What is History?

The role of history is not to inform the current generation of ‘exactly what happened in the past’, rather history now provides a myriad of different sources and historians who present their own differing perspectives and attitudes. Today history takes on a complex structure as one must sift through the “rubble” of opinions, perspectives and purposes to search for the facts before considering any form of subjective evidence. The point surely is that we find …

…discontented with the domination of capitalism wrote about the past from the perspective of the urban working class. This represented a break with the traditionally recorded images of the proletariat insofar as they represented positive images of the workers and negative images of the governing classes. Nevertheless, Marx’s history, in turn, reflects his own time and place as he saw history as being able to provide the moral lessons that Atwood is referring to.