As a History Major...

I feel that the field of History, at least nowadays, acknowledges to some extent the artificiality of history.

For example, in my Chinese Philosophy class, with pretty much every document we read, there is a discussion of the veracity of the document. In our unit on Zhuangzi, we discuss the fact that Zhuangzi might not have written anything that he supposedly wrote and that each part of a his treatise seems to have been written by a different source. We discuss how Zhuangzi is called a Daoist, but only by later sources; no source ascribed to him refers to him as a Daoist. And Daoism itself is surrounded by these sorts of questions; Laozi's existence can be called entirely into question, for example.

And pretty much every history course I've taken has been like this, one way or another. Even in classes where we didn't read historical documents we've discussed matters of interpretation. In one class, we read a source that claimed a ancient Greek play's negative portrayal of barbarians was supposed to be ironic, and the question of whether modern day conceptions of irony can be applied that far back came up.

There seems to be a sort of hierarchy of history, from what is popularly concieved as history to what is discussed as history among scholars, and at the top level the very concept of history does begin to break down. Of course, the concept isn't abandoned wholesale, but there is definetly an awarness of its artificiality.