How did history get so hard?

A few days behind schedule, I am sitting here at my computer toiling away on writing a history of online role playing games. I am struggling alot more than I thought I would. Not because I don’t have ample notes, timelines and examples, but because I am all to aware of the social construction of history.

There was a time when history was truth to me. Factual; undisputable; it is what it is, cause history don’t lie. Like math and science, which are made up of numbers, and numbers don’t lie… History was what happened … events put down objectively on paper – ‘they’ told me so, and for a long time, I believed them.

But after too many sociology classes and many many conversations that introduced doubt on everything we “think” we know, I am all to aware that everything is constructed. Everything is contextualized and relative. History is nothing more than selective memory, from a particular point of view. Choices of what to include and what to exclude is based on relatively arbitrary decisions by the author or to be a little more objective, secondary constructed categories created outside of the author.

In the end – history should be more aptly titled “The History of America from a middle-upper class educated individual” or “The History of America from the point of view of someone who struggles to read and write” – Although both ‘histories’ could cover the same time period, and the same events, the socio-economic positions of the authors would set the histories worlds apart.

With this in my head, my constructed categories pre-determined, I am trying my best to detail an objective, uninfluenced history of times, events and artefacts that exist(ed) outside of who I am as an author.