Since even the news is frequently inaccurate , I’m gonna say, 5 minutes.
And as a result the level of accuracy plummeted. Right?
I’m assuming you aren’t contending that with the advent of the printing press that accuracy actually increased? Even today, the vast majority of material written is pure bunkum, and that was even more true 400 years ago.
I’m not sure that the level of accuracy actually decreased, though I strongly suspect that is so. The printing press, or more specifically movable type, was was like the internet of its age. Any crackpot could disseminate their views, and most crackpots did. Arguing that the printing press increased historical accuracy is like arguing that the internet increased historical accuracy. Just as you wouldn’t believe >90% of the crap presented as fact on the internet, so you should treat >90% of the material ever printed. Most of it was political and religious screed and various scams.
In the days when everything needed to be hand written things were probably more accurate on average, or at least more honest. The amount of effort required and the smaller volume and hence higher accountability tended to engender some degree of honesty on the part of the writers. And I guess the same was true of the advent of the internet. In the days when publishing was relatively expensive, many authors and publishing houses had some requirement for honesty and accuracy. Now that it is free any fruitcake with a viewpoint can publish their thoughts with no penbalty.
Which leads us back to the OP. IMO the past decade is much less accurately known than the more distant past. Can you imagine what impression we would form if we were to try to assemble a view of the past 10 years based on a consensus of all material written in that time that purports to be true and accurate? So to produce any sort of accuracy at all we need to start applying editorial control, discarding most of the material completely and heavily filtering stuff like Fox. And even then we can have intelligent, educated and articulate people on these boards arguing endlessly about highly important topics such as what Bush really knew about the alleged WMDs in Iraq without ever reaching consensus.
So how do you expect future historians to accomplish anything like an accurate view of the current world? Even if 100% of all material is saved, they haven’t got a hope in hell when even we can’t produce an accurate picture of the current world. And with the loss of nuance and the subtle change sin language that always comes with the passage of time, their ability to interpret material becomes much, much less than ours.
Wrong. A multitude of sources means you can cross check them. Having just one source means that if it’s wrong you don’t even have a dissenting source telling you it’s wrong. Also, having a multitude of sources increases the likelihood that at least some aren’t propaganda.
And in addition even all the religious screeds and scams also helps to create a picture of what life was like at the period and what people thought and what moved them etc. The kind of lies we tell can be quite educational and even bad sources are better than no sources. I expect that a future historian trying to understand the Tea Party movement will find Fox News valuable as first hand material.
And before the printing press written sources were that more expensive that it was often restricted to powerful individuals or organisations – like the Church or some enlightened ruler – to produce or sponsor them. Which may be reflected in the sources. With the printing press written sources could be produced from a much more diverse background. So you get other viewpoints.
What time is it now?
I would add that we are not interested in the same things as the people who lie. In Caesar’s Bello Gallico there is passage where he has sent one of his commanders in an ambush. He then goes on to say that the wagon fighting of the Britains is very interesting.
While he is technically telling the truth, he is certainly trying to get elected when changing the subject. However, we are not really interested in Caesar’s leadership qualities. In fact the biggest problem we have with the whole book that it is a political pamhlet while we’d like an ethnological and geograhip work on Gaul. So this is a simple example how we are much more interested on things that are not at all central to the message of the author and where he is unlikely to lie.
I read somewhere recently that there are actually diverging stories of biographies of people, place and events that have occured within the last 100 years. So what you read about something or someone is more than likely accurate, however there are divergent facts. The writer brought up Elvis Presley for example, and the different contridictary things that have been presented as fact from reliable sources. He’s only been dead for 33 years and most people remember him and know his music. So, if we can’t get his bio straight, is history flawed on people and events that happened hundreds or thousands of years before our lifetime?
There is a saying “History is written by the winners.” Because of this, Hitler is seen as a monster. If the Nazis won the war, Hitler would have been seen as a savior, and someone like FDR would be villified as a war criminal. Someone like Christopher Columbus, who was mainly written as a hero, adventurer and explorer back in my youth and before, is now more seen as someone who was an imperialist who enslaved people and spread diseases. We can talk about innumerable men/women and events in human history and get multitudes of different facts.
This is what I like about the internet. I can read all sides and then make a decision on who is correct. History has been written by a million different people with a million different perspectives.
