Before you study the history study the historian.

 

I would hardly describe history as neutral. The famous English historian E.H. Carr, did say that before you study the history, you should study the historian.

Every historian carries their own baggage.  Nevertheless, it's rare to find anyone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap of chaos, chance, accident and contingency. We have to give history a coherent shape in order to make sense of it and that's why we divide it into periods of history. 

Scarcely anybody believes that there are no intelligible patterns to history at all. For the most part, the threads that lash it together have been scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. If we were to cut through past history at any point and inspect a cross section of it, we're likely to find the great majority of men and women, living lives of largely fruitless toil for the benefit of a ruling or privileged class. We're likely to see a political state that is prepared to use violence to maintain the status quo and probably some form of resistance to this injustice by people who feel exploited and oppressed. We are also likely to find that quite a lot of myth, culture and thought of the period, lends itself to legitimising the situation. 

The sort of history that we were taught at an English state school in the 1950s and 1960s, was about English Kings and Queens who were mainly of French, Norman, or German in origin. We were told really nothing about the lives of ordinary people. It was neither his-story or her-story, but the story of power and ruling elites. What they call history from below or labour history, came much later, with pioneering works like the 'Making of the English Working Class', by E.P. Thompson.