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Concept
Historian
Summary
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere.
During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, people became aware that the court needed to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus". This was necessary so that there would be a legal benchmark to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the illegitimate methods employed by David Irving, as before the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, there was no legal precedent for what constituted an objective historian.
Justice Gray leant heavily on the research of one of the expert witnesses, Richard J. Evans, who compared illegitimate distortion of the historical record practiced by Holocaust deniers with established historical methodologies.
By summarizing Gray's judgment, in an article published in the Yale Law Journal, Wendie E. Schneider distils these seven points for what he meant by an objective historian:
The historian must treat sources with appropriate reservations;
The historian must not dismiss counter-evidence without scholarly consideration;
The historian must be even-handed in treatment of evidence and eschew "cherry-picking";
The historian must clearly indicate any speculation;
The historian must not mistranslate documents or mislead by omitting parts of documents;
The historian must weigh the authenticity of all accounts, not merely those that contradict their favored view; and
The historian must take the motives of historical actors into consideration.
Official source
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