Finals are on the mind, and the American studies one is
certainly on mine. I've always loved writing essays, and I love philosophy, so
the two are often intertwined throughout my educational career. As such, when I
heard that the final was about the differentiation between fact and constructed
conceptions of history, I was stoked. I'd recently been dipping into Derrida's
works and his ideas. One that I've found to be particularly fascinating is his
conceptions on how accurately we can learn historical events. There isn't any
real "truth" behind the historical accounts that we learn about,
given how we never lived through them. They're at best second hand recounts,
and usually much more distant than that. Every link on the chain to you adds
another filter of bias, predispositions, and slant to the image that is that
snapshot of history. Then, when it finally gets to you, it's no longer a pure
depiction of the event that took place. It's an image of an image of an image
of an image...etc. On the other side of this, I can't really think of a better
way to learn history. There is no real objective way, given the current
technology we have, to experience the past first hand. Thanks a lot, doc Brown.
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