History

Though God cannot alter the past, historians can.” - Samuel Butler

I definitely agree with tis statement because I recognize that history is extremely subjective, and a subject that depends a lot on authority. The past is the past, it is true, and what really happened is inalterable and absolute. But how we tell it and understand it afterwards is not. As history students, we rely on the interpretation of professional historians, or learned scholars to learn about the past. We trust them because they are experts and have years of studying a certain matter, so much that they can write a school text book. However, sometimes we forget that there are many things that can alter or influence a historian’s interpretation of historical events. For example, a German historian might have a slightly different take on WWII than a French one.

The way we see the past greatly affects the way we see the present, because the history of relationships between countries for example affects the individual view of people in a  country (for example, Pakistan’s and India’s history). Historians can manipulate evidence to change the way people see the past, and therefore, theoretically ‘’change the past’’, even though the actual events will not change.