After reading the quote, discuss with your peers your reflections, questions, statements about your reaction to the quote. Encourage others to respond to your thinking.
One of the most admirable things about history is, that almost as a rule we get as much information out of what it does not say as we get out of what it does say. And so, one may truly and axiomatically (fundamentaly) aver this, to-wit: that history consists of two equal parts; one of these halves is statements of fact, the other half is inference, drawn from the facts. To the experienced student of history there are no difficulties about this; to him the half which is unwritten is as clearly and surely visible, by the help of scientific inference, as if it flashed and flamed in letters of fire before his eyes. When the practised eye of the simple peasant sees the half of a frog projecting above the water, he unerringly infers the half of the frog which he does not see. To the expert student in our great science, history is a frog; half of it is submerged, but he knows it is there, and he knows the shape of it. -( The Secret History of Eddypus)
4 comments:
What this post is stating is that half of history is stating actual facts, while the other half is stating inferences, drawn from the facts.
I love this quote in the way it begins and grows upon itself, building on a basic idea into more factual evidence, then into metaphors. The phrase, "...that almost as a rule, we get as much information out of what it does say as we get out of what it does not say," I think, is the basic idea of the quote, which is very true when it comes to us studying history.
I have never really though about history in this way. I have always approached history as a exercise in learnig a bunch of facts. Ater reading this quote,I began to realize that what it was saying is true. The Frog example really gave me a good mental picture of what the quote was explaining. This quote has given me something to think about and I look forward to approaching history with an open mind and look forward to trying to "read between the lines" as I study.
There is not a single doubt in my mind that quite a bit of history has been left unrecorded for some reason or the other. "History is written by the winners," after all. Not that I think there is some vast conspiracy controlling our educations. I simply find it absolutely improbable that all of the historians we rely on were purely unbiased.
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