ribed objectively and neutrally. Even the values, as reported by those who hold them, can be described neutrally, with no attempt made to assess their truthfulness.
The discipline of history arose as one of the humanities in the Italian Renaissance. Many modern historians have wanted to regard and practice history as a social science, by making it value-free and limiting it to an objective description of what has in fact happened in some certain area or period. However, such a goal is not logically attainable.
In describing what has happened within a specific geographical area within a specific period of time, one is dealing with an enormous amount of data. For the distant past the data could include not only all written records for the area and period of interest, but also all the archaeological data developed by modern research. The more recent the period, the larger the volume of data, and for very recent periods the amount of data could be still growing and so unmeasurable.
Obviously, no historian is going to write a history book that is larger than all the data it is based upon. Part of the reason for creating such a book is to attempt to synthesize all the data and explain historical events meaningfully and comprehensibly. The larger the book, the more it risks being incomprehensible. The historian solves this communication problem by, of course, choosing to study only important events and choosing only significant data to analyze. However, meaning, significance, and importance are values.
To experience an event as meaningful is quintessentially
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