THE LIMITS OF THE HISTORIANS OBJECTIVITY HISTORY ESSAY    2700w

Carl Becker, along with Charles Beard, started a controversy over the purpose of historical writing and the limits of the historians objectivity that continues to agitate American historians and philosophers. Is historical objectivity a possibility?  In practice, a historian takes past thought and tries to arrange it in some meaningful way.  Historians perform a kind of confidence trick because they write as if they are unveiling truth and they want their readers to agree with them.  Unfortunately, there is no singular truth on which historians will agree.  Regardless of how well it is written, no matter how the evidence is reconstructed, it won’t be the “truth” due to the issues of interpretation and inference.  In the end, historians draw inferences from a single experiment. History can’t be recreated.  History is an intricate process as opposed to the scientific method involving experimentation and verification through the repetition of experiment. History keeps grasping for the truth but it is always out of reach.

“The assumptions on which the idea of historical objectivity rest include a commitment to the reality of the past and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower