One of the big points brought up in this class was a museum exhibit of Dale Earnhardt’s car, and how historical narratives may be carefully and meticulously groomed for a historical effect.  In this example, we were presented with the question “how do you know that was actually Dale’s car?  How do you know that particular model wasn’t just one of his doubtless many training cars?  Did Dale ever actually even touch it?”  The thing is, and the point of that segment of the lesson, is that we don’t.  We don’t know what exactly happened in historical narratives like that, we only see the narrative that is presented for us by the museum exhibit, the textbook, the historical research.

To me, that line of reasoning does make a certain amount of sense.  I mean, how do we know that Dale actually used that car?  Someone that we accept as an authority on the schedule of Dale Earnhardt’s car rotation told us, and we believed them because, how are we going to know what a used NASCAR car looks like on the inside?  This line of reasoning and questioning presents an argument antithetical to the entire history major and historical research as a whole.  For the most part, historical research relies on first hand accounts of events, historical evidence, and books.  Lots and lots of books composed of other scholars’ interpretations of events to reach a well informed conclusion.

In present day, with the wide spread availability of knowledge and documents that in decades past were reserved for the few willing to sift through and find the relevant information anyone can educate themselves on a topic, and contribute to that scholarly discourse introduced.  However, that is a double edged sword, because anyone has access to the information.  That means, hypothetically, that anyone could “flood the market” with false analyses and evidence on any particular topic, it is simply up to moderators of forums and websites to control this.