Actaully, you have it backwards. Nearly everything we have from the earliest days of literacy- the Bible, various Egyptian tombs & stela, and so forth, was written by the priesthood or ordered by Kings. It’s 100% political and religious screed. It had to be, it was too expensive.
In the days when everything had to be hand written, most of the writers were subsidized by the State or Church.
"By the Old Kingdom (26th century BC to 22nd century BC), literary works included funerary texts, epistles and letters, religious hymns and poems, and commemorative autobiographical texts recounting the careers of prominent administrative officials. … The creation of literature was thus an elite exercise, monopolized by a scribal class attached to government offices and the royal court of the ruling pharaoh. "
And although the OT isn’t really all that bad, considering, few historians think it’s an unbiased source. True, archeaologists have been impressed by the accuracy of the recording of the OT (aka "textual reliability "), but any “history” prior to David is basicaly mythology, and even Biblical Maximalists accept that while there may well have been a United Monarchy and real Kings named David, etc, the details notated in the OT books are mostly legendary. (It’s quite possible to have very real people from whom myths have grown up- look at many of the myths we have about Geo Washington, only 200+ years ago).
Even later ancient history is doubtful at times. It appears Josephus only survived due to the fact that Jesus was mentioned a couple of times, and it seems clear to most that one of the mentions was changed by a later “pious editor”.
Except t=0 shouldn’t be 100% accurate either. Your perceptions are not 100% accurate, and your mind doesn’t even register most of the information it gets. For example, you can only see things clearly in a very small part of your visual field, but you don’t usually notice this because everything you look at you can see clearly.
And any book of optical illusions will demonstrate that what we think we see is really a reconstruction of reality. Our visual system is so sophisticated that it seems like we just open our eyes and perceive reality unfiltered, everything is right there and we just see it. Except that’s not what’s really happening.
And that’s not even getting into how memories are stored and retrieved in the brain.
Stalin won the war, and he isn’t seen as a savior, except by a few ultranationalist Russian cranks. And if history is written by the winners, then how did our view of Columbus change? It isn’t like we got conquered by the Indians in the last 50 years and they rewrote our history books. And what about the Southern veneration of Robert E Lee, who after all, lost the war.
If what you say is true, then every history book would be simply winner=hero, loser=villain. And that’s just false, history books are fully of accounts of really awful people who won battles and wars, and decent people who lost.
The notion that all history is just propaganda isn’t too cynical, rather it’s too naive.
Oh accurate history goes way back.
“Today humans walk the earth. In 100 BC humans walked the earth. Before humans walked the earth, pre-humans walked the earth.”
That’s highly accurate. It just isn’t very precise. A good historian weighs evidence and suggests his take on where the preponderance lies. Solid history can be accurate about any age: it will just be less informative for more remote eras.
I think you’ve got to define just exactly what history is. In a nutshell I think history is best defined as an interpretation of the past based on the available evidence. This might sound counter intuitive but facts about the past aren’t really history.
Fact: Scotland passed a law in 1563 outlawing the practice of witchcraft, necromancy, sorcery, and other “superstitious” practices. Between 1563 and 1589 there are approximately 114 people accused and tried for violating the law. In the years 1590-91 there was a sudden spike in witch trials with nearly 119 people being tried for violating the law.
These are facts about the past but it’s not history because I haven’t placed any of that information within a useful context. Why did the Scottish feel the need to pass a law against witchcraft in 1563? How come there was a sudden spike in trials in 1590-91? Answering questions like this is what history is. It’s not like measuring weight or the speed of light.
So far as archaeologist go -not the same as a historian by the way- you probably have to go a lot further forward than we are now. One archaeologist, Arizona I think, took his class to the dump and started rooting around an area with garbage from the 1970s. He found that Americans were throwing away an awful lot of beef during what was supposedly a beef shortage. The beef shortage was real but a lot of people were buying cuts of meat they normally wouldn’t buy, didn’t know how to properly prepare them, and ended up throwing a lot away.
Likewise some classes in other universities conduct surveys in neighbors asking them about how much food, alcohol, etc. they consume weekly. After searching through the trash it turns out people aren’t exactly accurate about how much beer they drink a week.
People who say that have obviously forgotten one of the western world’s most influential historians, Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War despite being on the losing side.
History is something that never happened, told by someone who wasn’t there.