History is Written by the Victors

The Importance of an Unbiased Approach in Historical Research

Objectivity is paramount in historical research. An unbiased approach to historical research can be hard to maintain if the researcher/writer is attached to a particular viewpoint or has a particularly strong interest in the outcome of their research. This innate bias is common and something careful researchers and professional historians try to avoid. However, it can be hard to keep our research unbiased because the quality of our research materials or references may contain inherent biases, perhaps ones that are not easy to detect, while others contain obvious biases. Written history is full of one-sided accounts, for example following WWII those behind the Berlin Wall learned a different version of the history of the war and its victors than those in the United States. Religions all over the world have written the histories that supports their beliefs and subsequent actions. Great Britain and America do not necessarily have the same narrative on the American Revolution. History can be a great source of propaganda - it can change the outlook on something or someone for generations and can be used as a persuasive or destructive tool. Understanding the source of your information and conducting a strong evaluation of its validity and bias is very important. Every caution should be taken to overcome and avoid any bias.

The span of history is long. It starts with what happened a moment ago and reaches back through generations and civilizations. It's a living art where nothing is concrete - the discovery of a letter, a document, an artifact can, and has, changed an entire established narrative. There is danger in repeating information that has become erroneous through relying on sources that have not been vetted in some time. It may be quoted and requoted through the years affecting generations of research. The careful researcher can avoid this by conducting a reading survey of current writings to determine if new sources have been discovered since the time of the previous publication. Personally, I prefer going to the primary sources to read it for myself.  Recently I was reading a book on the history of the development of the tactic of Blitzkrieg in which the German author really nailed an eminent historian for deliberately excluding available information which would not favor is research. I was familiar with this historian, whom I will not name because I haven't checked out the statement’s accuracy. Just saying it happens to the best.  

Special attention must be paid to the accuracy of dates, events, participants, causes or outcomes. We all make mistakes but there are many instances of details being misquoted or misinterpreted completely in error - an error that became established fact because later writers never traced the sources of the original information and double checked it. This goes hand in hand with thoroughly evaluating a new source to determine its veracity and sources. It is amazing how much information is partially digested and passed on to become absolute fact when in essence there is no basis for it. Marie Antoinette's famous comment "let them eat cake" is a tragic example, a total fabrication that was instrumental in her final downfall or perhaps later became folklore - the jury is still out on that one.

Probably the hardest thing to overcome for the researcher or historian is avoidance of the mass generalization of a group of people, motives, or character etc. The individual is forgotten, and the collective group made up of individuals, some good, some bad with different motivations, emotions, intellect, and abilities all morphed into one narrative.  I found this with the glider pilots. The narrative has been that they were old, with poor eyesight and were washed out pilots. There is a bit of truth to all of that - just as after Market Garden there was a period when the paratroopers were so depleted the standards were lowered to fill the void. One source states that all they had to do at one point was jump off the platform and they were a paratrooper.  However, history recorded the paratroopers as heroes, they dared all, and the glider pilots as goof offs - just two modern examples of stereotyping an entire group on one sliver of time within the entire course of events. In truth there were individuals in both programs that were excellent, regardless of how they moved into the positions they held and others that were pretty bad and not cut out for it, even with excellent training. In other areas of my research, I came across two women in the 16th century that lived within 40 miles of each other. Both were accused of witchcraft. One was imprisoned for long stretches of time even though she was not found guilty and the other countersued her accuser for slander and won. It has been generalized that women did not possess legal rights in that time and an accusation of witchcraft was a death sentence and yet . . .?  The moral? It becomes a danger when the researcher neglects to sit back and evaluate pertinent information to include it in their works and perhaps chooses not to because it would alter the established outcome they are looking for - that can be a hard reality and a difficult choice, but the facts lead us where they will.

Lastly, oral history is probably one of the most valuable tools we have. We assume something is only accurate if it is written down, in a book. To that point oral history can be changed with each teller just like written documents can be with each copy. It can also be the yellow brick road to an event or source that we would otherwise be unaware of.  We all rely on oral history. How many stories of your family have you heard that were not written down? Have you recorded every important event, transaction, conversation in your life? Because they were not officially recorded does it make them not true? Was it recorded and we don't have access to it anymore? Imagine, just for a moment the overwhelming amounts of paper, scrolls, cave paintings, newspapers, films, databases we would have if none of them had ever been destroyed? There are also fires, floods, wars, and purposeful destruction of documents, that only oral history leaves any trace to the story they would have told.

Not every civilization or level of society was or is literate so oral tradition keeps their history alive which can completely disappear in one generation if no one pays attention to it. Oral history provides the little clues we are on the right track or the wrong one and it has to be combed through carefully. It is especially helpful in genealogy. My family is French Canadian and in researching the family history no one could get passed a certain generation on the Leblanc side. However, there was an oral tradition which named the first name of every eldest son in the Leblanc family going back ten generations. My mother repeated the names to me the way she had heard it from her mother. For some bizarre reason all I had was gift wrap on hand, so I wrote it all out on the back of it. I found the records for the son that was the missing link based on that saying. If my mother had not repeated it and I memorized it or wrote it down in would have disappeared forever with her death.  That's the value of oral history.

In closing it is a good reminder to understand what our goal is in conducting research whether personally or professionally, or as readers to understand inherent biases. It serves us equally well to check out sources and read the versions written by the victors and the losers. We are infallible, we all have a bias but the search for the truth should be based on the goal of total objectivity to be of value. If we made an error, say it, and correct it - the value is in the truth being passed on to be built upon or torn down as history evolves

.