This came up in a conference about updating resumes (a student-driven initiative in my Uni) where someone said that History courses won't ever need updates because it teaches an unchangeable past. On that a young student Historian (sophomore I think) replied that it wasn't true because every history version also mirrors the time in which it is made. In further discussion he also said that later versions weren't necessarily better than older ones. Is that true? Isn't it so that historians can use the insights of previous versions and add new ones, making the newer version de facto better than older ones? If someone can illustrate how that works in layman terms that would be very kind.
Hello! It is basically correct that our picture of the past becomes more differentiated and complex as time moves on. I'm currently writing a paper on Domitian for my university and it's important to realise that the negative picture of him was only revised in the late 20th century.
Contemporary historians like Suetonius or Tacitus had strong personal reasons to write negatively about him, later came Christians who tried to stylise him as the second big prosecutor of Christians.
Goethe, having read Suetonius' "The Twelve Caesars", completely adopted his picture of Domitian, calling him a great tyrant.
In the German Kaiserreich or Nazi Germany, the Roman Empire was seen in a much more positive way than it was in Communist Russia for example (They always had a strong emphasis on Spartacus).
And today, the picture is yet another. When it comes to the 20th century, it is much more complex due to the temporal nearness.
Take the DDR and the early stages of the Cold War for example. In the Western history books, they wrote that the US protected Europe from the communist grab. In the communist history books, you could read that the Stalin Note as an offer to peace was declined in a spirit of superiority and that the Cold War is the result of the imperialist's aggressive containment policy, the Truman doctrine etc.
The both versions need each other and the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. But today there is only one version left which is a real problem in academia.
In the centuries to come, we will have a much more well-balanced picture about the 20th century.
I hope I got my point across that there is a tendency for history to become more accurate and objective with time, but it is only a rule of thumb. In North Corea for example, history was probably more objective before the 50s.
Redflame06 makes some good points. I should add that doing history is a matter of answering questions, and very often people assume that the questions are obvious, important to everyone, and eternal. They are not; questions ( and who gets to ask them) constantly change. French historians in the 19th century ( perhaps earlier) were obsessed with the question of whether the French should be considered Gauls ( celtic) Franks ( germanic) or Romans ( latin) . American political history of the same period would tend to ask questions like, what is admirable about Abraham Lincoln?, and never concern itself much with anyone who was not male, or white.
Just adding to what has already been posted above: Later versions of history are normally better in a sense that they're quite often better sourced than older ones. Since the academic discourse creates more and more data, statistics and other information over the decades, modern versions of history tend to rest on a broader data foundation and are therefore better sourced. Western history about Eastern Europe for example got much better since the opening of archives in Soviet Russia after the Cold War. Tl;dr The more we know collectively the better our understanding of the past.
That being said, only historians that actually use all of the availiable information are able to make a objectively "better" version of history. If information is lost or ignored (mostly because of ideological reasons) the version of history gets worse.