by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: August 25, 2010

The greatest fault of writing lies in the faults of the writer. Written historical tomes are as flawed as the perspective, limitations, capability, biases and even the directions that are given to the writer. There is a lot to be left out for various reasons. There is a lot that is included for various purposes. There is a lot that is simply made up in order to fill in gaps, to make the tale more interesting or even to make lesser figures into heroes simply because their names are not as odd sounding as the real hero.

The reader has a certain set of faults, too. While young people were telling their friends to not give away the ending to the blockbuster film about the Titanic, many older people sighed and rolled their eyes. Readers will become engaged in a well written fictional recounting, but may be put off by boring, fact laden and comprehensive but badly composed historical writing. 

Some historical writers have a gift for bringing history to life while their readers have a gift for reading historical works. Others struggle to tell the truth about history while their potential readers dash off to watch the History channel or to get a multimedia experience.

The average person may be interested in finding the nuggets of fact from even recent major historical events, but given the overload of opinion, speculation, "interpretation" and even outright lies that come across the web and the airwaves, there is no hope of getting to the truth of the matters.

Lately, there have been so many lies and distortions of historical fact that several hour long segments of cable news could be devoted to correcting them. Even  well known historical events during WWII turned into an event where one common talk radio host reversed the roles entirely. He never admitted his mistake or corrected it, either. 

In disaster, combat, crisis and crime, there is no way for everyone to have every perspective. Individuals can only speak for what it was that they experienced and observed, and those observations can be mightily flawed. Even those who are trained to be excellent observers can have distorted, filtered or even deliberately modified recollections of what it was that they saw, heard and experienced.

The resulting historical and psycho historical studies are only as reliable as the testimonies and memories of the eyewitnesses and participants, each of whom was only able to see, hear, feel, smell and act from one perspective. And those perspectives have enormous ways

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