How legitimate can history be if every document that has ever been written has some bias behind its writing? To what extent can we trust historical books written in a time we otherwise would have no knowledge of? How certain can we be that the "history" we're taught actually happened? And finally how do historians classify something as historical, what qualifications does a document require to become historical? Thanks for the help, Alex.

Presuming that it is impossible to write unbiased history, does that make the discipline invalid in that it can never be what it would ideally (at least for many) be: a completely truthful presentation of the past?

Why do historians write as if Man were the pre-eminent factor in shaping events when so much is decided by scientific factors (and negative ones, like the absence of viruses and meteors)?