Historical Application

All of the skills that you have learned in this module are essential skills of the historian. Just as we have disinformation, misinformation, malformation, and propaganda in the contemporary world, we had these in the past.

Historians don't simply discard false information. False information itself is a historical resource. Knowing who wrote a lie, why it was written, how they wrote it, who believed it, and why they believed it can tell us a huge amount about the past. Analyzing disinformation, misinformation, malformation, and propaganda not only helps us sift through historical facts and fictions, the process helps us better understand historical events, peoples, and cultures. 

As with historical memory, which we learned about in the last module, history is not simply a list of facts. History is a process in which we narrate the past and reflect on this past in the current context. How we narrate this past changes over time and is always a response to our contemporary milieu. Recognizing complexity in the past helps us better understand complexities in our current world. And, understanding how history has been narrated over time helps us better understand why people hold on to their beliefs, even when they do not match the facts of the past or the present.