history as a narrative?
In "False Documents," E. L. Doctorow says history is like a narrative. At first glance, I probably would have raised my eyebrows at this interesting take and wondered if Doctorow had ever sat through one of those year-long history lectures that most definitely did not sound like a narrative. First of all, history is fact. It's not the story of one person like you'd expect from a narrative, but an objective bird's-eye view of countless many interconnected lives and events. There's fact in history that doesn't come from a bias-influenced individual point of view like narratives and stories do. History is truth.... right? Okay, maybe not. Most definitely not. After Ragtime and many semesters of amazing Uni history teachers, it's a recurring theme that history is an ever-changing story -- multiple stories, in fact -- that is alive because the sources from which we know it are alive. The history we learn and know is not some indisputable chronology from an...