sometimes I think that studying history is useless?

by Imhere129

Sometimes I think studying history only adds more conflict to me instead of clarifying things, especially when reading about historical incident with opposing/ different opinions like every one is trying to shove his ideology, it's really hard to find some authors who are neutral when it comes to history.

Llyngeir

That really in the point of studying history. Nothing created by humans has ever been truly neutral, even if the original creator meant it to be so, if the audience sees something in the work and applies meaning to it then there is an attached bias.

It is not always about shoving ideology. Historians can have a great deal of inherent bias in their works, both concsiously and subconsciously. Their childhood, culture, university education (such as who taught them and how they were taught), their ethnicity, as well as their political leanings, all have an impact. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, for the more varied the historical field, the more perspectives there are at work, and the more angles we can approach an historical incident from. The key is to try and approach an historical event from as many angles as you can, read as many perspectives as you can.

The problem is that history is not so straightforward as 'this happened, this didn't', and that means there is a lot of wiggle room for people to interpret sources and argue their perspective on events or institutions. When one argument becomes dominant or the standard, going against that argument (which historians should do, not simply accept it as truth) can look like an historian's criticism is ideologically motivated, especially so when the dominant opinion is too, and can even be branded as 'revisionism'.

Moreover, there is the inherent biases in sources historians have available to them. There has never been, nor will there likely ever be, a truly unbiased source. Some can be more biased than others, but all have some form of bias, and this stems from the inherent bias historians have that I mentioned above. This makes constructing a truly 'neutral' account all the more impossible, as to do so historians will need to disregard some sources, favour others, and sometimes even misinterpret them (unconsciously or otherwise).

The 1619 project is a very prominent example of how a well-meaning re-interpretation of evidence can cause an 'ideological' debate. The various links provided by u/jelvinjs7 here discuss the debate really well.

All in all, the only thing you can do is approach history from as many perspectives as you can, and don't look for a single definitive 'truth' about historical events - preface everything with a big, fat 'might'.