Do You Agree with the Statement That History Is “an Act of Imagination”?

Do you agree with the statement that history is “an act of imagination”?

History can be an act of imagination as by the way that history can come to fruition. Imagination could be considered a driving force of history by the way that this imagination can create historical knowledge to become fact. As the historian G.M Trevelyan once argued ‘...the poetry of history does not consist of imagination roaming at large, but of imagination pursuing the fact and fastening upon it.’ People upon Earth are constantly looking for the answers of things, using imagination to help guide them. With history: archaeologists, historians, and the like aim to piece together the past from evidence they receive for example remains of an ancient body and thereafter piecing together how the person died. This may take large amounts of imagination to envisage the cause of death, where the death occurred etc. to allow these facts to be uncovered.

On the flip side, above all history is based on facts on real events and cannot be considered the work of the imagination. Events cannot be invented if they didn’t happen, as this wouldn’t be history, but a myth.
‘We historians are firmly bound by the authority of our sources (and by no other authority, human or divine), nor must we use fiction to fill in the gaps...’ said by Sir Geoffrey Elton who is clearly highlighting that history is pure factual knowledge and not a place for creative thinking as this would undermine the facts due to added unsupported claims.

Overall, I would say that history is not an act of the imagination as it has facts, sources and supported claims in general for historical events however, history can be an act of the imagination where facts aren’t possible so thus the imagination must try and figure out possible areas of past events so is a smaller part of history. Though most of historical data in our world is well supported and thus not an act of the imagination.

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