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Second-Guessing History


            It seems that history always is re-writing itself. The race and gender of a historian will influence their point of view found in their works. A historic event cannot always be paralleled with a person's own experience that happened during the time. History is being taught to children all over the world. The thing that separates our history from other countries is the way it is being told. Our perspective as the United States is much different than other countries in the world. Because of cultural bias, historical events being compared against relevant personal experience, and the way in which history is taught, history has become biased.
             Cultural bias is unavoidable. When an event happens, everybody will have their own point of view. For example, if a particular author is writing about the race riots, the authors own race will play an important part in what is written. It is important to consider things like race and gender when reading history. Elliott J. Gorn, a historian who has published many works on the authenticity of history says that "Historiography teaches us that all interpretation is limited by the cultural biases of our times, the skills of the individual historian, the limits of primary sources, the perspectives and blindnesses created by a scholars social position (yes, race, class, and gender, among other factors.)." .
             Children begin learning history at a very young age. They learn about the Indians and pilgrims, and of course, they learn all about the Boston Tea Party. With the information that is in textbooks, it is difficult to say that what is being written is 100% truth. Gorn writes, "Sometimes it reveals less about "what happened" than about what we want to believe happened." For example, to describe the early days of settling the West, Gorn points out how we use phrases like "brave men of vision settled the west" in order to create our "great nation.


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