Whom do you believe the most ??

Question

the Historians or Facts or Documents.

Answer 1

Documents were recorded at the time and have less influence of hindsight

Answer 2

Can I say "none of the above"? Facts say what may or may not have happened at a given time or date. Documents just say words. But, it's all about meaning, not words or numbers or dates. Historians try to add the meaning component to facts and dates and documents, but the problem is, everyone on this earth is biased to some degree, by their own experiences. For example, 95% of all university history professors are Democrats or even more liberal than that. What does that say about what they teach students? 95% + will vote for the Democrat who is running for office ... again, what does that say about them? If those same professors, historians then make a list of the best presidents is it any surprise that few if any Republicans ever show up? What does it say about what they consider to be important in American life and culture (the exact same thing, in opposite, can be said for talk radio hosts, who are almost universally Republicans or even more conservative) ...

So, learn what you can, study the facts and documents, read the historians, several of them, then make up your own mind.

Answer 3

Documents are not always facts. Facts are contextualised by political and cultural prejudices, esoteric laws and relative morality. Historians often have an agenda to either illustrate or portray people and events that puts their country, relgion, viewpoint, in a good light by a careful process of selecting the most appropraite material as evidence and then constructing a case or argument that supports their position. By interpreting the selected material in a certain way they can construct the past in any way they like.
Very often you will find in historical writing the liberal use of abstract words like good and evil (just two out of a very large lexicon) by people desperate to construct a rational response to human chaos by developing a narrative that has all the appearance of establishing a perfectly reasonable cause and effect. Historians are masters of illusion and love playing tricks on the dead, creating canonical masterpieces out of their imagination.
To wit, neither of the three things you have mentioned can be trusted since it is always a human agent that handles and carries them in baggages called 'poetry and literature'. Human beings have the innate capacity to always mix art with fact, the genius of the creative mind is its inability to distinguish on the register of truth where the line between fact and fiction should be drawn because truth is yet another abstract word. The Aristotelian non solution to the moral maze of searching for meaning in human political activity driven by amoralistic feral instincts.
To believe a fact or a document requires your abject conformity to the writers' or speakers' definition of the words they have used, a blind acceptance of a shared symbolic meaning, which most people do without even noticing. The scary irony of language is that people use it to communicate only an internal reality that only becomes external when your voice is no longer heard as an alternative internal reality. People kill each other in order for their internal reality to become dominant externally as their power base of control, a rather frightening characteristic of education when the numbers who share an internal reality organise themselves around various objectifications of this imagined truth or reality. What is a flag but an objectification of a shared myth or imagined truth?
Answer to question: none.

Answer 4

It should be facts and documents, but anyone, whether historian or amateur, could still read documents anyway they want. They could interpret them anyway they want too. Most historians are good at reading documents and getting the clear facts out of them, but there are too many that want to make themselves prestigious and record their findings falsely.

Answer 5

Historians are like anyone else: they have an axe to grind or an agenda to push, so you have to be careful.

Facts and documents are always best, but make sure you look at all of them, and don't just cherrypick the ones that support you position. That is done a little too often.

Answer 6

Primary Resources

Answer 7

It's all a bit shakey- modern historians and archealogists generally agree you cant help but interpret evidence based on your own societies form and function.

Answer 8

any information one gathers from any source should be confirmed before being accepted. what you believe to be true I may not and what I believe to be true you may not. yet at the same time both of us are speaking the truth as we interpret it to be.

Answer 9

I believe almost none of what I hear and maybe half of what I hear, objectivity is hard to find.

Answer 10

facts ofcourse