User:The Curious Historian/sandbox

A South African Historian, based at Stellenbosch University. Curious about the world and our relationships in society, with our environment, and why we make our decisions.

Historian Patrick Collinson writes that “It is possible for competent historians to come to radically different conclusions on the basis of the same evidence. Because, of course, 99% of the evidence, above all, unrecorded speech, is not available to us.”

Historical fiction author Hilary Mantel writes that "Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that."

We do our best with what evidence we have, we sit and read, we read and ponder, we imagine what it may have been like, what one might have felt. From there, our historical imagination pairs with our research, and our best efforts at investigative writing and research becomes a partial reflection of some small truth of the past.