History is a big part of everyone's lives. It is being made every second of every day. We generally think of history as the American Revolution and World War II and events such as those, but history can entail so many other things. First we will talk about the two different types of historians and how history is a science, then we will touch on some experiments that test the validity of eye-witness testimony, then we will discuss ways to address the on-going issues that historians face.
The first kind of historian is referred to as the "scissors and paste" historian. This type of historian has been the more dominant one in the last few years. "Scissors and paste" historians tend to narrow their focus to a certain event and work solely with that event. This is their one focus. Their research consists of many sources; they tend to not get down to the details of their work. When they find the information that they need they may only use the information that directly concerns their event. This is where the "scissors" part comes in. If the historian finds that a particular part of the information they found does not support their research, they will simply eliminate that part that part. It is easy to see why this type of historian is no longer the dominant kind of historian.
When most people think about science, they think about the natural sciences like biology or chemistry, but Collingwood describes another form of science, the form that history falls under. He explains that the traditional European definition of science is any "organized body of knowledge." With this definition, he explains that history is definitely a science. History as a science is measured in events and cannot be observed. We must rely on what we already know and what has been written down for us.
The second kind of historian is referred to the "scientific" historian. Slowly, these types of historians are becoming much more popular within society today. These historians study problems instead of events like the "scissors and paste" historians due. By studying problems, they ask many questions to try get to the bottom of their research. They are trained to know what kind of questions to ask so that they may obtain the most detailed and larger amounts of evidence.
One conflict that historians face is testimony of eye-witnesses. Eye-witness testimonies can be extremely subjective, this leaves a difficult job for the historian; trying to separate fact from fiction. Since that is hard to do, it also makes the job of piecing together history more difficult too. Since history is only known through the passing down of stories and writings. Jerome describes three different experiments to prove that eye-witness testimonies are unreliable.
The first experiment is given to children. They are shown a French stamp, which is very similar to a stamp that they know, for twelve seconds. There were some differences, they children were shown the stamp and then were asked to describe the color and design. Only nine children guessed the color correctly and there were significant amount of other mistakes too. This shows that after twelve seconds the children could not distinguish between this brand new stamp and a stamp that they have seen in the past, showing that an eye-witness account is not always accurate.
Jerome describes a second experiment done by William Sterns that showed thirty adults, three black and white pictures for forty five seconds. Immediately following that, they were asked to write down everything they could remember from those pictures. At allotted times following that, they were asked again to write down everything they could remember. As more time went by, the less the adults could remember. This is very similar to dreams. When you first wake up from having a dream, you can remember it in almost full detail, but when you try to tell someone about your dream even ten minutes later, you cannot recall all the details that you could this morning. This also proves how eye-witnesses are not always reliable. If they cannot remember what they saw even after ten minutes, how can they be considered reliable evidence?
The third experiment that Jerome describes was conducted at the Psychological Congress at Göttingen. They made a role play of a public harassment. When asked later about what they saw, every single eye-witness made mistakes in their reports. This is the third case that has proven the unreliability of eye-witnesses.
It is easy to see that historians
need to remember that eye-witness accounts are untrustworthy, and they cannot
fully rely on what other people have seen. Especially since people can be very
subjective, whether they realize it or not. With natural human error, things
get lost.
There may not be one
solution to better collect and understand history. It needs to be a collective
effort from all people. The professional historians should not have to bear the
burden of keeping history alive and collected by themselves. I think that it
needs to be a worldwide movement. History is something that will never change,
it's already happened, and there is no going back. Therefore, we need to be
better preservers of the history that is constantly being made.
Unfortunately, I do not
think that we will be able to get rid of eye-witness testimony, even though it
is clearly unreliable. However, I am really not sure of how we could replace
it. It is been the main source of evidence for a very long time, it is hard to
break something that so many people are accustom to.
In conclusion, we have discovered that there are two different types of historians and how history is a science, then we touched on some experiments that test the validity of eye-witness testimony, and finally we discussed ways to address the on-going issues that historians face. History is a never ending cycle, and it is our job to keep it going.
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