What is a Historian?

[Wild Bill]

I agree with you, Gene. But historians do more than find out that Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue/ in fourteen hundred ninety-two. After the facts they interpret what it all means, hopefully in a readable format as you wisely pointed out (Ever wonder why PhDs hate newspaper people who become historians? The professional historians tend not to be interesting writers). the interpretation is what makes historians continually revise and critique each other. That is called historiography, and is a field of study in any graduate program. That is one studies what historians have said in interpreting the fact Columbus sailed. What does it mean? It is not that any one historians right or wrong. This is why the Confederacy is "out" nowadays, whereas it was "in" during the early twentieth century. An historian named Thomas Pressley wrote about what American historians said about the causes of the Civil War. His conclusion was that interpretations travelled in a circle, hitting old interpretations as new once again sooner or later. It keeps us all in business writing books that sometimes people even read!