Richard Evans In Defense Of History

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The assigned reading was “In Defense of History” written by Richard J. Evans and was published by W. W. Norton & Company. Evans’ book is not just a defense of the subject of history (as the title claims); it is also a defense for the careers of all historians. The book is a counter against the postmodernist view of history. Evans’ book shows postmodernists that objectivity exists in historical books through the search by authors to find the ultimate truth in history and also shows the absurdity of postmodernism. The postmodernist view on history is that those who believe in the trend “deny that there is any such thing as historical truth or objectivity” (pg. 3). This trend, if true, would make all self-proclaimed objective history inaccurate and would halt the search for truth throughout the scientific history. Evans writes about the postmodernist view saying that …show more content…

173). Historians are not searching to raise their bias through the past; they are merely looking to tell the origin stories of our world. History, at its heart, is the search for objectivity and verified facts through primary sources. The theory that claims that our recorded history is filtered through opinions and contemporary ideas, could not be further from the truth. The relationship between the ways we think about history and our own understandings of the contemporary world definitely shape our thoughts, but to say that all historians have changed their perspective on history is innacurate. Evans’ book “In Defense of History” shows that those who claim that objectivity is non-existent in writings by former historians are preposterous in their idea and that the search for facts and truth in former works by historians are objective when taking into account the primary sources and not subjecting their work to personal bias and contemporary

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