What is history?

[rousseau]

But there are also things we objectively know about the past, for instance:
- when the last ice age ended
- that the agricultural revolution happened
- that the enlightenment happened
- that the human population has been growing steadily for thousands of years.

History is not just about events and trends. It is about what they mean, and that is subject to interpretation, which in turn is contingent on the historian's point of view. You can find an excellent collection of examples in The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present. If you are actually interested in historiography you could go further by reading what Trevelyan, Macaulay, Thompson, Thomson, Acton et al wrote about the same period and the same location. You may scratch your head at times, wondering if they are in fact writing history concerning the same period and the same location. Then you may find it helpful to recall Carr's analogy with catching oceans, baits and fishes.

We can agree that there is objective and subjective meaning, though, no?

An apple is objectively an apple. An apple's relation to other things in certain contexts may be subjective. Global warming is objectively happening, how this event is interpreted is subjective. I'd think that the scientific method, and scientific understanding is just newly being injected into the field of history. Up until very recently the field was awash with little to no awareness of itself.

So it's not that history is ultimately subjective. What happened, to an extent, can be made objective, or as objective as possible, and in some cases it can be made completely objective. But then how that's framed depends on the subject.

This is no different from a field like biology, except that it's easier to be completely accurate in the harder sciences.

 

[Politesse]

It's the title of one of my favourite books. Written by E.H. Carr, its major attraction is that it packs a lot of information and an intelligently presented point of view into a slim volume.

Carr rejected the cult of facts started by Ranke in the 1830s and continued by Acton among others. This does not mean he rejected the use of facts. He just disagreed that history can be turned into an empirical science in which, as the positivists would have it, objective facts lead to objective conclusions. Historical research will not come up with something equivalent to the laws of motion. I like Carr's analogy:

The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use – these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.

So, might it be possible to gather the many sets of facts assembled by the various historians, conduct a meta-study, and come up with a picture of "how things really were"? I don't think so. Incommensurability will inevitably be noticed. Some facts can't be made to coherently fit the picture. Then it becomes a matter of which facts to toss out and we're back to the matter of "point of view". Sorry, Friedrich. Sorry, Niall.

Guess it depends on what you're trying to understand. I mean if you want to understand the root causes of the French Revolution by studying a single year in history, that's of course going to be open to interpretation.

But there are also things we objectively know about the past, for instance:
- when the last ice age ended
- that the agricultural revolution happened
- that the enlightenment happened
- that the human population has been growing steadily for thousands of years

Only one of those things is an objective fact; the others are abstract categories constructed to give meaning to complex assemblages of data in a way that creates a satisfying narrative. There is all manner of subjectivity involved with this linear and progressivist view of history as being divided into neat periods and epochs of essential difference. It is a fact that the climate is variable, and we know a lot about things like the average temperature in any given year. But calling these years or those an "Ice Age" is telling a story, one with arbitrarily set boundaries, and it is does more to suit the living than explain the dead. The humans of the time would have had no reason to see themselves as living in an "Ice Age", for instance. Similarly with the others, there are facts involved. But historians simmer those facts down into simplifications and narratives as it suits their needs; there is nothing objective about what people feel they need from the past. And one can easily tell different stories about the same facts, and be just as accurate.

 

[rousseau]

Guess it depends on what you're trying to understand. I mean if you want to understand the root causes of the French Revolution by studying a single year in history, that's of course going to be open to interpretation.

But there are also things we objectively know about the past, for instance:
- when the last ice age ended
- that the agricultural revolution happened
- that the enlightenment happened
- that the human population has been growing steadily for thousands of years

Only one of those things is an objective fact; the others are abstract categories constructed to give meaning to complex assemblages of data in a way that creates a satisfying narrative. There is all manner of subjectivity involved with this linear and progressivist view of history as being divided into neat periods and epochs of essential difference. It is a fact that the climate is variable, and we know a lot about things like the average temperature in any given year. But calling these years or those an "Ice Age" is telling a story, one with arbitrarily set boundaries, and it is does more to suit the living than explain the dead. The humans of the time would have had no reason to see themselves as living in an "Ice Age", for instance. Similarly with the others, there are facts involved. But historians simmer those facts down into simplifications and narratives as it suits their needs; there is nothing objective about what people feel they need from the past. And one can easily tell different stories about the same facts, and be just as accurate.

I disagree.

If you want to argue that calling a period of relative cold an 'ice age', or a period where humans started using more refined planting methods 'the agricultural revolution', subjective, sure, fair enough. But this doesn't change the fact that at those periods of time a physical phenomena happened. The names you mention are basically constructs so various historians have a common language and know what is being referred to. Sure, maybe how those terms are built fit into the popular narrative of history at the time, but if you want to extend this argument then this applies to basically everything.

Let me ask you, does the theory of evolution exist, or is it an abstract category constructed to give meaning to complex assemblages of data? If our understanding of evolution is vastly different in one thousands of years from now, does that make the theory as it stands today unreal? And how would we know the difference between something that is objectively known, and something that is not?

Further, how would you build terms to refer to objectively known physical and social phenomena without being contextualized within the understanding of the current era?

Basically, all of this amounts to absolutism about how history used to be practiced, and disregards the fact that the past can be known to the degree that it can be known. Just because some guy interprets the data in a way that fits a popular narrative, doesn't mean there isn't an underlying reality that the evidence is pointing to.

 

[rousseau]

Maybe Carr rightly points out that people reading history should be aware of the subjectivity of interpretation, but to go as far as saying we can't build objective frameworks to understand how history moves would be going too far, imo.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

According to The History Channel, history is mostly the Second World War, particularly the bits involving Hitler; with a smattering of aliens, Egyptology, and archaeology from other periods (mostly periods of war, with a strong emphasis on weapons technology).

You left out Swamp People.

 

[bilby]

Guess it depends on what you're trying to understand. I mean if you want to understand the root causes of the French Revolution by studying a single year in history, that's of course going to be open to interpretation.

But there are also things we objectively know about the past, for instance:
- when the last ice age ended
- that the agricultural revolution happened
- that the enlightenment happened
- that the human population has been growing steadily for thousands of years

Only one of those things is an objective fact; the others are abstract categories constructed to give meaning to complex assemblages of data in a way that creates a satisfying narrative. There is all manner of subjectivity involved with this linear and progressivist view of history as being divided into neat periods and epochs of essential difference. It is a fact that the climate is variable, and we know a lot about things like the average temperature in any given year. But calling these years or those an "Ice Age" is telling a story, one with arbitrarily set boundaries, and it is does more to suit the living than explain the dead. The humans of the time would have had no reason to see themselves as living in an "Ice Age", for instance. Similarly with the others, there are facts involved. But historians simmer those facts down into simplifications and narratives as it suits their needs; there is nothing objective about what people feel they need from the past. And one can easily tell different stories about the same facts, and be just as accurate.

None of those things is an objective fact.

The broad trend in population over the last few thousand years has been one of growth; but not steady growth; Particularly not in the period prior to the enlightenment (ie most of any timescale measured in thousands of years).

Major die-backs can be found due to war, famine, and plague that made noticeable interruptions to the trend of growth - even as recently as the period 1914-20. And 'steady growth' would render such observations as the 'baby boom' impossible.

Oh, and since the mid 1960s, the availability of reliable and safe birth control has eradicated the growth trend. Only demographic lag (babies don't have children until a couple of decades after they are born) is still propping up the growth trend; World population will stabilise in the next three or four decades.

The observation of 'steady growth' depends upon 'smoothing out' the numbers over a very long term perspective; zoom in to single centuries, decades or years, and population totals worldwide are very 'noisy' indeed.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

What is history?

I agree with this in a general sense:

A sequence of events. That is what a history is.

But the word has more than one meaning, a general "history" where you could talk about the history of dinosaurs and then a more specific history for which you might take a class in school.

The latter history applies to humans and it applies between two time periods: pre-history and the present. So the latter history term means A sequence of events involving humans between pre-history and the present. In case there is any confusion on what prehistory means, it is before there were written records. So if you want to tweak things you could say history is the study of human events up to the present since the advent of written records.

Also, history is the thing we are doomed to repeat.

