What are some of the reasons historians so often disagree?
In South America, Central America, and Mexico, Europeans and native groups lived in intimate, if unequal, contact with one another. Many native people gradually came to speak Spanish or Portuguese, but they created a range of dialects fusing the European languages with elements of their own. European men outnumbered European women by at least ten to one. Intermarriage—often forcible—became frequent between Spanish immigrants and native women. Before long, the population of the colonies came to be dominated (numer- ically, at least) by people of mixed race, or mestizos.
Virtually all the enterprises of the Spanish and Portuguese colonists depended on Indian workforces. In some places, Indians were sold into slavery. More often, colonists used a
and a view of them as engaged in a war to end democracy. The civil rights movements prompted scholars to reconsider what they knew about the lives and achievements of black Americans, women, Hispanics, and gays and lesbians. The rise of postcolonial societies pushed historians to reexamine assumptions built into the telling of the rise and fall of empires—that they were the products of an elite cadre of men—and rethink the role of workers and the less powerful in influencing the course of events. The “cultural turn” at the end of the twentieth century placed a newfound stress on examining how various forces of culture—gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, language—deeply affected the ways in which people experienced and understood the world. Its effects are still rippling through the academy, asking historians to ever widen their lens of analysis when seeking to explain people’s motivations and actions.
Historians regularly debate over which types of interpretation come closest to
capturing the truth of the past with no clear-cut consensus likely to come into focus any time soon. Such debate, though, is a sign of the health of the profession. Schol- ars need to constantly revisit how they talk about the past and be challenged to defend their decisions in order to make sure they are capturing the full range of human experience when writing their histories. Indeed, under- standing the past is a forever continuing— and forever contested—process.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What are some of the reasons historians so often disagree?
2. Is there ever a right or wrong in histori- cal interpretation? What value might historical inquiry have other than reaching a right or wrong conclusion?
3. If historians so often disagree, how should a student of history approach historical content? How might disagreement expand our understand- ing of history?