How do historians deal with there own biases? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

First things first: All historians have biases.

Historians strive to maintain objective with regards to the facts, and to stick to a defined methodology - this helps, but we are never going to have all the facts, and cultural syntax which informs how we conceive of and interpret evidence. u/commiespaceinvader has a note on how method helps with objectivity, and u/snapshot52 has a post on understanding different perspectives which are both very much worth reading.

That said, there is always going to be some critical, subjective analysis. A dry restatement of the facts is usually not enough for people; they want a narrative, or at least an interpretation - and those approaches, no matter how strongly buttressed they are with evidence, rely on at least some degree of subjectivity. You can have the best evidence in the world, and still not be able to look beyond your own biases.

That's why you have peer reviews.

At base, a peer review is having another qualified, trained historian look over your work. Another set of eyes to see if you left out some crucial piece of evidence, or didn't connect the dots, or are so absolutely set on a certain interpretation that you have ignored or downplayed other possible interpretations. Ideally, the peer review might include people with very different viewpoints - an interdisciplinary review might have an archaeologist look at it, to see how they interpret the evidence, for example. An female historian might point out a quiet sexist bias that existed in the original sources written during the 19th century when women's views and involvement in science was downplayed or ignored. And so on and so forth.

Of course, for peer reviews to work, a historian has to be open-minded enough to be willing to accept criticism without taking it personally. To question their own assumptions, and realize that they are assumptions...and perhaps more importantly to question the implicit and explicit assumptions in their sources, because many historical documents were written within a specific context, and the face value of historical accounts are usually only part of the story - letters may include allusions to things that both writer and intended reader were aware of, but that a casual reader might miss. Certain unpleasant facts or matters might be left out of accounts, rhetoric might be employed, errors might be made.

Just recently I had an issue with a timeline I was making, because a certain work was known to be published in July 1933 but a letter referring to the published work was dated 15 March 1933! It turned out, after some research, that the dating of the letter was based on a postmark on an envelope, and that at some point the envelopes and letters had gotten confused in the archive, so that the letter was probably sent in July, not March. My mistake was an honest one, but I was depending on the materials I was referencing to be accurate - and they were not. Garbage in, garbage out, despite my best efforts at a sound methodology. My bias was trusting my source implicitly - and it wasn't until one of my peer readers pointed out the discrepancy that I investigated and corrected the error.