 

[bilby]

Sure, but prehistory is very variable by geography.

In Egypt, the Indus Valley, and Iraq, prehistory means 'before about 5,000 years ago'. In Australasia it means 'before about 230 years ago'.

The present is easier to pin down, although most people would refer to last week as 'current affairs' rather than 'history', so even that's not a cinch. Events from before we were born are certainly 'history', so that's anything from zero to about 110 years ago, depending on the age of the person involved.

So history starts between 5,000 and 230 years ago, and runs for between 5,000 and 120 years. That's a pretty large uncertainty.

 

[Politesse]

If you want to argue that calling a period of relative cold an 'ice age', or a period where humans started using more refined planting methods 'the agricultural revolution', subjective, sure, fair enough. But this doesn't change the fact that at those periods of time a physical phenomena happened. The names you mention are basically constructs so various historians have a common language and know what is being referred to. Sure, maybe how those terms are built fit into the popular narrative of history at the time, but if you want to extend this argument then this applies to basically everything.

Let me ask you, does the theory of evolution exist, or is it an abstract category constructed to give meaning to complex assemblages of data? If our understanding of evolution is vastly different in one thousands of years from now, does that make the theory as it stands today unreal? And how would we know the difference between something that is objectively known, and something that is not?

As a social phenomenon, it certainly has objectively measurable impacts on society, so phenomenologically speaking it is real. But the "theory" itself is an abstraction, yes. Of course it is. Any biologist can tell you there are some rough edges and essentially arbitrary distinctions that must be made to sustain it; there are multiple definitions of evolution, and there have been many sea changes such as the one you describe, so this isn't a hypothetical - Darwin's understanding of evolution was greatly impacted and indeed largely replaced, by the scientific description of genetics forty years later, and again by the discovery and sequencing of DNA.

As to the first paragraph, the abstractions we make about the world absolutely do "apply to basically everything".

Theories are conscious, functional abstractions. If we are scientists, we know that no theory fully encapsulates a complex phenomenon, and that they need constant refinement as the contradictions between generalization and empirical confirmation surface. Theories are real, and helpful, but they are not "Truth" and should not aspire to be, in the scientific mind.

Further, how would you build terms to refer to objectively known physical and social phenomena without being contextualized within the understanding of the current era?

You cannot. This is why it is good to encourage multiple and diverse perspectives on history, and to remain in conversation with historiography. Few disciplines are as interested in their own literary past as historians, and this is no accident; a good historian must study how social context affects historiography in order to understand the limitations of their own perspectives.

Basically, all of this amounts to absolutism about how history used to be practiced, and disregards the fact that the past can be known to the degree that it can be known. Just because some guy interprets the data in a way that fits a popular narrative, doesn't mean there isn't an underlying reality that the evidence is pointing to.

No one has claimed that there are no facts, only that a "history" is not a fact. It is always a narrative, attached to but not bounded by empirical reality. This is especially important where we no longer have access to such empirical validations. Most contradictions and conflicts in historical interpretation cannot be resolved scientifically. No one would deny that there is an objective reality to a question like, say, who fired the first shot at the Boston Massacre. But the forensic evidence one would need to resolve this scientifically is not now accessible to the historian. All they have to work with is documentation, and the bias thereof must be understood. Any given history, then, has no choice but to speculate, and moreover rely heavily on the speculations of previous generations.

 

[rousseau]

As a social phenomenon, it certainly has objectively measurable impacts on society, so phenomenologically speaking it is real. But the "theory" itself is an abstraction, yes. Of course it is. Any biologist can tell you there are some rough edges and essentially arbitrary distinctions that must be made to sustain it; there are multiple definitions of evolution, and there have been many sea changes such as the one you describe, so this isn't a hypothetical - Darwin's understanding of evolution was greatly impacted and indeed largely replaced, by the scientific description of genetics forty years later, and again by the discovery and sequencing of DNA.

As to the first paragraph, the abstractions we make about the world absolutely do "apply to basically everything".

Theories are conscious, functional abstractions. If we are scientists, we know that no theory fully encapsulates a complex phenomenon, and that they need constant refinement as the contradictions between generalization and empirical confirmation surface. Theories are real, and helpful, but they are not "Truth" and should not aspire to be, in the scientific mind.

