contemporaneous movements, debates and trends, and determine on the basis of this close critical reading how the text is best used as a historical source. Individual perspective (call it bias if you will) is nothing to fear—in fact it is often a historian’s greatest asset. Give up the holy grail of omniscient objectivity and embrace the view from the ground up.
Nathaniel Knight
Seton Hall University
Additional Readings:
E. H. Carr, What is History? New York: Vintage, 1961.
John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.