It depends on who is writing it and how indepth the studies of any reported event or chain of events that happened. It would have to include other documentation from several different sources and a good mix of logical thinking and scientific applications where at all possible. Understanding the political and social invironment at the time in question helps a great deal as well.

Bibilically speaking, science can pick up some evidence on many localized environmental evidence of things that were claimed but for the personal experences... well, those tend to be difficult to document at all. Drugs and desease were pretty prevalent then. Who knows how clear headed and clean these people were and how much might have actually been drug or illness induced.

There are interesting points on boths sides of that arguement though. This is where the problems come in. The arguements can seem reasonable enough to those who have a fair knowledge of related ideas, some of which may have had experiences enough that support the possibility of such things being possible.

The dominant culture determines the historical story that is being told. What we have is not history, but histiography-- opinions about what happened.

Most history is nuanced by the current power that be to fit it's purpose. You have to willing to dig back to see the truth, and that is ephemrial. That is why the Sayatayana quote is used so often, "Those that ignore history will be forced to relive it. And then the corarally, those that study history will be forced to watch it repeat itself!"

well its a guide and sometimes history is able to be well documented or authenticated but we would do well to remember that history is always written by the Victors. I am not particularly interested in History don't claim any for my self and I do like watching documentaries on any history to see how the story has gone and might go.

My history teacher told us that you must treat all history books as biased and as we didnt live at the time of when the books were written we would never truly know the truth . A good historian will read numerous texts , discoveries and make a patchwork of the evidnece to get the truth and even then you won'T get the 100% truth but as close as

Good question

History was my worst subject in high school. I passed with a B, because of my excellent note taking. If I didn't have my notes to study from, I would've failed it.