What is a reason why historians might change their interpretation of an event?

One of the most common problems in helping students to become thoughtful readers of historical narrative is the compulsion students feel to find the one right answer, the one essential fact, the one authoritative interpretation. “Am I on the right track?” “Is this what you want?” they ask. Or, worse yet, they rush to closure, reporting back as self-evident truths the facts or conclusions presented in the document or text.

These problems are deeply rooted in the conventional ways in which textbooks have presented history: a succession of facts marching straight to a settled outcome. To overcome these problems requires the use of more than a single source: of history books other than textbooks and of a rich variety of historical documents and artifacts that present alternative voices, accounts, and interpretations or perspectives on the past.

Students need to realize that historians may differ on the facts they incorporate in the development of their narratives and disagree as well on how those facts are to be interpreted. Thus, “history” is usually taken to mean what happened in the past; but written history is a dialogue among historians, not only about what happened but about why and how events unfolded. The study of history is not only remembering answers. It requires following and evaluating arguments and arriving at usable, even if tentative, conclusions based on the available evidence.

To engage in historical analysis and interpretation students must draw upon their skills ofhistorical comprehension. In fact, there is no sharp line separating the two categories. Certain of the skills involved in comprehension overlap the skills involved in analysis and are essential to it. For example, identifying the author or source of a historical document or narrative and assessing its credibility (comprehension) is prerequisite to comparing competing historical narratives (analysis). Analysis builds upon the skills of comprehension; it obliges the student to assess the evidence on which the historian has drawn and determine the soundness of interpretations created from that evidence. It goes without saying that in acquiring these analytical skills students must develop the ability to differentiate between expressions of opinion, no matter how passionately delivered, and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.

Well-written historical narrative has the power to promote students’ analysis of historical causality–of how change occurs in society, of how human intentions matter, and how ends are influenced by the means of carrying them out, in what has been called the tangle of process and outcomes. Few challenges can be more fascinating to students than unraveling the often dramatic complications of cause. And nothing is more dangerous than a simple, monocausal explanation of past experiences and present problems.

Finally, well-written historical narratives can also alert students to the traps of lineality and inevitability. Students must understand the relevance of the past to their own times, but they need also to avoid the trap of lineality, of drawing straight lines between past and present, as though earlier movements were being propelled teleologically toward some rendezvous with destiny in the late 20th century.

A related trap is that of thinking that events have unfolded inevitably–that the way things are is the way they had to be, and thus that individuals lack free will and the capacity for making choices. Unless students can conceive that history could have turned out differently, they may unconsciously accept the notion that the future is also inevitable or predetermined, and that human agency and individual action count for nothing. No attitude is more likely to feed civic apathy, cynicism, and resignation–precisely what we hope the study of history will fend off. Whether in dealing with the main narrative or with a topic in depth, we must always try, in one historian’s words, to “restore to the past the options it once had.”

People who are not professional historians sometimes assume that historical research is a once-and-for-all process that will eventually produce a single, final version of what happened in the past. We often hear charges of “revisionism” when a familiar history seems to be challenged or changed. But revisiting and often revising earlier interpretations is actually at the very core of what historians do. And that’s because the present is continually changing.

The kinds of people “doing history,” the kinds of questions they ask, and the tools and materials available to them are anything but static. It’s not simply that new facts come to light, but that the shape and meaning of historical events look quite different from different vantage points and time periods.

Historians recognize that individual facts and stories only give us part of the picture. Drawing on their existing knowledge of a time period and on previous scholarship about it, they continually reevaluate the facts and weigh them in relation to other kinds of information, questions and sources. This is inescapably a task of interpreting rather than simply collecting data. Just as with any important shared body of knowledge, then, history is always undergoing reexamination and reconsideration.

For example, no one is likely to question the fact that Christopher Columbus landed in the Caribbean in 1492. But in recent decades we’ve seen a very thorough questioning of what that event meant. Was it a discovery or an invasion? How was it experienced by the indigenous people who were “discovered” as well as the European sailors who were once the heroes of the story? Click here to view an online exhibit from the US Library of Congress that revisits the encounter of 1492 in light of these questions.

What are some reasons that historians might have different interpretations of events in history?

Selection and interpretation of evidence. At the level of primary research and evidence, historians often find different evidence on the same subject. ... .

The context in which evidence is interpreted. ... .

The role of ideology and politics. ... .

The criticism of the possibility of historical knowledge. ... .

Focus and aim..

Which are most likely reasons an interpretation of a historical event could change?

New sources and ideas may change the interpretation of events. New sources and ideas may change the interpretation of events. What information can historians learn by studying relative chronology?

What is the history of changing interpretations?

One more term here, the study of historical interpretations and how they change over time is called historiography.

Why does interpretation vary from one historian to another brainly?

Answer: Interpretations differ because they are written for different audiences. Historians select information and when they write they can distort information to make their arguments stronger. Historians change their views when they discover new evidence.