Question

Passage A
Historians have long debated the evidentiary value of autobiographies, with a dominant school of thought advising extreme caution. Because human memory is inherently reconstructive—an active process of assembling fragmented, often decayed recollections into a cohesive narrative—autobiographies are almost inevitably compromised by hindsight bias and strategic self-justification. An autobiographer does not merely transcribe the past; rather, they retroactively curate it to align with their contemporary self-concept and ideological commitments. Consequently, when historians treat autobiographies as objective repositories of historical fact, they risk absorbing the author's deliberate or unconscious distortions. This is not to imply that autobiographies are entirely devoid of academic value. Rather, their historiographical utility must be strictly and carefully circumscribed. They are most safely deployed as psychological or cultural artifacts: documents that illuminate the author's internal landscape, their strategies of self-fashioning, and the prevailing cultural scripts available to them at the time of composition, rather than serving as reliable chronicles of external historical events.

Passage B
The prevailing methodological skepticism regarding the historical utility of autobiographies, while ostensibly grounded in valid epistemological concerns about memory distortion, ultimately enforces an overly sanitized and incomplete version of history. By reflexively dismissing personal narratives as mere subjective artifacts, skeptical historians inadvertently privilege official state and institutional records. Such institutional documents are frequently treated as the gold standard of objective truth, despite being themselves rife with bureaucratic biases, political agendas, and strategic omissions. A more intellectually rigorous approach does not discard autobiographies, but rather subjects them to a robust, triangulated analysis. By meticulously cross-referencing personal accounts with independent archival data and demographic statistics, historians can effectively isolate and filter out the author's self-serving distortions. Once this critical methodological scaffolding is applied, autobiographies yield indispensable, granular insights into the lived, material realities of the past. Crucially, they provide access to the daily experiences and localized struggles of marginalized populations—narratives that are almost universally excluded from the official government chronicles favored by traditionalist historians.

The two passages together form a continuous debate regarding the historical value of autobiographies. Arrange the following rhetorical steps in the sequential order they appear across the logical progression of the debate, from the beginning of Passage A to the conclusion of Passage B.