Claim Though often considered an objective pursuit learning about the historical past requires creativity Reason Because we can never know the past directly we must reconstruct it by imaginatively interpreting historical accounts documents and artifacts W

Do we really need to be creative to learn about our historic past? The author claims so, by giving the reason that since we can never fully know the direct past completely, we can re-interpret it by creatively interpreting the historic accounts, artifacts etc. I mostly concede that without creative imagination it will be difficult to understand our historic accounts. However, I contend that objective analysis still has its value in some aspects of historical analysis.

First, our attempt to understand the past only by objective analysis becomes severely hindered without any imagination, as we are faced with a lack of sufficient evidence and conclusive data in this situation. Then, one inevitably requires acumen and creativity to join the dots and form a comprehensive story that could depict the history. For instance, in the study of African history, archeological evidence is a popular tool for reconstructing the past. Yet, on several occasions, one is bound to use much guesswork in the process, as many artifacts found are anonymous and lack the sequence of daily life. Makers and users of such artifacts are usually not known. These scenarios force the historians to resort to creative imagination for obtaining a clear picture of the past incidents and civilization. Again, historians today are not so much concerned with the when’s and how’s but with the reasons for a particular work, and this is the point where the objectivity of history comes to an end. It is a well-known fact in which year Bram Stoker composed his famous horror novel “Dracula”, but if we ask that why did the Irish writer created this fascinating literary piece, then, we must rely on our guesswork, as the existing evidence does not lead to any definite conclusion in this regard. As far as the motivation of someone in history is concerned, there will always be guesswork involved.

Even if we can gather enough data about the past, we can not ignore the role of imagination altogether. Often the obtained historical documents or writing, the primary means of analysis, are intentionally perverted or changed to suit the need of the previous writer or author . For instance, in the history of ancient China, when the emperors started a new dynasty, usually the first thing they did was to burn all the historical documents and to kill the historiographers, followed by rewriting what had happened in order to glorify their actions. Once the present-day historian is able to detect such distortions in the past documents, he or she must discard this sort of faulty sources, and rely on his or her creative power for recollecting what exactly happened in the past, especially if there are no other alternate reliable source of gathering proper information about the past.

However, I do not refute the fact that there is no place for objective pursuit in history. On many occasions, the objective study provides valuable information about the past history. For instance, the complete history of the British Empire is not just a construction of the imagination of historians with a couple of pieces of evidence, but it is after collecting as much evidence as possible from the British empire as well as its colonies that its history has taken shape. There has been evidence in form of a written account of British lords as well as others, newspaper articles, letters, and many such unavoidable proofs that help in establishing the facts. Also, in present days, our utilization of sophisticated technology like library-supported databases, online archives, and digital cameras has made the objective studies of historical events more comfortable . Nevertheless, this objective study does not take away the value of creative thinking in understanding and knowing about our pasts.

In conclusion, it can be said that even though historical analysis is predominantly an imaginative work, one should not totally ignore the significance of objective analysis. After trying to consider all possible facts and evidence, if essential, we should judiciously couple our creative thinking with the available data to interpret the past events in the most effective way.