History

"All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography"

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

As I take a break from writing for NaNoWriMo, I happen to come across this quote. It seemed appropriate since my son was working on a history lesson at the time and he was having a problem agreeing with what was being taught. I had to explain to him that most of the time, history books were written by those who "won", so naturally, the "losers" would be portrayed as the "bad guys". At least that is how I think of it.

But that's not what I was thinking about.

I was actually thinking about events that have happened in my own life and how others see them differently than I do. As I did so, this quote became even more evident. History, being a story, like everything else, is relative. It is relative to everything and everyone around us. In other words, what is good to one is bad to another and vice versa.

History is not history. It is a biography. It is a story of events and people and what happened. If someone were to write a biography about me, they would most likely get it wrong. Either because of preconceived notions or because they just didn't know me at all. And how many of our history stories were just like that? We may never know unless we somehow build a time machine and go back in time.

History is a story. A story we are to learn from, just as a biography is a story of a person's life or events. We can learn from that too.

Just a little thought for the day. I guess I just liked the quote a lot and thought just how much truth there was to it.