I"ve been in a fascinating discussion of bias in history on another
email list and I thought I'd share some of what I wrote there for
your consideration here. I'm not an expert, just an amateur - in the
true meaning of amateur as one who loves the subject.

Someone on the other list made a comment that all history books are
biased and I contradicted that claim with this post.

Merriam-Webster defines bias this way:
3 a : BENT, TENDENCY b : an inclination of temperament or outlook;
especially : a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment :
PREJUDICE c : an instance of such prejudice d (1) : deviation of the
expected value of a statistical estimate from the quantity it
estimates (2) : systematic error introduced into sampling or testing
by selecting or encouraging one outcome or answer over others

Bias is a negative term, connoting a certain blindness to facts. I
prefer to use the term "worldview." Certainly everyone has a
worldview and it definitely colors the way we see things. A
worldview can become a bias, but not necessarily. There is also the
need to recognize the existence of objective truth. Not all
worldviews believe that there is such a thing. The Catholic
worldview believes and preaches in truth, not only as an abstract
idea, but also as a concrete fact. As Fr. Corapi says (I'm
paraphrasing) Truth is not just an idea, He's a Person!

In an earlier post someone made the comment that straight history is
facts, but any written history is filtered through the writer's
bias. I was discussing this whole thing with my history-major son
last night and he made an interesting comment. He said that a good
example of unbiased history would be a timeline, even they however
can show some worldview by what they chose to include or exclude,
but any history book has a worldview and you need to be aware of the
author's views when reading.

Now I love history and I love living books. But I refuse to
sacrifice truth for the sake of entertainment. A living book can be
both true and enjoyable, or false and enjoyable. In my mind a
biased book is one that contains factual errors due to the authors
conscious or unconscious prejudices stemming from their worldview.
They conveniently ignore facts that don't fit with their agenda. I
believe that bias comes ultimately from a fear of truth. Fear causes
us to try to change facts to fit our personal needs. A Catholic
does not have to fear the truth because we understand that man has
been warped by original sin and that although Catholics are human
the Church is divine. Catholics do evil things, many times in the
name of the Church, because all men fall short of perfection. But
the Church stands on a different plane, she contains no error, she
is the Body of Christ and Christ is Truth Incarnate. So a good
Catholic history text doesn't whitewash the human error in history,
he faces it, admits it and asks forgiveness for it. A bad Catholic
text falls into the trap of trying to make excuses for sin or
minimizing the errors. That's not serving the cause of truth.

Quoting Hilaire Belloc:
"The Catholic brings to history (when I say "history" in these pages
I mean the history of Christendom) self-knowledge. As a man in a
confessional accuses himself of what he knows to be true and what
other people cannot judge, so a Catholic, talking of the united
European civilization, when he blames it, blames it for motives and
for acts which are his own. He himself could have done these things
in person. He is not relatively right in his blame, he is
absolutely right. As a man can testify to his own motive, so can
the Catholic testify to unjust, irrelevant, or ignorant conceptions
of the European story; for he knows why and how it proceeded.
Others, not Catholic, look upon the story of Europe externally as
strangers. They have to deal with something which presents itself
to them partially and disconnectedly, by its phenomena alone; he
[the Catholic] sees it all from its center in its essence, and
together."

An unbiased book is written by an author who recognizes that they
have a particular worldview and is willing to see beyond their own
horizons and get into the skin of someone from a different place,
time and philosophy and really tries to see through their eyes.
That's good history.

I want to bring history alive to my children, but it must be true
history, history based on facts rather than bias and prejudice. We
read history written by a variety of worldviews and we compare them
to our own, this broadens our horizons and makes us more empathetic
and discerning. Teaching children to distrust all authors
because "everyone is biased" I'm afraid does the children a
disservice, undermines their willingness to trust and to believe in
the existence of objective truth.

This is not written as a judgement on others, just a description of
my personal educational philosophy.

OK, I've given you my opinions, which are based *not* on expertise,
but on lots of reading of and discussing with historians, Catholic
and secular. I look forward to hearing what others have to say on
this!