I was reading a book and saw that in the preface the authors had sort of declared their political leaning and the purpose of their research (“as Canadians with progressive political and social commitments, on the left...”).
I was really curious, since I was under the impression that people generally tried to avoid letting personal biases etc. influence their work, and that having bias would decrease the source’s credibility? On the other hand I thought it could maybe just be the authors more explicitly stating part of their perspective, which would still be valid, and it seemed to be a good thing for transparency? I am also unsure of whether I might just be misunderstanding bias/political leanings.
Is this common practice? Are those types of sources still considered “good” sources since they clearly state the purpose/perspectives, or should people just try to minimize bias as much as possible?
Sorry if this is a bad question, I haven’t really seen that before so I was a bit confused! Thanks! :D
Here's a secret: History is created by, charted by, written by, and studied by humans. Humans are, by definition, biased. 'Unbiased' history is a myth. It's all biased. All of it. But that is not a bad thing. u/mikedash examines the matter of bias here, and u/Georgy_K_Zhukov does the same here.
Just to add on a bit to the other comments here, starting with pasting and slight editing to an answer I wrote to a similar question (basically "is it possible to write unbiased history?").
I think how I would phrase it is that a good historian "shows the work".
Which is to say that basically any historian will reach conclusions and approach a topic with a set of values (you kind of have to if you're writing history, otherwise you'd be saying "here is a bunch of random stuff that happened"), but: 1) the historian should arrive at those conclusions from research, rather than starting from a conclusion and working backwards to make the research fit the conclusion, 2) those conclusions should cite and show the documentary evidence that they are based on, 3) the historian should acknowledge other historians' good faith interpretations of that evidence and be in dialogue with those interpretations.
Specifically here, it perhaps stands out to me less that Reg Whittaker and Gary Marcuse are stating their political positions, than the fact that Whittaker is a political scientist and columnist and Marcuse is a filmmaker. Which by the way does not mean they cannot do history - anyone can! But it would make me approach this work specifically with an eye to seeing if they are approaching the historical method as enumerated above. From the book summary one thing that gives me pause is talk of "repression of ... the Left" because that's a horribly squishy term being treated as one coherent thing. I'd also note that U of Toronto Press doesn't actually classify it as history, but as "political science/Canadian politics/foreign affairs", for whatever that's worth. It also was published in 1996, which in terms of Cold War studies is pretty old.
How I'd approach this further is to see if it was reviewed in any academic journals, and also see if it gets any citations in Cold War histories published in the past 25 years. A quick search shows that it does have a few reviews, which is a good sign, although the downsides seem to be that coverage of the topic is uneven and more geared towards informing a popular audience than breaking new historic ground.
/u/Snapshot52 strongly rejects the premise that history can be value-neutral, in this Monday Methods post. There are more posts about An Indigenous approach to history and the epistemology/historiography of Indigenous history research
/u/commiespaceinvader has previously written about empathy as the central skill of historians
/u/Georgy_K_Zhukov also wrote Rules Roundtable XIV: Political Agendas, Moralizing, and the Mythical 'Unbiased Answer' which is a commentary on why the subreddit has rules against using the comment threads for a personal soapbox.
Edit: found more relevant entries by Snapshot52