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This question is about historian.
What is the role of a historian?
The primary role of a historian is to inform others by telling a story. The historian must be the narrator of the story they want to tell. Whether relating information to a corporate executive, writing a book, or teaching, historians must present their information in an organized manner.
Like works of fiction, historical accounts have a beginning, middle, and end. As narrators, historians must choose the logical starting point, organize the middle part of the story, and conclude the tale with a satisfying conclusion. On occasion, a historian might witness an event unfold.
When they do, they record the information in as much detail as possible. For example, when Mount Etna erupted in A.D. 79, it buried the towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Pliny the Younger witnessed the eruption and his detailed letters recorded preceding and subsequent events as well as the actual eruption that are still studied today.
Historians must perform a significant amount of research. They might spend many hours reviewing source documents, such as immigrant ships' logs or birth records, to confirm a single fact. They use books compiled by other historians, court records, journals kept by individuals, and correspondence files to find pertinent information.
Getting the facts correct is important to a trained historian. Once historians have ascertained the basic facts surrounding an event, they must analyze them. By putting together the individual pieces surrounding the subject, a historian can begin to analyze the causes and effects of the event.
The process can be somewhat subjective, but the role of the historian is to decide which facts are relevant and how heavily each factor weighed in the event. For example, a historian researching an economic depression must decide whether politics, a losing war, taxes, disease, epidemics, or uneducated citizenship hastened the downturn.
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