Choosing a starting point can bias history without any falsehood

Evidence

The misuser of history can to a considerable extent serve his purpose simply by defining the topic, that is to say, of what, of where, of whom, of when, he is writing the history. Take even a simple matter like the starting point. One has to start somewhere if one is going to write a book or an article or give a lecture on an historical topic, and the choice may in some measure predetermine the result. Any starting point is necessarily in some degree artificial. History is a seamless garment; periodization is a convenience of the historian, not a fact of the historical process. By choosing carefully, one can slant history without any resort to actual falsehood. For example, a writer on relations between the United States and Japan can start with Hiroshima, or he can start with Pearl Harbor. Even precisely identical narratives of events would look very different, if they start with the one or the other. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 1838

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that periodization is a ‘convenience of the historian, not a fact of the historical process’ resonates far beyond history — it applies to any framing of process as stages, from development models to life narratives.
• XREF: Resonates with the reader’s interest in narrative framing and infrastructure as framing — the same logic applies to how one frames the history of trees or noise, e.g. starting a tree history with the industrial clear-cutting vs. the ancient woodlands. — connects to: Present projects retroactively decide whether a past period counts as continuous or repudiated — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1188
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘The starting point as narrative weapon’ — how Hiroshima-vs-Pearl-Harbor style choices predetermine every history, from national histories down to tech retrospectives.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 1838