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Prejudice And Bias In History

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History is alive. With every step taken across this boundless earth where billions have walked before, it is given life. Speak one word, one whisper, and the voice echoes to the roots of the past from the Roman Empire to Greece and even to a tiny town too small to bear a name but vital to the past and to the existence of modern civilization. Each word spoken and each sentence written is echoed with the voices of billions of people dead and forgotten. History is alive. It lives thanks to the hundreds of thousands of students and historians that map our past so people can have a broad perspective of the present and the future. They accomplish this difficult task by using sources, primary and secondary sources, each offering its share of advantages …show more content…

For example, in the classic case of a favorite student, a teacher is biased if he or she is favoring one student over another. Even if two students misbehave, the favored student may only be given a warning while the other student may be sent to the dean’s office. In this particular example, the bias of the teacher towards one student certainly feels unfair to the other, which a bad thing because the teacher is supposes to be impartial like a historian. History is a subject that is based on people’s opinions. This means that bias can negatively affect people’s options thereby negatively affecting history. This is because bias causes people to overlook some facts and to focus on presumptions rather than facts. For example, in science, biases may result in unreliable experiments. In other subjects such as politics, bias towards certain policies or laws will have massive affects on the outcome. When there is a bias, there will always be another person or thing that will be unfair and discriminated against. Primary sources, although useful, are full of bias. This is the reason secondary sources are much more viable and beneficial to students. Secondary sources usually have less bias because historians act as a third party that gives the account as he or she perceives it. This reduces bias because having a third party perspective gives the historian a broader perspective and therefore mostly a non-biased one. Secondary sources weigh in all the facts to make a more fair and complete account. This reduces bias because historians get all the relevant facts, which gives them a broader outlook therefore giving them a non-biased perspective of the event. Emotion plays a huge role in bias, which implies that primary

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