In the Daddow argument, historians are presented as subjective and biased in their documenting of historical events because they somehow benefit by focusing on narrating these events without questioning their accuracy or validity. My experience in reading history as well as frequently watching documentaries made by historians such as Ken Burns present arguments for the opposite point of view: historians accumulate as much information as they can in order to present a complete picture of the events they are recounting. For example, how many historians have written about the assassination of President Lincoln, taking pains to examine the event in excruciating detail and presenting the accounts of a variety of witnesses from that time as well as the accounts of historians from times past? There have been countless efforts to understand the events surrounding the assassination, especially focusing on John Wilkes Booth, his life both before and after the murder, and trying to make sense of his motivation. I am fascinated by historical accounts connected with the Lincoln assassination and have never perceived even a hint of bias or an agenda on the part of a historian, but rather solely perceived their purpose as presenting a historical record. This includes the current historian, Doris Kearns Goodwin, who is an expert on American history including the Lincoln assassination, and frequently comments on these events in an objective, informational, and interesting manner.

Another historian that would disprove that argument is Ken Burns, whose many documentaries including “The Civil War” recount in painstaking detail the events of those years using eyewitness accounts, diaries, and the words of the people who have actually experienced those events in the purest of forms, their own words so that Mr. Burns does not appear to have any agenda other than presenting actual history to his audience. I therefore disagree with Daddow’s thesis that historians ” either do not have the time or the inclination to focus on the gaps and prejudices in their accounts of the past.” My experience has been quite the opposite: historians devote an extremely significant amount of time trying to present coherent accounts of the facts of history.