No Sense In A Source (Rachael Marks)

     This book... is fantastic. It was much more than I thought it was in the beginning (hence my questioning as to why this was a school book). I would have never picked up this book if not for this class. It is really a good thing that I was assigned this book. It brought me back to middle school and ninth grade a lot, much more in depth than I have thought about this year as a Senior. At first it seemed campy and fun, but then layers of substance pilled into it. The book became a dream for the part of me that loves analysis. What really captivated me was the presence of the question "how do we know what happened?" In ninth grade I had Mr. Calvo who was very much inclined on teaching us about historiography. It was great to go back to that lesson and think on it with an older mind. It entranced me then, but I haven't thought about it in a while. It is wonderful that I was able to bring that philosophy back into my mind. Adrian failed to ever mention one very important aspect of the reliability of sources when he claimed that the person within the situation was capable of being the only usable source. And that is not at all true. We all perceive things in biased ways. If I were to sit down and eat a meal and claim that it was a good meal that doesn't mean that it was in fact a good meal. A different person could sit down and eat the same exact meal and claim that it was a bad meal. We have different tastes. Adrian does point out that a study of the author is important. When looking into any textbook, or account of an event, it is important to note the authors biases. Maybe I had a bias for a certain food included in the meal. Maybe the other person had a bias that made them dislike an aspect of the meal. Maybe they were just uncomfortable with where they were sitting. The point is, the human perception is sadly unreliable. Our brains play tricks on us all the time. If we are asked certain questions in an interrogation it may lead us to create things in our minds that didn't actually occur. We aren't doing it on purpose. It just happens. On several occasions I have brought up memories with friends that denied that they have ever happened. But I swear that they did. Yet as they debate more and more with me, I become less sure of myself in something I was originally totally confident in. The mind is corruptible, there is no complete way to get a full account of history. There are so many things that have happened, and have not happened, that we may never know about, not because they are being hidden from us, but because nothing is a reliable source.