On the personal level, each individual will have their own biases. I was just wondering how did/do handle their own biases when transcribing history as it unfolds? Would it be okay a historian disregards a transcript of recorded events if it goes against their personal biases? If reading a specific record in history, should one look at the author and their affiliations or whatever before digesting what they have recorded?
The reason I ask this is because we're in an age where people would decide for themselves if something was factual or not despite being provided by facts. But if I understood this correctly, history is interpreted by the eyes of the historian and can be contested.
Would it be okay a historian disregards a transcript of recorded events if it goes against their personal biases?
Absolutely not! But then, it is important to point out that historians are not "transcribing history as it unfolds." The work of the historians is to understand what happened in the past and then to convey that understanding. There is necessarily some interpretation in that process, and where there is interpretation, there can be bias.
Recognizing the biases of others is essential to the role of the historians. This is true of the people responsible for primary sources but also of the writers who produce secondary sources. Understanding the points of view of these people is an essential first step in the source criticism necessary in evaluating the sources and the information/interpretations they convey.
Often a person’s prejudices make their observations all the more interesting because we are getting real insights into someone from the past. Mary McNair Mathews (1834-1903) wrote “Tens Years in Nevada or Life on the Pacific Coast about her western sojourn (1869-1878). She is one of the most disagreeable, racist, antisemitic, sour, critical, and generally negative writers one can encounter, and her observations are fascinating. It is important to understand her point of view and her objectionable biases, but it is also necessary to consult her work when writing of the period.
When I was writing The Roar and the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode in the early 1990s, I was on my guard against my own biases. The subject had not been tackled comprehensively by a serious historian since 1883, so the field was wide open, but there was a risk of inserting too much of oneself into the writing of the history. Without other historians with whom to have a dialogue, I found myself writing in a vacuum, and for such an enormous topic – one of the riches gold and silver strikes in history – I needed to present a balanced portrait of this past without the checks and balances of others.
One of the things I did was to step back every time I have described an aspect of the past; I ask myself if I could successfully demonstrate the opposite of that same subject. Often, I could – and so I did. This was, frankly, a way to make certain that someone else wouldn’t be able to come along and “prove” that I was wrong by demonstrating opposites, but it was also my effort to be balanced. Often the past (i.e., humanity) is so complex and contradictory that it is possible to characterize a subject one way and then also in the opposite way and both characterizations can be defensible.
As inspiration, I drew from the work of Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012), a Marxist historian whose use of the dialectic inspired the writing of magnificent, sweeping histories of Europe. His work was full of these contradictions as he considered the forces that ground against themselves in a churning that caused the recent unfolding of a continent. To make my own point of view – my bias – clear, I mention Hobsbawm in my acknowledgement, to make this part of my inspiration apparent to other scholars.
Dealing with biases – one’s own but also those of others – is fundamental to navigating the world as a person. It is no less essential for historians as they navigate in the past.