This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the work of history is done.
Historians don’t just read something, believe what it says, then say “that’s history, job done”.
They tease from a source glimpses of the past.
Each document or artifact provides information, and meta information, that can be used to give us a fuller picture of the past, whether the writer was telling the truth (whose truth?), writing known falsehoods, writing fiction, etc.
No historian believes The Lord of the Rings is true, but if looked at through the lens of history it could be a valuable historical artifact. The Lord of the Rings could teach one about things like: the state of literature and publishing in the mid-twentieth century, cultural attitudes towards war, religion, and industrialization, linguistic fluency among the population, the writer’s education level, social standing, and personal attitudes, etc.
You don’t exclude a source because it may have a bias, or known falsehoods, or missing information, etc.; you account for those in your study of the source and piece together what we can know despite those issues.
This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the work of history is done.
Historians don’t just read something, believe what it says, then say “that’s history, job done”.
They tease from a source glimpses of the past.
Each document or artifact provides information, and meta information, that can be used to give us a fuller picture of the past, whether the writer was telling the truth (whose truth?), writing known falsehoods, writing fiction, etc.
No historian believes The Lord of the Rings is true, but if looked at through the lens of history it could be a valuable historical artifact. The Lord of the Rings could teach one about things like: the state of literature and publishing in the mid-twentieth century, cultural attitudes towards war, religion, and industrialization, linguistic fluency among the population, the writer’s education level, social standing, and personal attitudes, etc.
You don’t exclude a source because it may have a bias, or known falsehoods, or missing information, etc.; you account for those in your study of the source and piece together what we can know despite those issues.