HIS Blog Spring 2021 VB

  Image of how the piazza (town square) in my grandmother's hometown, Ponte San Nicolo` used to look like in 1940. My grandma lived less a block away from the square. When the bombing from the Germans took place, she was playing outside in her backyard. While she herself was not injured, her house, along with most of the buildings in the picture shown, had collapsed.

 One of the most common ways in which emotion can sometimes interfere with the supposedly objective act of collecting history is through bias and personal experience. A lot of history online is from the 20th century, and may likely intersect with the past life events of digital historians. It can be likely for a historian to feel emotionally attached to a specific historical event due to the direct or indirect effect that it had on their life at that time. Emotions could easily make the collection of history easier or harder on a historian based on their personal circumstance revolving around pieces of history.    Emotion can also come from bias. For example, an American historian whose relatives passed away in the Vietnam War might feel more compelled to collect history from the USA's and South Vietnam's perspectives rather than North Vietnam's. This may result in a lack of objectivity and balance in historical records.   There are some benefits to emotions in the c...