Opening salvo

I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, true "porteño", grew up not too far south of there, and returned to it to continue my studies in the university. All that was old history, at least from the perspective of my rather long and intense life. Then I came to live in the United States. Also long time ago. My parents were immigrants in Argentina, I am immigrant in the US. You can safely say that I have spent my life on the bridge between two cultures (or more, if you count my parents original North-European culture, and my time traveling and working in different countries.) Roots in Northern Europe, in Argentina, in the United States, and elsewhere. Having relatives in many countries helps too.
One thing that have been a constant in my whole life is my love for good reading. Another, my love for history, since my father got me H.G. Wells' The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, I, II (1920, 1931, 1940; posthumous revision by Raymond Postgate 1949) which included a complete detail of the Second World War events. I think it happened around 1950 or 1951. At that time we lived in a large farm, with a school which I attended right across the highway, barely 500 feet from our house. The farm though me a lot about biology (by the time I was ten years old I had a large collection of insects, and knew a lot about the bees and the flowers...)
Life in the farm provided with ample time for reading (most of which I did in a nice tree-house built on an old pine tree which grew up inclined instead of straight up, providing a suitable staircase for access to the house my father and an old guy sort of second foreman in the farm, help me build on that tree. Don Pedro used to tell a lot of stories in simple words which also fired my imagination and formed the basis for another love in my life: get to know people, and by that I mean really know them, not just to make acquaintances...). Another book which I read around that time was an old edition of the bible. Complete, from Adam to Revelation and beyond.

So I started to love to know what truly happened now, then, or anytime, there, here, and elsewhere. Also I learned to tell apart fact from fiction, and began my search... which I still continue and I am sure will keep doing until I make the transition and emigrate to the realm of the spirits.

The truth in history is an elusive mistress. In reality, everything we know from an historical perspective is nothing more than opinions expressed by well intentioned individuals, generally biased, knowingly or not, in favor of predetermined views.
As other loosely defined disciplines come into play, such as Archaeology, albeit supported by scientific technology which helps to precise and clarify details encountered in our search, history is continuously revising its fundamental premises.
However, we still lack a focus in our task. The most glaring problem is the extraordinary amount of items demanding attention. We live in a world of over six thousand million (or six billion depending your way of counting) individuals loosely grouped into tens of thousands individualized communities, each of which was begotten from previous groupings, splitting and rearranging in new associations all the time, even as we speak. It is impossible for a human mind to keep track of all that is going on today, and even less to keep conscious about the historical evolution of each grouping and split.
In addition, we know little and have even less confidence in our knowledge of vanished communities and forgotten histories. Barely a couple hundred years ago a young upstart leader from Europe became fascinated with the monumental remains found in the sands of Egypt and directed his men to the collection and study of whatever they could find about such remains.
Šumer, Hatti, and thousands of other cultures, were unknown to those European scholars, who in the major part, depended on a loose history handed down mainly by their religious texts.
Consequence of Napoleon's interest in searching the ancient Egypt, the enthusiasm of the scholars rouse to heights never seen before and the support of the European ruling elites meant that thousands of individuals spilled all over the world taking a new look on what was being offered to their gaze. Most were daring individuals, albeit ill-prepared for the task on hand. To one Darwin who had opportunity to hone his mind in the subjects that became his life-long quest, there were hundreds that barely had any idea of what they were supposed to search, beyond their obstinacy and possession of the means to push their interests forward. And the new discoveries fueled the blaze out of control.
We began to collect an extraordinary mass of artifacts and snippets of knowledge, but unfortunately, also we began a systemic destruction of many more items than those we preserved for further study. Just by ignorance, we dismissed many items as unimportant or unrelated, items which now we lament not having in order to be able to make sense of those we kept. So all our assumptions suffer from this incomplete research malady. In addition, as the newly acquired knowledge began to filter to the masses through the books being written by these mavericks, it began to stir opposition from the established religious and political groups, afraid of losing the justification to their monopolies on power. For every research which brought new perspectives on our history, there were dozens of articles and books presenting a disparaging view of the findings, even denying the research conclusions and claiming to have found gross mistakes, errors, and misinterpretation of the facts.
Some of the critiques were valid, and pointed out the major drawback of research going wild: the jumping too fast to loose conclusions. History and Archaeology were more of literary undertakings than scientific disciplines. Popularity won the day over rigorous study. Style was more important than accuracy. We had to wait until the twentieth century got underway to begin to hone the scope of both fields. It didn't help that a research sponsored by the existing religious rackets gave birth to the biblical archaeology, where the bias toward "proving" the "historicity" of the writings on which their doctrines were based, created distortions which still today haunt us.
We desperately need to define our scientific approach to research regarding history; because, in spite of hundred opinion pieces talking about criteria regarding historical studies, we still lack a concise and uniform approach to what constitutes a historical fact, what constitutes a mere interpretation, and how to develop hypothesis and theories in our historical perspective. All these aspects are fundamental in determining the foundational tenets of our historical knowledge. The rigor of a scientific approach in these fields is still sorely missing.
So we band together to face this task, to begin a systematic review of everything we might already know. We aim to reorganize this knowledge in a common sense approach, while keeping an eye on the help we might receive from our technological advances in the process of evaluating and seeking to understand what we know. It won't be done in a short span of time, rather it will be a continuing process going beyond our generation, but it needs to get started. Otherwise we won't ever find the true past history of our generations.
If you are interested in knowing where we come from, and what path we followed to get to our present, I invite you to join me.
I warn you. This task I start here requires from everybody patience, open minds, and to avoid any kind of preconceptions, bias, or bigotry. If you are trying to justify your beliefs without a willingness to submit them to question, probably you will get frustrated and perhaps the best for everybody would be that you stay out of any discussions. Otherwise, I am sure you will enjoy my (and ours) exploration.
If you might be interested, I warmly welcome you to joint me following our history's calling.