Welcome back to the History Thread! This week’s optional discussion prompt: how important is balance or impartiality in historical works? Obviously most historians seek to achieve something like a balanced perspective on the people or events they write about. But we’re all human, and for some events or people sometimes this is neither possible nor desirable.

This thought was inspired by reading Peter Cozzens’ The Earth is Weeping, a recent book about the Indian Wars. Cozzens states in the introduction that he seeks a “demythologized” version of Western settlement, taking to task Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for its polemical treatment of the subject. Now, I’d agree that Brown’s work is somewhat problematic – it reads often more like a novel than a historical work, and his pro-Native stance sometimes curdles into “Noble Savage” romanticization. But on the other hand, Cozzens seems to view “balance” as documenting atrocities by both sides, and pointing up the failures of Indigenous peoples to unite against white settlement as much as the dishonest policies of the United States. He doesn’t exactly apologize for Manifest Destiny, but his presentation does at times seem like the kind of “balance” that can only be achieved by giving two things of unequal stature equal importance, for the sake of seeming impartial.