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  • True Facts and Honest History:A Review of Certain Practices, a Mea Culpa, and Other Thoughts About the Writing of History
  • Judith Walzer Leavitt (bio)

Facts are not what they used to be. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a fact as "something that has really occurred or is actually the case . . . a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony." This usage dates from the 17th century and continues today. Fact is differentiated from fiction or inference or conjecture by "a datum of experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based upon it." Yet there is emerging in our current world a different and less precise usage. Today our public figures evoke what they call facts in their discourse often without checking their source or veracity, picking and choosing and even distorting data to make their case. The news media, in reporting these stories, or when interviewing those who use so-called facts in these ways, often themselves do not take the time to check their facts and, not wanting to offend either side, leave a muddle of understanding of what might actually have happened. Many in American society have come to a flexible or relative understanding about factual evidence: one can always find an "expert" who will testify to the truth of any given observation—even in scientific matters, e.g., climate change—and therefore maybe one cannot trust any account, any facts. Or, said another way, facts can be found to support any conclusion. President Obama can verify his birth in the state of Hawaii with hospital and state records: the time and place of his birth are facts that one can cite as true. Yet "birthers" dispute the reality of these facts, challenge the truth of the president's American citizenship, and get a lot of media coverage for their accounts of the facts. And then polls determine that one-quarter of Americans believe that he was not born in the United States. There does not seem to be an evident or easy way to resolve the two opposing conclusions: facts as we have known them do not seem to be enough.

Within the academy, many literary and cultural theorists call into question the entire enterprise of facts and fact-finding. Truth is always relative and contingent, interpreted by the reader or observer in different ways that are fluid and changing. These theorists acknowledge that one facet of literary interpretation is to decipher the writer's meaning and intentions. But they argue that it is more important to understand that meaning is equally shaped by the reader's own cultural framework, which includes biases and assumptions that have profound influence. What seems to be truth to one reader may seem an obvious distortion of truth to another.

Outside the academy, the slipperiness of facts has led some to call upon "true facts" to differentiate them from other facts that may or may not be true, a development that seems to recognize that some evidence is more verifiable or more acceptable than other evidence. True facts are what we used to know as facts, verifiable and knowable by direct observation and experience; the way people use such facts can create either "truth" or "truthiness," to use Stephen Colbert's word.

Here I want to consider how historians use facts in this world of relativity and offer some observations on how to think about our craft. History is much more than the retelling of a chronological collection of facts. We who attempt to tell the story of the past, to answer its questions, are interpreters, with feet and head planted in our own time as we look to the past to tell the stories of those who lived before. Our attempts to get at the truths of the past are just that, attempts. We historians base our interpretations of the past on the evidence that survives for our use, acknowledging always that new data might lead to the emergence of new facts that could lead to alternative interpretations. We generally assume that human cognition and behavioral psychology are the same historically as they are today. But do we know that they are? Can facts change? And...

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