No, it is not. This is a message that historians and graduate students are taught the first moment they start their Ph.D/Master's programs, but it's not a message that academics have tried to share with the public. They should, because I think it could help the public begin to understand the nuances of history, but it also comes with a lot of problems from the perspective of the historian as an educator. Why? Well, for one, if we suggest to the general public that history is nuanced and open to interpretation, inevitably there are those who will carry that too far and begin to make gross and unsubstantiated speculations. It's hard to convey this message that "history is open to interpretation, but not just any wild speculation." Striking that balance is a challenge but one we have to undertake if we are honest about the discipline's importance for the wider public.

Nobody is free of their biases. We only see the world according to our own subjectivity. Even the choices we make on what to study and the kinds of questions we choose to ask when we study the past are often rooted in our own biases, and our own sympathies for the historical actors of the past. There's no escaping it. Having an opinion or a "bias" about the past is not a bad thing. It's ok to be political or ideological. However, what historians MUST DO is to be transparent and honest. They need to present where they get their sources so that others may be a part of the conversation, to allow for an alternate interpretation. As long as a historian can say that she was judicious in her analysis of the evidence, that she interpreted sources to the best of her ability and in accordance with the definitions and meanings of historical actors of the time... then that's all she can do. Whatever mistakes she made are up to other historians to point out. As long as there is transparency and honesty, and not an attempt to deceive or to lie, then a historian has met the proper standard. However, there is no such thing as an unbiased and objective reading of history. It does not exist.

No. It is important to understand the bias of the author. They will always exist, even subconsciously, and knowing what that bias is will help the reader form a more correct understanding of the topic.

We were always instructed to find 2-3 secondary source materials surrounding each major point, but they needed to be from different viewpoints. A full understanding of the topic would not have been possible otherwise. When working with primary source material, a bias is even more prevalent, and understanding it is vital to understand the document as a whole (and their position.) For a "currenty" type example, would be to look at a television show or movie that is reviewed. The reviewer has inherent biases, and sometimes they're very clear. A reader will generally ignore the highest and lowest reviews, and find something in the middle. That is working within the bias to gain an understanding of the topic.