Historian Bias

290 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Example bias in history

A historian’s job is to discover historical facts and interpret them. Some historians believe that historical facts are not absolute, meaning they are subjective. This causes many factors to influence a historian’s interpretation on the past. These factors include bias and perspective. This gives history the appearance of being constructed.

Bias is prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair. Bias is formed by political beliefs, cultural influences and personal experiences. Historians might have a bias and see a certain historical event unfolding for one reason while another historian might have a bias and interpret a historical event as folding for another

Show More
Related

  • Bernard Goldberg's Use Of Bias In Mainstream Media

    831 Words  | 2 Pages

    Bias is everywhere in the mainstream media whether it is political, celebrity, or worldwide news. Bias can misinform the public and most of the time leaves the whole story to suit their belief. Bias is when someone is presenting information or talking about a topic but being unfair and not showing the whole side of the story. Media keeps certain information to themselves to not make their belief seem bad but as a good thing. In everyday media there is some form of bias that can be small or big depending on the topic. Of course in today's society it seems that bias is okay and acceptable in the media. However people doing their job are bias and present the information to their beliefs. The public thinks they are getting the truth but media is

    Read More

  • Racial Bias In Media Essay

    868 Words  | 2 Pages

    Racial bias is a preformed negative opinion or attitude toward a group of persons who possess common physical characteristics including, but not limited to color of skin, eyes, and/ or facial features. When turning on the news and glancing through the pages of a local newspaper, ethnic minorities are the central focus of crime stories and portrayed as the prime source of crime in our nation. However, many people within the legal system believe that racial bias in the media also affects the way that crimes are being prosecute and how suspects are being treat.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of William Cronon's Why The Past Matters

    685 Words  | 2 Pages

    The study of past events have been a common practice of mankind since the verbal telling of stories by our ancestors. William Cronon, in his article “Why the Past Matters,” asserts that the remembrance of the past “keeps us in place.” Our individual memories and experiences shape how we act in our daily lives. In addition to influencing us at an individual level, our collective history binds us together as a society. Without knowing where we have been or what we have experienced, it is nearly impossible to judge progress or know which courses of action to pursue. The goal of the historian is to analyze and explain past events, of which they rarely have firsthand memory of, and apply the gained knowledge to make connections with current and future events.

    Read More

  • The Houses of History, by Anna Green and Kathleen Troup

    965 Words  | 2 Pages

    It’s truly fascinating how there are so many different approaches to history, how so many different types of minds and schools of thought can come together to study the events of the world’s past. There are so many ways to approach what happened in our past, and the groups of historians previously mentioned are only a fraction of the actual number of different ways of researching and thinking that exists as it pertains to the study of history. History is in some ways, always a mystery, and all historians, regardless of schooling, training or biases, seek to accomplish one goal: to understand what occurred before us and why, and to use that knowledge to learn how the world was shaped into the world we live in today.

    Read More

  • Implicit Bias In Health Care Essay

    584 Words  | 2 Pages

    Here, I use the term "bias" to refer to both

    Read More

  • History and Honesty

    1241 Words  | 3 Pages

    The history had experienced further development in the times of ancient Greeks. Two of their historians were of great importance for the future of the history: Herodot and Tukidid. Their work contained mostly the descriptions of the Greek - Persian wars. Herodot is important because of the structure of his books and essays: his works were short and brief so he didn't involve with mythic descriptions of the facts. With Tukidid the history had begun to exist as science. He acquainted the rule that a historian should always first research the facts and causes of the happening and yet then describe it in his works. Not all of the modern historians stick to this rule and maybe that is one of the causes for nowadays problems we must face.

    Read More

  • Cultural Bias Essay

    1037 Words  | 3 Pages

    Bias in simple words means a person’s likelihood to favor one over another. Bias can be conscious and non-conscious. It can also be positive or negative (Ryan & Saha, 2011). I believe that I am biased about how the younger generation perceive things, their beliefs and values compared to the older generation. Thus, whenever I see there is a conflict between older and younger generation, I tend to blame it as generation gap and overlook my biasedness.

