Mcneill's Argumentative Essay

Powerful people in the past might have ultimately shaped and influenced the way we perceive history and the way we look at things. Most of us if not all of us have heard the heroic story of how Christopher Columbus discovered America but there are two sides to each story and we never thought of listening to the other side of it because we thought it was true since it’s what we learned at school and from the media. According to a quote by McNeill, “A historian who rejects someone else’s conclusions calls them mythical while claiming his own are true” (McNeill, 75), that being said If one side of the story is considered to be part of our history then we must presume that the other side of the story is a myth.

In this essay I will side with the famous George Orwell, who wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past” where he emphasizes the influence of powerful and dominant individuals on how the past was reported. I will support my opinion by explaining mythistory in McNeill’s …show more content…
McNeill suggests that history and myth are connected in many ways, McNeill quotes, “Myth and history are close kin inasmuch as both explain how things got to be the way they are by telling some sort of story” (McNeill, 75). In the reading, McNeill explain the concept of “scientific history” and he it is states that, “… a conscientious and careful historian needed only to arrange the facts into a readable narrative to produce genuinely scientific history” (McNeill, 76) but McNeill also mentions through the quote, “Facts that could be established beyond all reasonable doubt remained trivial in the sense that they did not, in and of themselves give meaning or intangibility to the record of the past” (McNeill, 76) that putting together a pattern of facts seemed too narrow for the people who write down history using this “scientific”