Here's a question that sounds like a riddle but isn't: Who understands a battle less accurately—the soldier who fought in it, or the historian who studies it two hundred years later? Your gut says the soldier. Your gut is wrong. And figuring out why is one of the most important lessons in historical methodology.

Being there doesn't mean you understood what happened. In fact, being there often guarantees you didn't. This isn't an insult to eyewitnesses—it's a feature of how human experience works. Let's look at why firsthand accounts are both invaluable and deeply unreliable, and why distance from an event can actually sharpen your understanding of it.

Imagine you're standing in the middle of a crowded intersection when a five-car pileup happens. You saw something—absolutely. But what you saw was the bumper coming at you, the sound of glass, the person screaming to your left. You didn't see the truck that ran the red light three seconds earlier. You didn't see the chain reaction from above. You experienced a fragment and your brain instantly, without asking your permission, built a story around that fragment.

History works the same way. A soldier at the Battle of Waterloo knew the terror of a cavalry charge and the smell of gunpowder. What he didn't know was the broader tactical picture, the diplomatic context, or why Napoleon chose to fight there in the first place. Proximity gives you intensity, not comprehension. The closer you are to an event, the more your understanding is shaped by your specific position in it—physically, emotionally, socially.

Historians call this the problem of situated knowledge. Every eyewitness sees from a particular spot. That spot illuminates certain details brilliantly while hiding the larger pattern. A factory worker during the Industrial Revolution could describe grueling shifts in vivid detail but might have no framework for understanding the economic forces transforming her entire world. Being inside the story doesn't mean you can read it.

Takeaway

Experiencing an event and understanding an event are two fundamentally different things. Proximity gives you vivid details but often blinds you to the larger pattern those details belong to.

Here's the uncomfortable part: eyewitnesses aren't just limited in what they saw—they're unreliable about what they remember seeing. And this isn't about lying. It's about how memory actually works. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus spent decades demonstrating that memory isn't a recording. It's a reconstruction. Every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds the scene from scratch, and each rebuild introduces subtle changes. Details shift. Timelines compress. Other people's stories bleed into your own.

This has devastating implications for historical source work. When a Civil War veteran dictates his memoirs thirty years after Gettysburg, he's not replaying a tape. He's constructing a narrative influenced by everything that happened since—other accounts he's read, conversations he's had, the way the war is now publicly remembered. His absolute sincerity makes it worse, not better, because he genuinely believes every word. A liar you can catch. A sincere person with a mutated memory is much harder to evaluate.

Historians deal with this by cross-referencing—comparing multiple accounts of the same event, looking for where they agree and, more importantly, where they diverge. The divergences are gold. They reveal what each witness's position, bias, and post-event experiences contributed to the account. Marc Bloch, the great French historian, compared this to a judge weighing conflicting testimonies. No single witness gives you the truth. The truth lives in the gaps between their stories.

Takeaway

Memory doesn't preserve the past—it rewrites it. A sincere eyewitness who genuinely believes their account can be more misleading than a known liar, because sincerity masks the distortion.

So if eyewitnesses are unreliable, what do historians actually bring to the table? Distance. Not just time, but analytical distance—the ability to see outcomes, compare cases, and access evidence that no single participant could have gathered. A historian studying the French Revolution can read letters from aristocrats and peasants, police reports and parliamentary debates, economic data and personal diaries. No one alive in 1789 had access to all of that simultaneously.

There's also the advantage of knowing how things turned out. Participants in historical events are trapped in what historians call the fog of the present—they don't know what comes next, so they can't distinguish the significant from the trivial. A newspaper editor in 1914 Sarajevo might have buried the archduke's assassination on page three. He didn't know it would trigger a world war. Hindsight isn't just a cliché—it's a genuine analytical tool that allows historians to identify causes and consequences invisible to contemporaries.

None of this means eyewitness accounts are useless. They're essential. They provide the raw texture, the human detail, the emotional reality that makes history more than abstract analysis. But they need to be read critically, as evidence produced by specific people in specific circumstances—not as transparent windows onto the past. The historian's job is to take those flawed, partial, deeply human accounts and construct something that none of the witnesses alone could see: the bigger picture.

Takeaway

Distance from an event isn't a handicap—it's a superpower. Knowing what happened next, having access to multiple perspectives, and being free from the emotional intensity of the moment all allow historians to see patterns that participants never could.

Next time someone says "I was there, so I know what happened," take it seriously—but not at face value. They know what it felt like to be there. That's precious and irreplaceable. But what actually happened? That's a different question, one that requires evidence, comparison, and critical distance.

Understanding this distinction doesn't just make you better at reading history. It makes you better at evaluating every claim that starts with "I saw it with my own eyes." And in an age of competing narratives, that skill is worth more than ever.