How ‘factual’ is historical fact?

(This is an overflow from the ‘Spain’ blog. I would like to hear people’s opinions on some underlying issues.)

Quite often people support their views by such statements as “history shows us that ……….”. I have difficulty with this because I don’t believe there is any one ‘true’ historical view. There are probably as many views of history as there are historians. ‘History’, in my opinion, is not ‘fact’ but simply some people’s account of other people’s accounts of yet other people’s accounts of what happened at a point in time… intermingled with a lot of interpretation and hindsight.

As more ‘knowledge’ is added to the equation, historical accounts change. The ‘history’ taught today is somewhat different from the ‘history’ taught when I went to school aeons ago.

It is often considered that, with hindsight, we see things differently – but do we see them ‘truer’ or just differently? It’s the principle, I guess, that at a distance you can see the whole picture, but how far back do you have to get? Another problem arises … at a distance you might be able to see the bigger picture, but you lose the detail. Up close you see the detail, but probably miss out on the bigger picture.

Is the solution somewhere in the middle? Maybe not … it could be that you then miss both the detail AND the big picture.

At any given time, it is very difficult for anyone, let alone the ‘ordinary’ person in the street, to know the ‘facts’ about anything. We are at the mercy of all those umpteenth-hand accounts. Usually, we choose the one that best suits our own prejudices and that, boys and girls, determines how we vote in our ‘democratic’ elections (if we vote at all).
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The following story (from the wonderful book ‘The Art of Looking Sideways’) sums it up nicely, I think:

Lenin to Trotsky: “Now this is the truth, and I can refer you to many authorities. When Catherine II and her royal entourage sailed down the Dnieper River in 1787 to view the New Territories, the Field Marshal Potemkin created sham villages of painted canvas along the river bank to give the distinguished visitors a false impression of reality. We want no more Potemkin villages.

Trotsky to Lenin: On the matter of the Potemkin villages i must disagree. They were real, and this is the truth, for which I can cite many authorities. The illusion thatthey did not exist was created by historians, the source of most of our illusions of the past.

Lenin to Trotsky: Dear Comrade, what does it matter who was responsible, my Field marshal or your historians? In either event, somebody was rudely deceived.”

(Lenin Trotsky: Pre-revolutionary Correspondence)