Historians Storyteller

Is History True? Handlin argues yes, while McNeill argues no. I am not one to decide for someone else if they think it is or not. However, I do believe most history is. Although, a great deal of our history went unrecorded, the amount we have can suffice to show that what’s happened in the past can happen again in a contemporary situation.

Studying history can be an active, often arduous process, dependent on making assumptions with the evidence available and proving those assumptions to be correct or otherwise. But it can also be an easy task if done incorrectly, one of cutting corners and assuming falsehoods to be true for the sake of convenience. This is the way that many historians, amateur or professional, approach history. Not only does this approach exclude any possibility for well-constructed conclusions to be made, it can also leave the populace ignorant of the truth. In “The Strange Death of Silas Deane”, James West Davidson and Mark Hamilton Lytle argue that history is not merely the act of collecting data-rather of making assumptions about the data-through the use of countless rhetorical questions, paragraph organization, and a sardonic tone.

Throughout time, there will continue to be a considerable divorce between academic and popular historians. As Margaret Conrad argues, popular historians have established the tension, by recreating “historical films without the involvement of trained historians”. This underscores the troubling gulf that sometimes separates public academics approaches to the past. Academic historians have been “too long focused” on professionalism, and discarded “generating” a “dialogue” (Conrad) with their contextual audiences. The substantial dissolution between academic and popular historians is evident in a range of sources, essentially from Michelle Arrows to Herodotus and Thucydides to Bury.

History writing has evolved much over time with the contributions of many people. In the modern sense, it can be traced back to ancient Greece and China, where historians Herodotus and Sima Qian began keeping records of human existence. Although they were not literally the first people to write history, together they are named the first great historians of the Western world and the East because of their individual innovations and extensive work that has long affected history writing up until this day. There is much to debate when it comes to the greatness of these ancient historians, and although some believe they were both important and successful in what their works, The Histories and The Records of a Historian, accomplished, others

A historian picks and chooses what information to analyze. By leaving out some information it is also a form of manipulation and twisting the past. I think that this shows a direct link between a historian and a mythologizer, whose job it is to twist history for another purpose.

However, they must balance this imaginative outlook with the reality that scientists connect to, so that their information is reliable. So, while describing history, a historian has the ability to extend information in an artistic manner, but they must also stay within the constraints of actuality. I agree with his statement in the way that he compared the two opposing subjects, but I would not typically think of arts and sciences having a connection through history.

Writing history requires diligence, research, checking and rechecking the information and most of all an understanding that no matter how hard a person tries their own beliefs, biases, and history will color the information they are writing. Having the ability to trace the steps writers take to arrive at certain conclusions helps the readers to assimilate the information with some degree of understanding, if they choose to follow the research. This does not mean that everyone who reads the material will arrive at the same conclusion, however, just as a writer has bias, so does the reader.

Wouldn’t it be odd if you met your best friend at grief counseling? Psychologically, it’s not as odd as you may think. For example, The Storytellers is a book about two unlikely friends that connect through their losses and further their friendship by using each other as filters to talk to someone that will listen when you are willing to tell. The characterization aspect will be done on Sage, her past and how it has affected her. Predicting what will happen next is the part that will show inside the mind of the reader thus far. Lastly, evaluating both Sage and Josef’s situations at the moment.

I interpret that to mean that you cannot get an accurate reconstruction of history without the personal letters and writings of the day to show us the quality of people of whom we are learning about.

Ordinary, innocent individuals tortured for simply being Jewish. Sage Singer’s grandma has blue numbers tattooed on her arm because she is a Jew. Because Sage is Jewish, she feels segregated from the rest of the world. Sage works night shifts creating freshly baked goods for customers to indulge in at Our Daily Bread. Ms. Signer feels at home behind a counter kneading bread dough nightly. She prefers night shifts, so she doesn’t have to socialize with customers. One night Josef Weber starts showing up at night to chat with Sage. Josef shares his guilty past with Sage, and it affects her significantly. I am reading The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult. In this journal, I will be predicting, questioning, and visualizing.

The storyteller is by all account not the only African American in the book to have felt the confinements of supremacist stereotyping. While he tries to get away from the grasp of preference on an individual level, he experiences different blacks who endeavor to recommend a protection technique for all African Americans. Every one of these individuals present a hypothesis of the assumed right approach to be black in America and tries to layout how blacks ought to act as per this hypothesis. The advocates of these speculations trust that any individual who acts in spite of their prescriptions successfully sells out the race. At last, be that as it may, the storyteller finds that such remedies just counter generalization with generalization and

This is not a new issue, as faulty perceptions and interpretations were at the forefront of the warnings of which Descartes described hundreds of years ago. In order to compensate for inconsistencies in perception and interpretations, Thelin feels modern researchers and historians need to doubt documented history and unearth data that may have been forgotten or overlooked. Thelin believes that history does indeed matter, and stresses that even basic facts such as names, dates, and numbers need to be corroborated and not just taken at face

History has always been a subject that has fascinated me – the quote “Those who do not know history are bound to repeat it” seems inevitably true. I have always been curious about understanding the stories of those who came before me because those stories spill into my story, which eventually will spill into another’s story and the cycle will repeat itself until the end of time.

Many things can be said with words, but words don’t ever tell a story to its truest detail. They leave the story to be interpreted in different ways. And eventually over time, over many generations, the story gradually changes. Detail are forgotten, details are mistaken, details are changed. And when all is said and done the story, the reality that is true and pure, is no more. Replacing it is a new story, a second edition of the same history. It’s the same general story at heart but it’s not the truth.

“Historians are people who always seek the truth about the past insofar as that is possible. Truth that is never quite attainable in a straight line that is never precisely straight. Historians are craftsmen who construct their story on the basis of evidence by selecting and arranging the facts (or ideas, values, or artefacts) in a chronological sequence that has a beginning”. (Williams, 2007)