“History”

In psychology, I remember greatly discussing memories and how they can be untrustworthy. Basically, the more you call an event to memory, the more it is tampered with. So actually, the things you don’t remember so well or haven’t thought about in years are your safest and most true-to-reality memories. I think the same can be said about history itself. As discussed in The Theory Toolbox, history takes on a narrative form and therefore must yield to interpretations. And the more you study a specific era or event in history, the more types of narratives, and often biases dependent on the author’s point of view, you are introduced to. The many different interpretations of these events then provoke later generations to make their own individual interpretations that aren’t necessarily based solely on the realities of the events discussed. However, the events in history that we have less narratives on, such as events that occurred before written documentation became the norm, the less interpretations we can form out of these events. Therefore, as the text suggests, these narrative forms of history are not inherently meaningful and an individual’s interpretation of it can be different depending on their culture and time period. In fact, the only thing history can do is show us patterns of events throughout time. As this explains the “what” and “why” of the events, it is up to the existing individuals and readers to come up with the “how to stop it.”