A detective’s main role is to determine whether a person is guilty of a crime. In our judicial system, a person is only considered guilty if there is no reasonable doubt that the person is responsible for the crime. In other words, the case against this person cannot have any holes. When historians look into the past to uncover truths regarding a certain event or time period, they must follow a similar train of thought. If even one piece of evidence gives a historian reason to believe that a course of events did not go the way it is commonly believed to have gone, then the entire history must be reexamined and possibly changed. This is exactly what happens in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time. Detective Alan Grant utilizes the skills he learned during his career with the Scotland Yard when he researches the life of Richard the Third and the accusation that Richard killed his two young nephews. Along with Carradine, he sets out to look for any reasonable doubt that Richard committed the crime, and sure enough, the two gentlemen find it. One important development is the realization that the most commonly accepted history of Richard the Third was written by someone who was not yet an adult when Richard had died, and therefore could not have known Richard personally and could not have a trustworthy knowledge of him. Trusting Sir Thomas More’s account would be like accepting the testimony of someone who did not witness a crime, but merely heard of it some time after it took place.
Just as detectives must rely on firsthand accounts when investigating crimes, historians must rely on primary sources when studying history. The most accurate information regarding a historical event comes from those who experienced it. For example, a diary entry dated during a certain historical event is more likely to have more accurate information than a secondhand account that was written fifty years after the event took place. This is because, over time, people’s thoughts and memories become jumbled, and facts can be lost. Most people have trouble remembering what they ate for breakfast a week ago, so how can one trust an account of an event fifty years later? Just as detectives must rely on recent, firsthand accounts, so must historians.
That said, detectives do not normally run into this problem, since for the most part they are investigating crimes that happened fairly recently, and they therefore do not need to worry about information changing over time. Historians do have this problem. It is an unfortunate fact that information does get lost, altered, or even made up over a long period of time. This is because different people throughout the years will add their own accounts of events, making historians’ jobs harder. This occurred in The Daughter of Time with Sir Thomas More’s account of Richard the Third, which altered information regarding the now infamous king. Historians must be able to identify any possible changes in an account of a historical event, otherwise false information will continue to spread.
Another important difference is that while there is usually only one way to recount a crime, there are multiple ways to recount history. When detectives investigate a crime, they are looking for a certain string of events that immediately follow each other. History is much broader than this. History is not just a string of events: these events all have political, social, cultural, environmental, and economical effects on the world. All of these must be taken into account if one wants an accurate understanding of a certain time period or event. It is not enough just to know that something happened, which led to something else. So, despite the similarities between the two, important differences must be taken into account in order to fully comprehend the roles of detectives and historians.
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