Let’s keep it civil here guys, or else I will have to lock this thread.
But how can a historain today accurately portray the battle of Marathon? Was he there? Did he witness the battle? Does he even understand the weapons of the time?
This is why it’s better to have a historian, preferably one from a 3rd party neutral nation, record the events in a non-partisan matter.
A historian will use his primary sources. Let’s take the book 1776 by David McCullough for example. His account of the battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston uses a host of sources, including letters written by George Washington, John Singleton Copley, addresses on the floor of the House of Commons, decrees from King George III, newspaper records, diary entries of American and British Soldiers, etc. Good historians are able to properly record history even if they personally have not experienced that specific event, and in fact are able to do so in a more accurate manner.
Another issue is revisionist history. This is where historians rewrite history to make it more politically correct for the day. We see this often today specifically around events that surround wars. These historians try to justify it as making the accounting more correct, but in actuallity, they are just changing history to be more pallatable to the people of the time and screwing up future historians that may only want to find the truth.
You would love one of my favorite books called Lies My Teacher Told Me. He talks about how American History textbooks cookie-cut history, creating heroes and downplaying not-so-pretty events.
For example, let’s take Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus committed significant amounts of genocide (upwards of one million deaths). We don’t learn that in school, do we? Our history textbooks borderline make up stories about Columbus. For example, one textbook describes Columbus’s landing in the Americans something along the lines of (I don’t have the book at college with me) “For two months, the storm-battered ships had traveled through the Atlantic Ocean, when one morning they finally caught a glimpse of land”. When in reality, Columbus’s ships did not hit any inclimate weather until after they had alright sighted Haiti, and had only been at sea for a little over a mont. (they stopped at the Azores for an extended period of time. It had been 2 months since the sailors had left Spain, but not 2 months at sea.