You cannot. This is why it is good to encourage multiple and diverse perspectives on history, and to remain in conversation with historiography. Few disciplines are as interested in their own literary past as historians, and this is no accident; a good historian must study how social context affects historiography in order to understand the limitations of their own perspectives.

Basically, all of this amounts to absolutism about how history used to be practiced, and disregards the fact that the past can be known to the degree that it can be known. Just because some guy interprets the data in a way that fits a popular narrative, doesn't mean there isn't an underlying reality that the evidence is pointing to.

No one has claimed that there are no facts, only that a "history" is not a fact. It is always a narrative, attached to but not bounded by empirical reality. This is especially important where we no longer have access to such empirical validations. Most contradictions and conflicts in historical interpretation cannot be resolved scientifically. No one would deny that there is an objective reality to a question like, say, who fired the first shot at the Boston Massacre. But the forensic evidence one would need to resolve this scientifically is not now accessible to the historian. All they have to work with is documentation, and the bias thereof must be understood. Any given history, then, has no choice but to speculate, and moreover rely heavily on the speculations of previous generations.

That's fair.

To respond more meaningfully I'll have to actually read Carr's work at some point to get a deeper understanding of it. But if anything stood out to me about the OP, it was this line:

Historical research will not come up with something equivalent to the laws of motion.

At face value I don't agree with this, but I shouldn't take it out of context of the wider book. But to that point alone it looks to me like history has the potential to be quite scientific and precise, it's just that we aren't very long out of the scientific revolution so the practice so far hasn't been particularly scientific.

Maybe the field just hasn't given itself enough standards and guidelines to what constitutes history, yet. I mean, if any person can gather a bunch of evidence and write a book, maybe those books shouldn't necessarily be looked at as 'history' but 'interpretations of history'. The hard problem is how we drill down and establish that what we've found is an accurate depiction (or that an accurate depiction cannot be established)

 

[bilby]

That's fair.

To respond more meaningfully I'll have to actually read Carr's work at some point to get a deeper understanding of it. But if anything stood out to me about the OP, it was this line:

Historical research will not come up with something equivalent to the laws of motion.

At face value I don't agree with this, but I shouldn't take it out of context of the wider book. But to that point alone it looks to me like history has the potential to be quite scientific and precise, it's just that we aren't very long out of the scientific revolution so the practice so far hasn't been particularly scientific.

Maybe the field just hasn't given itself enough standards and guidelines to what constitutes history, yet. I mean, if any person can gather a bunch of evidence and write a book, maybe those books shouldn't necessarily be looked at as 'history' but 'interpretations of history'. The hard problem is how we drill down and establish that what we've found is an accurate depiction (or that an accurate depiction cannot be established)

That's called 'archaeology'. And is itself plagued with interpretive errors and biases.

It's probably a ritual thing.

 

[Hermit]

...if anything stood out to me about the OP, it was this line:

Historical research will not come up with something equivalent to the laws of motion.

At face value I don't agree with this...

Let's have a look at the OP. It says: "Is history the march of reason and progress? Is it not that? If not, what is it?" Looks like something equivalent to the laws of motion is being suggested here, and that is what most histories come down to - arguing in favour of one interpretation or another of what history is about. It could be about exactly what you suggested in your OP, or it could be about the fall of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. It could be about quite a range of things. What it could not be, is the combination of all of them. There too many irreconcilable bits for that to happen. Those will need to be reinterpreted, recontextualised or rejected outright. So again, Carr's fishing analogy applies.

 

[rousseau]

...if anything stood out to me about the OP, it was this line:

Historical research will not come up with something equivalent to the laws of motion.

At face value I don't agree with this...

Let's have a look at the OP. It says: "Is history the march of reason and progress? Is it not that? If not, what is it?" Looks like something equivalent to the laws of motion is being suggested here, and that is what most histories come down to - arguing in favour of one interpretation or another of what history is about. It could be about exactly what you suggested in your OP, or it could be about the fall of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. It could be about quite a range of things. What it could not be, is the combination of all of them. There too many irreconcilable bits for that to happen. Those will need to be reinterpreted, recontextualised or rejected outright. So again, Carr's fishing analogy applies.

