I hear this question often, usually from freshman. More often than not, it seems to me that what they're trying to get to is a distinction between whatever knowledge they bring to the course -- from previous instruction, from movies, from anecdote, from whatever -- and whatever we're discussing.

For example, I frequently use Sinclair's The Jungle in my post Civil War survey. I think it's a great book and it tends to hold student interest.

I get a lot of questions regarding the portrayal of immigrant life in Chicago. "Was it really that bad?," "Did the packers really manipulate the workforce against itself?," etc., etc. I usually answer with a "yes" for Sinclair and then point them to a more academic work (if interested, see Jim Barrett's Work and Community in 'The Jungle' or Rick Halpern's Down on the Killing Floor for more info.) There seems to be a much rosier view of Chicago immigrant life out there. I'm not too sure where it comes from, but speculate that most folks haven't experienced that sort of life and have difficulty relating.

But that just scratches the surface of your question. The problems arise, as you allude to, when history gets messy. My little discussion above may answer the question for a microcosm of early 20thC immigrant packing-house workers in Chicago. It does nothing to address (just as an example) those same immigrants in New York, nor the same work done in Cincinnati, nor the semi-forced migration or African Americans northward at roughly the same time, nor the _______ , nor the _____ , ad nauseum.

So what to do? Nearly impossible to construct a real histoire totale of anything, so how to understand a period in time, or the experiences of a group of people in a given area at a given time?

The answer, I believe, is to read more and understand that whatever answer you propose is strongly couched in a language of specificity. That is, when asking or answering questions, be specific. A question like "What was Chicago like in 1900?" will not yield a satisfactory answer to anyone who wants to understand more than an answer for a test. "What was life like for immigrant workers in the Chicago packinghouses around 1900?" will yield a much better answer. "What was life like for African Americans working in the Chicago packinghouses during and after the Great Migration?" will make things much more satisfactory.

Anyway, I'm rambling and have to get to class. Keep things complicated. History is messy.

Mostly, I think, it assumes that there is a single, accurate, true, and most particularly, known version of the past.

There is some understanding that the public/media/popular image of a given era might not be accurate, but there's an underlying belief that someone knowledgeable can pick apart these misunderstandings and explain the single form of reality. Saying "we don't know" doesn't convey, without significant further understanding, that it's not just that we haven't found out yet, but that our understanding will never settle to one single, accurate, etc version of the past.

I'm with /u/cosmic_charlie on this one. I think when questions here ask "what was it actually like to be a ___ in ____ era", the questioners come to the topic with some prior interaction with the topic through television or movies, historical fiction, or video games.

I assume that asking "what was it Really like" or "what was it actually like" is a shorthand way of asking what misconceptions/mythology might be perpetuated in pop culture understandings of a historical era.

Of course, you do raise the dilemma of knowledge. Historians can deconstruct pop-culture myths in media and say things like "this event doesn't show up in sources until several hundred years later, and so the narrative is likely fictional." or "this meme relies on a 20th century understanding of religion, and in the 15th century understandings would be quite diferent."

But of course, Historians and other scholars of the past have to contend with the fact that there are gaps in the record, and it can be very difficult to evaluate how "normal" or "representative" an example is.

With archaeology, linguistics, and other methods we can "reconstruct" the past. That is, we can use the evidence we find to piece together a model of what we think happened. With lots of scholarship and lots of data, we can hope to have more confident that certain aspects of the model are accurate. But of course, scholars need to be critical, and acknowledge that our understandings of the past often represent only a slice of society, and aren't necessarily a comprehensive and representative understanding of the totality of experience in that era.

I agree that it's usually about sorting out stereotypes and myths in the inquirer's conception of the past. The problem is though that even with extensive factual knowledge, any retelling of the past using those facts is still a contextualization, an attempt to relate events of the past to our experiences of the present. There's an even further issue, however - whose experience are we talking about? Are we talking about, say, how a poor farmer lived back then versus how a poor farmer lives today, maybe? Or how a wealthy person saw a poor farmer back then versus how the inquirer looks at poor farmers today? Are we looking at their material function in society, their place in hierarchy, their role in the conception of a "community"?

Ultimately an ideal answer should cover all of these to some extent. The inquirer may only be looking for one particular, preconceived aspect, but will hopefully come away with both a better undestanding of the subject of the question and the very nature of historical inquiry.

I think that's a good question. I ask myself this all the time when I think about history. Isn't that the goal of historical research? To find out what the past was really actually like?

To be honest I think this is sort of the entire point of living history/experimental archaeology - what was the past really like? What was it like to march 20 miles a day, set up a marching camp, and tear it down and march another 20 miles the next day, to keep doing that over and over? What was it like working in a storefront in the city of Rome? What was it like getting smacked over the head with a mace?

It's one of the reasons why I think living history/reenactment should be utilized more in the educational system. Academia is fine and dandy and important, but really how the hell does teaching people about the difference between identity and ethnicity in the migration era, or the minutiae of Roman law, etc. answer what they want or need to know?

If I want to know about slavery, about the history of the US, about our struggles and conflicts, about what it was like in the past and how we can learn from it, I'm going to get a lot more from living history than I am from my school textbook. There are places like Historic Brattonsville where I live, where you get to see firsthand what being a black slave in 18th century America was like. If you want to learn about the civil war well 100,000 reenactors showed up to the battle of Antietam the other year - twice as many as were at the actual battle. I'm going to get a much better understanding of my concept of civic duty by seeing a bunch of well-educated living historians participating in a pre-revolutionary debate about rights/representation than I am filling in the bubbles on a test about the Constitution.

I mean you can't go around literally burning down the city of Atlanta for the purpose of educational display, or actually using whips with broken bits of glass and metal and splinters on people reenacting slaves. But living history, IMO, really provides a better answer than reading a monograph does.

I ask myself this question quite a lot ("What was it REALLY like in the past?"), and I have a different take than most of the responses I see in this thread. To me, the question means: "If I was somehow transplanted to a specific place and time in history, what would I experience?" The answer to that question would probably have very little to do with what you can read in most history books.

If the past is a foreign country, then the question "What is it REALLY like to live in Japan?", for example, isn't something you can learn from reading a travel book. Instead, you would want someone with knowledge to point out to you the differences in culture that you might otherwise take for granted.