Using either Becker and Woodward or Collingwood and Jerome, discuss the conflicts and challenges that face historians (and all thinking people) when trying to use evidence to reconstruct the past. What do you see as the most appropriate way to address these challenges and produce something that may actually be useful and reflect "the truth?"

'Humans are imperfect beings'; most Lutherans have grown up hearing this utterly depressing phrase and can only be set at ease once they've heard the standard, 'Everything will be alright in the end because Jesus died for our sins'. Que the hallelujah chorus. No, I'm not asserting my rejection of Jesus or my, unknown until reading Jerome's The case of the Eye Witness, atheism because nothing could be further from the truth. I'm merely attempting to set myself back in time, before I was soothed with the promise of grace, before I knew that someone I knew could die, even back before I believed that there were little people under traffic lights just waiting for cars to come so they could switch the green light to red. Back to when I was my most perfect. Perhaps it was at this age, before I created memories, that I was truly objective. In Jerome's words, "[W]hen the mind has accumulated a stock of experiences, it has learned that the arrangement and order of thoughts do not always correspond to the arrangement and order of objective things" (89 ¶ 3). In Jerome's text, he compares witness testimonials and statistics produced from studies of said witness' to the objectivity of Historians, he even throws in examples of falsified stories from the explosion of Pompeii (184). While I have never had such a decisive or well thought out opinion on the matter of the distortion of history, I regard Jerome's opinion as a much grander version of my slowly forming idea on said matters. I can recall in Psychology last year reading about witness testimonial studies which rarely proved accurate, and mixing this with the class discussion we recently had on the opportunity, objectivity, and significance of history, I can formulate a much less educated version of Jerome's assertion.

 As example, up until a few years ago, I would've sworn that when I was three, my sister's head had gotten stuck in-between her crib's wooden bars.  I had the (what I thought was) distinct memory of my father having to release her from her wooden prison with a chain saw. Apparently, logic never entered the equation. I was comparing childhood memories with my friends at some moment past, when I decided to bring out that little diddle. As I got to the word 'chain saw' my best friend Abby objected. She pointed out (not unkindly, but very sarcastically) that it was extremely unlikely that he used that forceful of a method to release a baby's head from a crib. I, always looking for some type of competitive action, told her I'd prove her wrong. We were in the car with my mother when I asked her if she remembered that time, way back when, that Alina (my older sister - by sixteen months) got her head stuck between the cradle bars. She of course did, as it was probably a funny experience for anyone viewing. So, feeling awesome in my power of legitimate memory, I turned to Abby and decreed myself victor. However, Abby (like the brat she is) decided to ask my mom how my sister's head was freed. What I thought was a chain saw, was in fact a steak knife (my dad has never been too great with power tools). Abby declared she was queen of everything (for that particular moment, the battle is ongoing). Much to the dismay of my petty nature, I keep coming up with falsified memories and have to ask myself 'Did that actually happen?' Sometimes, this makes me feel like a pathological liar; other times it makes me feel like an old time bard, making up stories as I go.

In his conclusion, Jerome makes a strong, legitimate point when he asserts "The human mind . . . [is] a tool by which one accomplishes one's desires" (190). After all, the mind is what allows us to daydream, invent, and wish for things that could never be. What's to say that historians are free from these so-called "imperfections" that riddle the human race? Every time I find a falsified memory, someone, somewhere finds out that a historical even never did happen. Every morning, when I have to drag myself out of my bed, away from the dreams of living a life that I deem perfect, a historian too must set aside their own dreams of living in their era of choice, so that they may face their reality of today. Every time I doodle tiaras or insist that people call me "Princess Sarah" for the day, there is a historian out there who refuses to answer to anything other than "Caesar" when called. So, how can a human being, someone who goes into life with passion, even if that passion is for accurate history, not find his or her own private thoughts and imaginings escaping into their assertions? How can anyone claim their accuracy in a testimonial, of a time they clearly didn't witness, when statistics' show their probable downfall? How do we find the truth? Simple; we don't. We live and we learn. We allow our imperfections to do what they were meant to. Jesus was crucified, not to ease our suffering as we live, but to allow us the grace to be wrong. As Jerome put it, "Making errors . . . may, and sometimes do, cancel one another, and eventually bring one out into the right path". I don't believe that history has to be accurate for it to mean something or for it to be important; sometimes people make things up that end up meaning more than the truth ever could. Sometimes, the lies really do lead us to the truth.

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