Making It Up

Josephine Tey's book The Daughter of Time poses many questions that a reader wouldn't otherwise be asking. What is "history"? How can we know if something is truly fact? Is it actually possible to judge a book by it's cover? What stuck with me the most was the word "tonypandy" which I still cannot find a proper definition for, but we'll get to that.

Discovering that only some of what once was fact regarding Richard III is true, made Grant and the readers question how much of our history is actually just stories people told to fill in the blanks of what they didn't want people to know. When you think about it, that's how the education system has always taught us. The first time we learned about Thanksgiving, it was the most basic and pleasant description that adults could think to tell children. As we grew, the story became more violent and harsh. Now that we're grown, we say we "know" what happened when Columbus came to America, and we "know" what happened at the Boston Tea Party and Pearl Harbor and we "know" that the United States went to the moon in 1969. (Debating the moon landing is for another time) My point is that by these few accounts of false history having been passed through centuries of writings, can make an individual question any history book's legitimacy.

This is where the question "What is history?" meets the question "What is real?" It becomes difficult to answer when you cannot pinpoint a definition for the two. What we know to be true and real, may not have been. When I was six, I knew that unicorns were real! I was determined that the French took them all and were hiding them in the Catacombs. That happened in the past, but does that make it real? Does that make it history? In the novel, Grant and Carradine use the term "tonypandy" to describe false history. The two learn that their most reliable source for accounts of Richard III's life, was not reliable at all. Through other thorough investigating, they come to a conclusion about Richard III's true character, but who's to say that other sources were 100% accurate as well?

If you haven't noticed, this book has turned me into a major skeptic. It astounds me that there is no known individual who kept account of Richard III's life, leading to people making their own stories. The book really challenged what is and is not history, and it seems to define the term as actual events, whether known or not. While I agree with this, having said in class that history is something that happened in the past, I think it is flexible.

I mean to say that while history should be recorded as the true events that occurred, it is not always so. Sometimes there are gaps and unanswered questions - things people should have taken note of but didn't, or all records of the event became lost somehow. People would go mad if these gaps were not filled and questions remained open! Then again...sometimes "I don't know" can be a legitimate answer...