    Read More

  • The Negative Influence Of Bias On Social Media

    243 Words  | 1 Pages

    To ensure the material presented is not too influenced by our own bias people must take a second and examine our thoughts ask ourselves do we feel strongly about this subject. If so we can suspect a bias. After identifying the biases we have to work to keep them contained or to just let them go completely and approach the issues objectively by looking at all points of view.

    Read More

  • Bias In History

    924 Words  | 2 Pages

    The ideal historian is someone who wants to find the answer, but does not care what the answer is, curious but not committed. One might only look at the Declaration of Independence, or the Art of War to see how even a valuable historical document contains what some might call bias. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines bias as “an attitude that favors one way of feeling without considering other possibilities.” Subsequently, if Founding Fathers, Sun Tzu wrote documents that fit the definition of being biased, does the document lose its value to historians? Is there a document that does not have bias? History has long been written and interpreted through biased opinions, however, to truly study history, a historian must form an impartial view when

    Read More

  • The Perspective And The Purpose Of History

    1099 Words  | 3 Pages

    History is a story told over time. It is a way of recreating the past so it can be studied in the present and re-interpreted for future generations. Since humans are the sole beneficiaries of history, it is important for us to know what the purpose of history is and how historians include their own perspective concerning historical events. The purpose and perspective of history is vital in order for individuals to realise how it would be almost impossible for us to live out our lives effectively if we had no knowledge of the past. Also, in order to gain a sound knowledge of the past, we have to understand the political, social and cultural aspects of the times we are studying.

    Read More

  • Types of Long-Distance Communication

    735 Words  | 2 Pages

    Also, historians depend on the written record. Perhaps a better way of saying that is that they are at the mercy of that record. Land transactions, birth and death records, weather reports, government documents—to the historian, nothing written is trivial, because it all contributes to the picture we have of the past. In the last century or so, as historians have turned away from their fixation on the doings of the great and included the lives of average people in their study, the letters those people left behind are invaluable evidence of how life was once lived. We know what our ancestors ate, how they dressed, what they dreamed about love and what they thought about warfare, all from their letters. Without that correspondence, the guesswork mounts (The History and Lost Art of Letter Writing, Malcolm Jones)

    Read More

  • Media Bias

    2488 Words  | 5 Pages

    Media bias is the tendency for the media to represent different people in a particular way based on their own views, the views of their sponsors, and possibly the views of society. Media bias could be blatant, but usually it is subtle. It can be expressed in the content of television shows. It can be expressed in the choices of types of stories that they show on the news. It can be expressed in the language used on shows, and that is written in the newspaper and magazines.

    Read More

  • History is the Bridge that Connects the Past with the Present and Future

    608 Words  | 2 Pages

    What is history? History is the analysis and interpretation of the past. History allows us to study both continuity and change over time. It helps to explain how we have changed throughout time. Part of history is using pieces of evidence to interpret and revisit the past. Examples of evidence include written documents, photographs, buildings, paintings, and artifacts. Is history important? When looking at what the definition of history entails, it is clear to see history is in fact, important.

    Read More

  • History And Human Sciences

    993 Words  | 2 Pages

    The historian's task is to shed light on the what, why, and how of the past, based on inferences from the evidence of the present. The evidence will have to come from many sources such as information collected from stories passed from person to person, archeological findings, primary sources, recording on tape, paper or stone, scientific analysis of objects. Historical data do not speak for themselves; the archives are incomplete, unclear, contradictory, and very confusing. The historian has to interpret individual pieces of evidence; and the historian needs to be able to fit the mass of evidence into a coherent and truthful story and in order for that to happen a historian has to research and try to understand the past. History can not be accepted if it has not been researched and analyzed. Understanding the past is true to the area of knowledge, History. No one is going to accept the past unless someone comes a...

    Read More

  • Importance Of History Essay

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    Learning about history helps us learn about the humanities own reflection and what’s good or bad about it. This is just like a diary , people and by people I mean historians , just wrote what they saw and what seemed to cause a major change in society and we just happen to be reading it a couple of years later. I believe that historians actually wrote historical truth because it makes sense and it has been scientifically proven

    Read More

More about Historian Bias

Open Document