Historical writings are a main component in how we reconstruct and interact with the past. Historians use literature in order to begin forming ideas about the past and try to uncover any meaning or truth that is apparent about the history. The historian is given the task to write histories and eventually add to a great collection of works. The humanities faced a shift in thought that put the histories’ objectivity in question. There is opposition towards every historical method regarding the objectivity through its methodology. In the case of history, truth could be distorted in a methodology, but ultimately history is not a science. As humans, we can partake in certain practices regarding literature and mental methodologies especially for …show more content…
A focus that is too narrow or too generalized would cause problems in understanding history in its original form. A history’s focus is crucial because it is the central idea which sways the writing and its outcome. One problem is “For a philosophy, a meaning, is by definition a principle that does not accommodate exceptions” so a piece of writing under a philosophy determines how the history conducts itself and the historian pieces together parts that justify the philosophy. In the Fallacy of a Single Cause, Barzun discusses how history does have a single cause for the events and those who wrote it are “give meaning to the past” where one “seeks out the one pattern for special attention”. This method entails looking at a history of ideas and subjecting the ideals as the overarching theme where “the ideas get up and do battle on their own behalf”. History within itself is not the reconstructed product in writings. History in its reality is not something that is ordered nicely into divisions, causes, overarching themes, and presupposed concepts, but is chaotic and full of subjects that cannot be all encompassed in a single history. Categorization of history has caused “subjects grouped over against other subjects termed nonhumanistic, inevitably become specialties like those other subjects, And thus their original purpose has been perverted or lost”. History’s truth can be found within the context of methodologies, but warped compensatory histories that considered “past defects were to be remedied by new defective emphases” disparages history’s meaning for the sake of a certain agenda. The history itself through any methodology would lose some of its original purpose because no history is impervious to human interpretation no matter how self-aware one