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L.Kelly-Bowditch's picture

Week 2

What struck me most about this past week's discussion was the similarity between the debate surrounding Evolution, Creationism, etc. as stories developed to explain something to the constant struggle historians face in attempting to reconstruct an event and distinguish hearsay, "memory", eye-witness accounts, etc. from the bare "facts".

**In writing this post, I've noticed I've become much more hesitant to state "facts", but rather leave things up to interpretation by the reader.  It has become hard to write a sentence about anything, really, without quotation marks to qualify that what I am writing is how I may see things, but another version of the story, or another story altogether, may come up with a different explanation.

Back to my previous thought, historiography traces the different sources available and analyzes their usefulness by determining who was writing, why, when, etc. It is really impossible to have a "good" source without qualifying what it is good for. For example, British sources discussing the happenings of the Boston Tea Party would be good for learning the English viewpoint on the revolting of colonists getting increasingly determined, whereas it would be almost useless in learning why Bostonians felt so imposed upon by the latest tea taxes. In this same vein, the stories we have been looking at, Darwinism, for example, are probably "good"stories for some occasions, while others may be a better fit at other times.

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