Historiography

Most people assume history is a settled body of facts — names, dates, and events that someone has already sorted out, and that your job is simply to learn. That assumption falls apart the first time you read two good historians who examined the same evidence and reached different conclusions. Neither one is lying. Neither one is careless. So what exactly is going on?

The answer is that the past and history are not the same thing. The past is everything that ever happened, and it is gone beyond recovery. History is the account we build of the past out of the fragments that survive — and building an account requires choices. Which questions to ask. Which sources to trust. What counts as a cause rather than a coincidence. Which of the millions of things that happened are significant enough to belong in the story at all. Historiography is the study of those choices: not what happened, but how we come to know it, argue about it, and revise what we thought we knew.

Perspective is unavoidable. Distortion is not. — the working principle of this unit

That distinction is the whole point. Recognizing that every historian writes from a point of view does not mean every account is equally good, and it does not mean the truth is unknowable. It means we need standards for telling careful work from sloppy work: sourcing, contextualization, corroboration, fair treatment of evidence that cuts against your argument, and a willingness to be corrected. These three lectures give you those standards and then put them to work on a single, familiar stretch of the American Revolution — so you can watch the same evidence yield genuinely different, genuinely defensible accounts.