Final answer:
The telling of certain historical stories can empower or disenfranchise people. Neglecting the stories of marginalized groups can lead to a distorted understanding of history. Historians strive to provide a comprehensive and inclusive narrative that challenges biases and highlights the experiences of all individuals.
Step-by-step explanation:
The telling of certain historical stories can have various benefits or can result in disenfranchisement. Some historical stories can empower and humanize people by providing a sense of dignity, while others can dispossess and malign them. When the stories of certain groups or perspectives are excluded or marginalized in historical narratives, it can lead to a distorted and incomplete understanding of the past.
For example, the stories of marginalized communities, such as women, the poor, and minority groups, have often been neglected in traditional historical accounts. Historians in the 1960s and 1970s started focusing on these groups and used diverse sources like church records, court hearings, and personal narratives to shed light on their lives and experiences. This approach, known as social history, aimed to represent these groups on an equal footing with traditionally privileged groups.
By telling the stories of those whose voices were rarely heard, historians have sought to provide a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of history. This helps to challenge biased perspectives and highlight the contributions and struggles of marginalized individuals and communities.
The telling of historical stories can either benefit or disenfranchise individuals and communities, depending on whether the stories are used to empower or to malign. Representations of historical events can reflect biases in the value placed on written versus oral traditions. Efforts in social history have sought to reveal the lives of commonly unrepresented groups, influencing our collective understanding of the past.
Individuals and communities can significantly benefit or be disenfranchised by the ways in which historical stories are told. When stories are used to disempower or malign, they can strip away the dignity of entire groups, and create a biased understanding of history. However, when they are used to empower and humanize, stories repair and uplift broken dignity. The representation of historical events in stories can reflect biases, particularly when oral traditions are undervalued compared to written records.
The storytelling strategy can completely alter the perception of a group; for example, starting a narrative of Native Americans with the arrival of the colonists presents a different perspective than starting with their defense against the colonists. Recognition of social history efforts since the 1960s shows the importance of including diverse experiences 'from the bottom up', shedding light on groups like women, the poor, and minorities, who have often gone unrepresented. Historians strive to reduce their own biases, but those biases sometimes provide new insights into the lives of ordinary people rather than just elites.