History can never be anything more than an intelligent guess at what the past was like.
Is the reality 'inevitably lost forever?'
true/correct
Side Score: 7
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no, not at all
Side Score: 6
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I agree with this assessment although i consider it to be rather simplistic. Reality is always hard to pin down but theres no doubt a discipline like history is open to the kind of corruption and manipulation that others are not e.g. philosophy. Science is the only human endeavor that can be relied upon to tell us anything objectively, this is because it is the only one with a self correcting system. Side: true/correct
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1
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I completely disagree with this statement. I mean seriously, did we just decide to guess that George Washington was the first president? What about later when we are all dead and gone, are our grand childrens grand children really going to be told that Obama was the first president that was not white on a hunch? NO! That is because it really happened. Did we just decide to make all of those HISTORIC events and people up? NO! And there is cold hard evidence to prove it. Side: no, not at all
It's no so much that history will be lost and no one will ever know what happened, but that we will never hear the full story. Since we never really get the full account of what happened we can't truly understand the past, I think that's what this debate creator is getting at. They aren't saying that no one will know who the 1st president was, you would have to be retarded to think that, they are saying, if I'm right, that history is biased and because of the bias many of us will never know how history really went down. The colonial empires who essentially carved the world into the nations they are today did so purely for economic gain and committed terrible atrocities against the indigenous people they colonized. Nobody remembers how the Belgian King Leopold killed about 10 million of the Congolese he had enslaved to fuel the resource extraction that was happening in the Congo, the continued exploitation has lead to what is the largest war in the world right now happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. If people knew a lot more about history, I imagine their views on certain nations, people, etc would change considerably. History is extremely important in understanding the present. It's not the obvious details like presidential history this debate is about, its about how our knowledge of history skews our view of the world. Side: true/correct
Before written documentation, yes people would have been guessing. But since we have first hand accounts of what took place in the past recorded on paper we know the events are factual, maybe somewhat obscured, but it's there for everyone who knows how to read. Side: no, not at all
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History is written by people in that day. Historians tear up truth and put in what they want. If you leave history alone and just read what was there then it would be clear. But, if you mess with it and don't just leave it be and say it couldn't be that is when you get in trouble. Side: no, not at all
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