HIS 100 Module Five Activity Template: Historical Interpretations
Replace the bracketed text below with your responses.
Identify the topic you chose to explore:
Climate Change and Environmental Issues: Chernobyl
Describe how exploring your research question improved your understanding of the historical roots of your current event.
Exploring my research question allowed discovery of more perspectives. Including views from people inside the governments of Russia and the United States expanded my understanding. I also explored views from the scientific community and people near the event. I found it interesting that the United States, the scientific community and people inside Russian don’t tend
to believe much of the information surrounding Chernobyl that was provided by the Russian government.
Explain how biased perspectives influence what is known about both your historical and current events.
Any information presented by the KGB or disclosed by Russian media surround the events of Chernobyl was passed through government agencies for approval before release. This makes some details hard to find, leading to inferring some contamination and release readings using readings from nearby countries. Open sharing of information could had led to lessening of the contamination and fallout of the event. The declassified information from the United States was biased against the shared Russian intelligence and used strong language expressing doubts in the information. Propose how the narrative about your historical event might change if it were told from a missing perspective.
I was missing the perspective of the people living in the area around the event, specifically information that has not been screened by the government before release. Also, almost all information from the local population would have to be translated to English, which can introduce bias in the translation. Propose how the narrative about your current event might change if it were told from a missing perspective.
Adding this narrative could show that everything was being well managed and that the people felt the government was talking the correct actions. You never know with the missing information. It could be foreign governments setting the narrative against Russia.
