The statement also specifies that “Historians hold this view not because they believe that all interpretations are equally valid, or that nothing can ever be known about the past, or that facts do not matter. Quite the contrary. History would be pointless if such claims were true.”
An old debate is where to place history in the divide between subjective and objective truth.But these are stipulations distinctly in a minor key.
At the core, this issue reopens the old debate about where to place history in the divides between subjective and objective truth (historical truth derives from the interpreter or historical truth derives from the facts themselves) and between absolute and relative truth (historical truth is transhistorical or historical truth is historically situated). Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (1988) provided a classic articulation of how this debate played out among American historians. In their mutual polemics, the absolutist/objectivist is arrogant and rigid, while the subjectivist/relativist can just say any old thing, usually ideological nonsense, as the requirement to aspire to the truth has been removed.
What Novick’s account couldn’t include is how the professional standards of the AHA themselves have been deformed since he wrote. The year before Novick published That Noble Dream, the AHA issued its first Standards of Professional Conduct (this version, as revised through 1999). These initial standards left open the nature of history by including both options: “Scholarship, the uncovering and exchange of new information and the shaping of interpretations, is basic to the activities of the historical profession.” Although these first standards prescribed “an awareness of one’s own bias,” they also strongly emphasized the objective importance of sources: “Because historians must have access to sources—archival and other—to produce reliable history, they have a professional obligation to preserve sources.” The standards gave measured additional support to history as interpretation but under the rubric of intellectual diversity: “When applied with integrity, the political, social, and religious beliefs of historians may inform their historical practice.”