Here’s another short excerpt about the confusing mess that we call history and how vastly different interpretations can muddy the waters of our past.

If one was telling the story of life in the U.S. south during the 1950s and 1960s, one might paint the south in terms of the civil rights struggle and use the historical contexts of landmark court cases such as Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education to show the African-American struggle for equal rights in a society which once condoned slavery and segregation. However, if a white supremacist such as Bryon De La Beckwith, who was convicted of killing civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1963, had written about the south during the 1950s, he most assuredly would have denied the importance of these court cases and would have painted a much different picture of southern society. Historical interpretation based on bias, opinion and partial facts without using the normal rules of logic and argument is what Williams calls pseudo history (31). But if one person wants to interpret history their own way and leave conventional wisdom behind, they may do so and unfortunately there will be others who will listen and believe. This can further muddy the waters of history.

Furthermore, history really is open to interpretation. Using one side of an argument but omitting another can paint two very different pictures of the same period of time. Historians have to carefully weigh all the evidence and look at the historical process over a period of time to get a full view of events. Take, for instance, recently retired President George W. Bush. If a historian wanted to look at the Bush presidency and assess his job performance, he or she could chose from so many different angles which could show Bush in a positive or negative light. For example, he or she could focus on Bush’s dismal popularity ratings as he left office, the fact that there have been no terrorists attacks on U.S. soil since 911, that he left office in one of the greatest economic downturns in the past 50 years, that he removed a murderous dictator from power in Iraq, that he failed to find weapons of mass destruction, or that the surge of troops sent to Iraq in 2007 dramatically improved conditions on the ground. This pick your angle game can go on and on without end. Hopefully, scholars will in the years to come give a fair and unbiased treatment to all of these issues concerning the Bush administration and then let the chips fall where they may. However, this will not stop individuals from highlighting his successes and minimizing his failures or vice versa. Likewise, there most likely will never be a complete consensus. Some day most historians may agree that the Bush presidency was successful or unsuccessful, but the point is that no one has to take their word for it. Someone else will come along with a new piece of evidence, a new angle or a new interpretation which will shift the historical dialog into a new discourse.