The OP, in my view, was more calling for interpretation of history in sum (which is definitely not the march of reason and progress, but that served as a nice lead-in).

I'm not saying Carr's work has no utility or validity, just that I think in general the universe works on defined physical laws, humans are part of the universe, and so humans do too. History being a record of humans (and other things) over time means that there should be objective patterns that we can definitively say are true once we examine the records.

But Carr's work probably is more useful in the domains where we cannot claim things with any certainty.

 

[4321lynx]

Let's have a look at the OP. It says: "Is history the march of reason and progress? Is it not that? If not, what is it?" Looks like something equivalent to the laws of motion is being suggested here, and that is what most histories come down to - arguing in favour of one interpretation or another of what history is about. It could be about exactly what you suggested in your OP, or it could be about the fall of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. It could be about quite a range of things. What it could not be, is the combination of all of them. There too many irreconcilable bits for that to happen. Those will need to be reinterpreted, recontextualised or rejected outright. So again, Carr's fishing analogy applies.

The OP, in my view, was more calling for interpretation of history in sum (which is definitely not the march of reason and progress, but that served as a nice lead-in).

I'm not saying Carr's work has no utility or validity, just that I think in general the universe works on defined physical laws, humans are part of the universe, and so humans do too. History being a record of humans (and other things) over time means that there should be objective patterns that we can definitively say are true once we examine the records.

But Carr's work probably is more useful in the domains where we cannot claim things with any certainty.

You mean besides the broad pattern of the rise and fall of groups, tribes, nations and empires? As someone said (?Voltaire), history is a record of the crimes and follies of mankind. That's pretty objective imo.

Technology, from sharpened sticks and stone axes to interplanetary rockets and all the mathematics and physics connected to that, is another story, another pattern.

So, science.

Art, literature, music.

Anything else? Philosophy, religion, metaphysics etc etc are covered under crimes and follies.

 

[rousseau]

Let's have a look at the OP. It says: "Is history the march of reason and progress? Is it not that? If not, what is it?" Looks like something equivalent to the laws of motion is being suggested here, and that is what most histories come down to - arguing in favour of one interpretation or another of what history is about. It could be about exactly what you suggested in your OP, or it could be about the fall of feudalism and the rise of capitalism. It could be about quite a range of things. What it could not be, is the combination of all of them. There too many irreconcilable bits for that to happen. Those will need to be reinterpreted, recontextualised or rejected outright. So again, Carr's fishing analogy applies.

The OP, in my view, was more calling for interpretation of history in sum (which is definitely not the march of reason and progress, but that served as a nice lead-in).

I'm not saying Carr's work has no utility or validity, just that I think in general the universe works on defined physical laws, humans are part of the universe, and so humans do too. History being a record of humans (and other things) over time means that there should be objective patterns that we can definitively say are true once we examine the records.

But Carr's work probably is more useful in the domains where we cannot claim things with any certainty.

You mean besides the broad pattern of the rise and fall of groups, tribes, nations and empires? As someone said (?Voltaire), history is a record of the crimes and follies of mankind. That's pretty objective imo.

Technology, from sharpened sticks and stone axes to interplanetary rockets and all the mathematics and physics connected to that, is another story, another pattern.

So, science.

Art, literature, music.

Anything else? Philosophy, religion, metaphysics etc etc are covered under crimes and follies.

My first thought is that historical analysis would meld itself with other fields: biology, ecology, psychology, organizational behaviour. In that way the practice of history acts like a method of evidence gathering which could both lend itself to other fields, as well as use harder theories for analysis.

But then the question is if we're using something like biology to analyze history, then why wouldn't any 'laws' fall under the domain of biology itself? With that in mind I guess you could say that practicing history is basically a process of evidence gathering that lends itself to theory forming, in whatever domain. So history maybe not so much a domain in itself, but the practice of defining and informing other fields about the past.

 

[rousseau]

Our past is a never-ending string of absent-minded people screwing up over and over again.