Historical Truth Essay -- essays papers

Historical Truth Historical Truth? As a child sits through history class in the first grade, he or she learns of the relationship between Christopher Columbus and the Indians. This history lesson tells the children of the dependence each group had on each other. But as the children mature, the relations between the two groups began to change with their age. So the story that the teenagers are told is a gruesome one of savage killings and lying. When the teenagers learn of this, they themselves might want to do research on this subject to find out the truth. But as one searches, one finds the inconsistency between the research books. So the question is, who is telling the truth? Mary Louise Pratt and Jane Tompkins probe these difficulties of the reading and writing of history, specifically at the problems of bias and contemplative historical accounts. In â€Å"Art of the Contact Zone,† Pratt explores the issue of whose version of history gets favored and whose gets limited by analyzing the circumstances surrounding Guaman Poma’s and de la Vega’s letter to the King of Spain . In â€Å"‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,† Tompkins investigates how history is shaped in accordance to personal biases and cultural conditions of historians by questioning different writings about Native Americans. Each author comes to the conclusion between history and subjectivity, meaning that history is problematic. The historical accounts pondered by Pratt and Tompkins through historical text allows them to realize that every account that a historian calls a fact is really a perspective. Pratt’s concepts of â€Å"contact zone,† â€Å"autoethnography,† and â€Å"ethnography† are supported by the historical ideas in Tompkins essay. The c... ...from reading both essays one would find this to be true. For example, the historical documents encountered by both authors found some conflicting ideas. Comparing the two authors strategies to read history, Pratt does a complete job. A complete job means reading primary sources from both the inferior and superior cultures. This way she could get the full picture of the actual accounts of the â€Å"contact zone.† On the other hand, Tompkins does not read both types of texts, only â€Å"ethnographic texts† and comes to her conclusion. But the basis of Pratt’s and Tompkins’ essay is of the essays they read. Therefore each author is biased in their own nature. There biases come from their culture, which affects the way one sees or understands, and writes history. So whose view is right? It is oneself who ultimately decides on which historical point is true based on ones biases.