Biases in History

Fred Olds' Hall of History

As a child learning about history, I thought the subject was much like math.  Everything I was being taught I thought could be qualified and proved.  If I was taught that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and couldn’t tell a lie about his deed and that he wore false teeth, than that’s what I thought he did.  And somewhere I thought, out in some dusty museum, there were his false teeth and his mother’s diary entry telling how little George told her he chopped down the cherry tree and how she told him, now there will be no more cherry pie; hence proving what I was taught.

As I grew older I realized that history is more like a story.  A story that changes with the storyteller each time it is being told.  Can you really argue that the story of the Trojan horse has been told time after time in exactly the same way?  Of course not, the simple children’s game of telephone tag proves this point.  For even if one wanted to write down history exactly as “they found it”, history is always subject to the treatment, the lens, the bias, of the recorder.  Herodotus,  Plutarch, Voltaire, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy and Ken Burns have forever put their spin on history no matter how well they have tried to leave themselves out.  There may not be an “I” in team, but there is always an “I’ in history.

This makes the study of history all that more fascinating, trying to unweave the storyteller from the story.   History becomes then as much a reflection of the storyteller’s or historian’s beliefs, prejudices, opinions, philosophy, principles and theories as the history that is told.  The historian becomes the ambassador that represents areas of importance to his/her society  to others in a new time by veiling his time’s beliefs, philosophies, teachings, and values in the retelling of other's histories, This doesn’t make history any less important to study, knowing that it is never pure, never crystal clear, and free from bias.  In fact it makes history even more important for our students to study, less dusty and more intriguing.  For history is like a mirror showing to us what an age values from the perspective of the historian telling the story.

The “founder” of the North Carolina Museum of history, Fred Olds, who loved history and wanted to preserve his state’s history through artifacts he collected from Cherokee County to Wake County, had his biases.  The museum today still displays one case that was part of the first Hall of History (forerunner to the North Carolina Museum of History).  Contrast this case to the current museum’s exhibit cases to see his biases of what he thought was important in North Carolina history verses what the curators today value.  His case includes many military artificats, undocumented items with questionable labels (a piece of Daniel Boone’s home with a handwritten note saying it is so), and an unidentified rock among other objects.  Because of Fred Olds bias, intended or unintended in how he preserved North Carolina history, we now have a picture of what he and some of his age, at the turn of the century, felt was important to remember. 

Bias in history is inevitable.  It is unavoidable.  Study history and study the ones who record history.  Study the ones who record over past records of history.  Try to untangle the voices that whisper and shout history in your ear.  Don’t shun biases, celebrate them and try to listen to what they are trying to tell you about their world, their time, their history.

North Carolina Museum of History today