Can We Know Our Past?

Harvard FAS

In a time when histories are being contested, monuments removed, and alternative facts compete with established orthodoxy, how do we evaluate competing narratives about what really happened in the past?What happened in the past? How do you know? Even though today we take great pains to document every major event that occurs, more than 99% of human history is not written down. How, then, can we determine with any certainty what people did, let alone thought about, hundreds, thousands, and even…