09/02/23 Prep Note

A great historian is supposed to be objective and not include personal elements in their writing. That is why a lot of people argue that Herodotus should not be considered the first historian. However to what extent can a person produce any type of written work without including personal elements? In fact, even the act of being able to “write about history” and be considered a historian comes from a place of privilege and therefore contains personal characteristics. This idea can also be applied to Richmond’s Unhealed History. Before starting to read the book, I read about the author’s background and not surprisingly he is a white, heterosexual, Christian, American man. Up to an extent that information stayed with me and changed the way I received knowledge while reading the book taking into account that the book could be written basically from an oppressor’s point of view. However, as I started reading I was leading more and more close to the conclusion that personal characteristics do not entirely define a person’s intention and their ability to separate themselves from the truth. By that I mean, that the author until chapter 6 is doing a great job of rediscovering the history of Richmond, using multiple trust-worth resources, and offering insightful perspectives that sometimes are intervented with facts by themselves and sometimes I do not entirely align with some of the way his thoughts are expressed, but overall I can say with confidence that he is using narrative in an effective way to communicate historical knowledge and share his interpretation separately. The combination of micro-elements like the 03use of the third person, the inclusion of different trustable resources, diagrams, figures, charts, direct and indirect quotations, the separation of comments, and the rest of the text, all contribute to the creation of a macro-narration that I consider successful of generating and communicating historical knowledge.