Be Careful About Sources

We all know that the challenge in the information age is not to find answers—we’re surrounded by answers—but to discern between good answers and bad answers, good information and bad information. There are so many discussions online about our history, and most of these discussions produce a lot more heat than light.

Be careful about sources of information that just seek to tear people down. Look instead for sources of information that are based on the records left by the people themselves and that seek to be fair to them. It is really easy to play “gotcha” with the past, to pull a quotation or an incident out of context and make it look alarming.

As a historian, I try to follow the advice of a British novelist. He said: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between [1953], prologue). That means when we visit the past, we don’t want to be an “ugly tourist.” We want to try to understand people within their own context and their own culture. We want to be patient with what we perceive as their faults. We want to be humble about the limits of our own knowledge. And we want to have a spirit of charity about the past.