History is what you make it!

I talked with Tam today over the phone (because we really didn't have time to meet) and we discussed major quotes in the text to see what sense we can make out of it. Tam and I both agree that historians would disagree with this quote according to Fasolt. They would mainly disagree because Historians mostly record history with evidence. So no one can make history without proper evidence. Tam and I discussed how Fasolt disagrees with this phenomenon. We found a quote on p. 68 of the text which states "But history is not the study of reality, much less the study of the reality of time. History is the study of evidence... and evidence is not reality". I found this quote to be very powerful because it brings up a major issue in our society. We tried to break it down and comprehend the last part of it where it states that history is the study of evidence and evidence is not reality. We finally came to a conclusion that because historians only study history based on evidence, there is a lot of history left out. It is left out because there is no proper evidence to legitimate it. This view makes history seem kind of crooked because the history that is being taught to us in the textbooks may not necessarily be true according to Loewen in "watching big brother," which also connects to Fasolt's point of view. Tom brought up a great point in which she said that history is just facts that are based on evidence which means there is no analyzing; people don't stop, think, and analyze what their being taught, they just store the facts in their mind. We also discussed an issue that may not be relevant to the text in which we said that history is very biased. For example, if you learn about the Iraq war, Vietnam war, or even WWI, I guarantee it would be different than if you would learn it overseas. Every country teaches history from its point of view, which is why some history gets lost along the way. We came to an agreement that history is the written evidence that historians find and present it to the general public. Towards the end, there was a powerful quote in the "solution" section where it says "Expecting history to reach the reality of the past is to allow oneself to be seduced by a mirage arising not from the past but from a historical imagination run amok" p. 82. Now this quote is pretty loaded and is difficult to comprehend. what I understood from it however that no one will ever learn history as it happened in reality.