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History? Stay away from opinions...

I've been studying history for the last five years now and it is one of my favorite subjects. Unlike many other students who aren't interested in history but some other subject, I like to spend a bit of my free time doing some extra research on the subject. While talking to multiple people and reading a couple of texts, I have noticed that many of us make the widespread mistake of considering opinions to be historical facts. For example, It is a common view that ' Adolf  Hitler caused the second world war ', although it seems very right it is NOT a fact but still an opinion. I would not go into much detail, but if you do more background study you will see that there are two sides even to this story. On the other hand, it is a clear fact that 'Hitler played a major part in WWII'. I hope you are now starting to understand what I am trying to say. We need to crucially understand the difference between historical facts and opinions. If we consider an opinion to be a necessary truth(a fact) then we tend to form biased perspectives in our mind that may be wrong. This is very damaging because we may obtain incorrect knowledge as a whole due to these biased perspectives. We should realize that many topics in history are debatable and do not necessarily have only one conclusion. That is why instead of blindly buying someone else's opinion we should try and analyze the facts on our own and construct our own opinion. For example, A writer in an article may argue that the American policy of isolationism was wrong but instead of agreeing to his or her arguments, you must first do some research of your own and then decide.....

This image is from Japan's Surrender in 1945. This image is evidence to prove the fact that Japan surrendered to the US during the second world war.

                              "I am convinced that Hitler does not want war .....
                      what the Germans are after is a strong army which will enable them to deal with Russia"
                                                                                                                            

  -- British politician Lord Lothian speaking in January 1935
              
The above text is an opinion from Lord Lothian. With hindsight, we can see that Lothian's belief was proved wrong. 
   
 I'll surely talk more about this in detail in the upcoming blogs.



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