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What is history?
- Thread starter rousseau
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History is what people believe happened, not always what actually happened.
Somebody's record of what it suits him to believe happened. There are great chunks of which we know nothing and others (post-Roman Britain, for instance) where archaeology and common-sense contradict what we think we do know. It is necessary for us to have some notion of how the world got this way, but the subject is about as likely to establish meaningful answers as philosophy!
Horatio Parker
Veteran Member
An interpretation of past events is what I was taught.
Philos
Veteran Member
Folks,
I think history is what happened when Donald Trump said it didn't.
A.
I think history is what happened when Donald Trump said it didn't.
A.
Philos
Veteran Member
To me it feels like a not insignificant component of the hard and soft sciences are just 'we want to know', and not necessarily 'we want to create a utopia'.
But at the same time it's really hard to understand the present without understanding the past. History gives us context to what we're experiencing, without it it's very hard to answer the question 'why am I doing this?' or even 'who/what am I'.
bilby
Fair dinkum thinkum
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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).
beero1000
Veteran Member
It's clear you haven't watched the History Channel in quite some time. Around 99% of its programming is reality shows about pawn shops, hillbillies, aliens, and bigfoot now.
If we are not to end up like President Trump, just inventing what we please. It's not accurate, but it does tend to give a general map of the past.
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4321lynx
Veteran Member
iolo,
But is it necessary?
A.
If we are not to end up like President Trump, just inventing what we please. It's not accurate, but it does tend to give a general map of the past.
Especially if you look at it from more than one country's point of view, and from various "neutral" countries' (aka as bystanders') points of view. Those
tend to even out the playing field at the same time making the subject more interesting.
To add to this, I once heard it mentioned that history is a series of random events. In a lot of cases small differences can have major effects, and the course of time can change significantly. Consider something like Brexit.. had the vote been slightly different it wouldn't have happened, and this could have huge ramifications on the future.
At the same time, though, when you look at history's progression from the most macroscopic perspective, the randomness subsides.
Cheerful Charlie
Contributor
A fool does not learn from his mistakes.
A smart man learns from his mistakes.
A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
That is why a wise man studies history.
This is the answer I gave some years ago to a sneering right winger on usenet who disparaged history and asked, why bother with history?
History is a sequence of people making logical decisions based on incomplete and recent information.
I like this view. Takes the wind out of the 'great minds' and moves history's force to geologic accident. For instance, one could pay a lot of respect and admiration to enlightenment philosophers, but in reality they were vehicles for the revolution of their day, rather than spontaneous, shifters of the world. If not Voltaire or Rousseau, it would have been someone else.
I like this view. Takes the wind out of the 'great minds' and moves history's force to geologic accident. For instance, one could pay a lot of respect and admiration to enlightenment philosophers, but in reality they were vehicles for the revolution of their day, rather than spontaneous, shifters of the world. If not Voltaire or Rousseau, it would have been someone else.
Hermit
Cantankerous grump
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:
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:
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.
fast
Contributor
History is that point in time that immediately follows the end of prehistoric times. Although visualizing prehistoric times might have you thinking of when dinsosaurs freely roamed Earth, the end point of prehistoric times actually extends a lot closer to now than you might think. Show me the first written record of something that has happened, and I'll show you (fairly closely) the moment when what you asked for began.
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
I've heard good things about Carr's work and I should probably read it before criticizing it, but saying something like 'history cannot be objectively known' strikes me as something that someone writing about history in the 60's would say. It sounds profound, and in a lot of cases turns out to be true. But that there cannot be objective understanding about the past, or well defined laws about the progression of history, again strikes me as something a historian writing in the 60's would say.
But then, I still notice a hesitation of most historians today to explicitly write out 'theories of everything' when it comes to history. Just doesn't seem to be kosher, but it doesn't mean it's not there.
Hermit
Cantankerous grump
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.