The Importance of History in Understanding Who We Are

When a patient is speaking to a doctor, the doctor knows full well that she is only getting a part of the picture and that the patient has biases. Patients notice and over report certain symptoms and they dramatically under represent other symptoms. They have their own agendas. But the clinician knows that and it really doesn't stop that clinician from forming what usually turns out to be an amazingly accurate assessment. And so the same thing may happen in history. You may have events that have been recorded in history that are not backed up by the archaeological evidence or some other physical findings. Even in those cases, those erroneous, biased, bigoted, agendized histories do help us understand who we are