Nowadays history becomes a discipline that is more concerned with an imagination and exoticness of the events than with a true objective declaration of the facts that happened. It means that we agree with the author of the quotation and think that history must be as precise and accurate as math, physics or other natural sciences (Husbands, 1996). The main purpose of history is to teach people their past, so they will not make the same mistakes or will not be caught in the same circumstances.
Unfortunately, there are two significant factors that make us think that the history we are taught now is more about fiction then the realistic description. These two factors are:
Not all the historical facts that we know of are truth as many historians distorted them for the sake of government and ruling people. So we can surely say that some parts of the history are written and rewritten only for the purpose of praising somebody. They have no sound ground, so they make us doubt about the whole history.
Some of the incompetent teachers believe that there are two types of opinions: their opinion and wrong opinion. That is why they teach only subjective material which interfere with the process of critical analyzing of a certain historical event or a person.
All these problems results in imagination taking a core place in the matter and subject of history, putting the realism on the background (Matos, 2015). We believe that fiction and imagination can be applied to history only when dealing with some insignificant details that will not interfere with an objective understanding of a problem.
Reference List
HUSBANDS, C. (1996). What is history teaching?. Buckingham, Gran Bretaña [etc.]: Open University Press, p.112.
MATOS, S. (2015). History, Memory and Fiction: What Boundaries?. História da Historiografia, (17), pp. 427-439.
