ToK Unit

In a usual History class it is common to explore different historians’ points of view. This way the student can create his/her own theory, by combining the different opinions he/she identifies with the most. However, the veracity of these events is never doubted, because we have already accepted that “facts” dictate the truth. Nevertheless, nobody contemplates on the process a historian had to go through to, first of all, determine a fact and then impose his opinion. This process, which is filled with the selection and filtering of information, limits our perspective. Yet, it is also a necessary procedure in which the historian determines what is deemed to be important or not.

Currently the senior History class is studying the causes for World War II. There is no exact answer for what exactly caused the war, so this ambiguity leaves space for debate. For example, historian A. J. P. Taylor says that the European statesmen in the 1930s and 40s are just as guilty (if not more) as Hitler is for causing the Second World War. Other historians and British wartime leader Winston Churchill believe that Hitler’s ambitions and policies were the main reasons for the breakout of the war. Not only has each historian filtered parts of the entire truth, but also an ordinary feature, such as language, a huge impact in interpretation. The German invasion of Poland in 1939 is described completely different in a British newspaper when compared to an Austrian one. Each side carries a political view that they wish to impose on their reader. So, the language used and the facts that they chose to report creates articles that appear to be polar opposites, but in fact are reporting the same event. Similarly, in a few decades, when historians are studying our current society, they will have to deal with primary articles from the New York Times and from Fox News, one imposing a perspective significantly different from the other.

This process is extremely similar to the Beta-Alpha activity simulated in class. The reports were used as primary documents that historians had to investigate in order to understand what happened to both civilizations. There were no “neutral” documents that stated what happened, it was either from a Beta’s or an Alpha’s point of view. For instance, one historian might be more sympathetic to the Alpha’s and the “facts” that they describe have a larger weight in his/her concluding theory. In this case, the Beta’s side of the story would lose its importance if it weren’t for a second or third historian looking at the same documents and “siding” with them.

Besides language, there is a vast selection of factors that affect a piece of information. This concept is greatly explored in the article “What are historical facts?” by Carl L. Becker, who claims that there are three essential questions that are rarely considered when studying history: what is the historical fact?, where is the historical fact?, and when is the historical fact? After defining all three, he concludes that historical facts are only present is our minds with the help of our imagination, because if we did not acknowledge them, they would cease to exist.  This implicates that our humanity, composed of our culture, schema, morals and more, also affects how we interpret facts. Nevertheless, if it weren’t for this process of selecting information we would have no emphasis on certain events, because everything would be considered important to study, causing a lack of frame or focus. We take the “hard facts” for granted, because everyone simply assumes they’re true. It is uncommon to stop and second-guess what factors might have affected each fact.