What do you See? Perception and History

Like all of life’s lessons, we can look to…

A Certain Point of View… What Obi-Wan said was true, everything depends on point of view. History is a messy business, there’s no one ‘true’, ‘official’ account of events. When studying history we should keep this in mind and always ask questions. Who’s point of view is this event being told from? What’s their situation in life? Man or woman, rich or poor, white or non-white? How might their situation alter or change how they experienced or perceived an event?

In the Business we Call this Bias! Bias is not necessarily a bad thing, everyone has one, even you and me! Although it’s not bad, we need to be aware of bias, and we need to examine the bias of someone when we read their work. Example: A white male European explorer comes to North America to set up a home with a family in He keeps a journal that talks about how the aboriginal people in the area that shouldn’t be entitled to the same rights to the land as he. Should we take this account as fact? Of course not. Regardless, we can learn something about the author here which helps us in our study of History.