This question is derived from this quote- ‘If our choice of narratives reflects only our power to impose our preferred version of reality on a past that cannot resist us, then what is left of history?’ (William Cronon, ‘A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative’) http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/cronon_place_for_stories_1991.pdf
I for one don't think so. Even if history just reflected the preferred narrative (or the victor I guess), then there's still meaning to be derived from it, like national belonging, shared heritage, and lessons to be learned. Acting as if history is on the same level as something like Harry Potter is not very helpful I think.
Anyway, I would love to know what other historians think about this issue, and the wider issues of the historical method, as it leads to some secondary questions about that as well like if there is a distinction to be made between non-historical and historical methods.
No, history is the study of the past.
Of course, different sources which we use to study the past as well as the viewpoint of the historian and area of study will colour our perceptions however historians do not 'make up stories about the past' that's what historical fictions writers do.
Saying that historians just 'make up stories about the past' is like saying that biologists just make up stories about the human body and economists just make up stories about the economy — all ridiculous propositions. We use the sources available to us to come to fact based conclusions.
Cronon's been interested for most of his career in the tension between The Objective Truth Of The Past^TM and the resultant, often considerably less absolute, narratives from which we derive meaning.
He came back to that question 22 years later in his presidential address for the American Historical Association in 2013, where he spoke at length on the intersection of storytelling and historiography, and on the difficult juggling of the two to produce history which manages to be both faithful to the past and engaging to scholars, students and the interested public.
As for John Sayles and all other creators of historical fiction, whether in film or on the printed page, they have the power to invent scenes and episodes and characters, to put words in people’s mouths and thoughts in their heads, and to present such fabrications as real within the suspended disbelief of their narrative frame. No historian can ever do likewise. For us, the deepest challenge of our discipline—the maddening constraint that is also the wellspring of our creativity—is that we are not permitted to argue or narrate beyond the limits of our evidence. We cannot even begin to imagine a story without first having spent enormous amounts of time answering the question that arguably defines our discipline more deeply than any other, a question so seemingly simple that few who are not historians recognize its profundity: “What are the documents?” It is our devotion to documents, our awareness that without them the past lies forever beyond the reach of our inquiry, that supplies the epistemological foundation on which all our professional practice is built.
(emphasis added)
You can read a transcript of the address here or (my recommendation, as he's a decent speaker and there's worse sources of background audio for an hour and a half) watch the video of his address here.