Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall this observation, from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Knopf, 2019):
While I am aware that there is no Truth, no objective truth, no single truth, no truth simple or unsimple, either; no verity, eternal or otherwise; no Truth about anything, there are Facts, objective facts, discernible and verifiable. And the more facts you accumulate, the closer you come to whatever truth there is.Related posts
Barack Obama on facts : “Facts are stubborn things” : Longhand and a Smith-Corona : Taped to the lamp
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Well, it's confusing. On October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus set foot on the Western Hemisphere. Undeniably, something happened. He did sail over, he did get out of the ship, he did, presumably, walk around. I learned some things he did, when I was in elementary school in the 1950s. These were presented as "facts." He discovered the New world, he showed the earth wasn't flat, he opened up the Western Hemisphere to European exploration. Now, of course, these are in dispute. Has their fact-dom expired? What are the actual facts in the case?
It’s funny you should mention Columbus, because I liked to use “Christopher Columbus discovered the New World in 1492” as a sample sentence when teaching. My point was that every word in that sentence can be (fairly) questioned: the name is an anglicization; “stumbled upon” can replace “discovered”; “New World” is from a particular perspective; it wasn’t 1492 for everyone. The general point is that a fact is a fact, if it is a fact, only within a context. (Even the “in” requires an understanding of events as happening in relation to a calendar.) A more accurate statement might be that between 1492 and 1504 CE a navigator named [his name in Italian or Spanish] made four voyages to what are now known as [place names]. I think it’d be factual to say too that these expeditions began the effort of colonizing the lands of the western hemisphere. All that to me is more in keeping with truth. But when I was a kid, I too, learned about the New World, and lots of early New York history, in greatly simplified terms. When my kids were in school, they were taught that Rosa Parks sat on a bus and everyone realized that segregation was wrong.
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