History

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Controlling the present,
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History

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Secrets of times gone by
History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.
—Ambrose Bierce[1]
History is the study of everything that has been - specifically that has been recorded (generally in writing). It is an ongoing study which attempts to sort out exaggeration from devaluation, lies from less serious lies, and mistakes from oversights, with the ultimate goal being a book that will present "Truth" of a person, a country, or humanity itself's "past" to the unhappy student who must memorize it all.

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[edit] Views of history

How history is viewed by and large depends on who needs to tell the story, and what their goal is. Ironically, history itself is almost always less about the past, than it is about the present. Most "history" that has ever been told to anyone carries an agenda. That is, someone chooses the particular story they choose, with the particular interpretation on it, to explain something about their particular view of their world, right now.

How the past plays out, and therefor the story they tell of it, has been perceived differently by people in different times and cultures. For instance, ancient societies such as the Babylonians and the Hellenic Greeks tended to think of history as a circle: as time progressed, events would repeat themselves, although under different circumstances each time.

By contrast, medieval and renaissance scholars and chroniclers viewed history as a progression through a sequence of different ages, starting with the creation of the world and ending with the Second Coming of Christ and the judgment of mankind. It was usually believed that there were seven such ages.

Modern academics tend to look at the past and the study of it less as a specific series of events that have unfolded and need to cataloged, with some true sense that the "truth" of what happened in these events can be uncovered, but rather as a way to understand the players in any given event, and the various views about the events. They have recognized that since what is being studied is often written records, a scholar must take into account that the writer had biases and an agenda, and that the scholar himself has biases and agendas. Modern historians understand that by and large, history is a creation.

[edit] Historical Method

Depending on the place and time history as has been classified a humanity or a social science[2] However regardless of classification there are are techniques and guidelines modern historical research is supposed to follow.

First, all other things being equal the closer a piece of evidence is to event in question the better it is regarded. These levels of evidence are:

1) Contemporary evidence: Evidence that dates to the time the person or event actually happened -- documents, media accounts, eyewitness accounts, etc.

2) Derivative evidence: Evidence that uses contemporary evidence from the contemporary record that has since been lost, such as histories written in ancient times.

3) Comparative evidence: Evidence that gives details that can be checked against known phenomena of the time.

Historians evaluate this available evidence in two main ways:

Source criticism

This covers determining the reliability of a given source,[3] [4], procedures regarding contradictory evidence, [5] and quality of possible eyewitness evidence [6] including indirect witnesses and oral tradition. [7]

Synthesis: historical reasoning

This covers argument to the best explanation (ie Which competing theory is more likely to explain a given bit of evidence?)[8] sometimes using statistical inference[9] and-or argument from analogy.[10]

[edit] Great Man vs Great Moment

For most of its existence history has assumed the great man hypothesis ie that history is the product of 'great men' whose charisma, intelligence, wisdom, or political skill shaped their world. However, this view has created "myths" that do not match the actual records of the time. Such examples include Columbus sailing west to prove the world was round, Watt inventing the steam engine, Edison inventing the first electric light, Hitler founding the Nazi party, and so on.

The counter argument, first suggested in 1860 by Herbert Spencer but expanded in the 1970s thanks to system theory, was that history was a series of great moments where series of events combined to make these men great. So "the discovery of American around 1500 was inevitable"[11], Watt only improved the already existing Newcomen steam engine which was itself an improvement of Savery's Engine using the work of Papin, Edison developed the first commercially viable electric light replacing Humphry Davy arc light of 1800 and Sir Joseph Wilson Swan's carbon paper filamen bulb of 1860, the Nazi party preexisted Hitler's joining and any silver tongued anti-semite could have made it into what it became, and so on.

[edit] Written by the victor

History is written by the victors.
—Winston Churchill

It's often said of history that it is written by the "winners," for they who are in power control the media. If a society, culture, or uprising is unsuccessful, it may be wiped from the past, often lost forever; if found, it is only after a very determined or very lucky person finds a scant evidence to map out an alternative view of history.

This view is also applied not just to literal victors, but to dominant aspects of society. As most history has been conveyed through literature, people too poor to be educated, or who work too hard to have time to write, cannot tell their stories. The stories of the working class and various minorities have been frequently discounted as "unimportant" or "irrelevant" to the "greater" history; yet "greater" is a matter of perspective.

Historical facts often aren't. The score of the hockey game was Avalanche 3, Bruins 0. Foresberg scored a goal at 3:09. But what is as important, yet fully debatable in any and all contexts "Did the Avs win because they played harder, or did the Bruins, lose?" Perspective, attitudes, assumptions, culture, and differences from source group to "discovery" group can all affect what is understood as the "history" of an event.

Terry Jones' entire Medieval Lives series (and book) delves into just how much of history is really propaganda and myth making. For example, the often repeated story of Christopher Columbus sailing west to prove the Earth was round is a fiction created 300 years after the fact by Washington Irving and used as propaganda as how the Church repressed progress. The infamy of the Spanish Inquisition is another such example with the view of it as an all powerful tyrannical organization composed of sadistic religious zealots answerable to only itself being a total propaganda fantasy; the real Spanish Inquisition, by the standards of the day, from 1500 on was the most efficient and compassionate judicial bodies in Europe and in fact executed fewer people then any other major court in Europe.[12]

[edit] Academic history

The study of history as an academic field dates to the 19th century, when historians begin to adopt a small measure of the scientific methods for studying source materials. They also adopted a new objectivist ideal of history that broke with earlier approaches. The new role of the historian was to show history "as it actually happened", and not to pass judgment or impose his own views on the sources. Key figures in this development were the German historians Leopold von Ranke and Theodor Mommsen. A different Anglo-Saxon historical tradition evolved independently, largely empirical but with wide variations. With the benefit of retrospect, one can look at the supposedly 'objective' 19th century histories of J.R. Seely (A propagandist of Empire) or W.E.H. Lecky (an Irish unionist and opponent of mass democracy) and see very clearly a rich variety of bias. British historiography was for almost a century dominated by The Whig Interpretation of History, which regards history as a chronicle of perpetual progress. Macauly was the greatest proponent of this school. It still has some adherents, though it has been a long time since it has had any meaningful influence on British historiography.

In the early 20th century, the French Annales School, which among others numbered the historians Lucien Febvre, Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch, was notable by introducing social scientific methods and turning away from the traditional focus on political and diplomatic history.

In recent years, the traditional academic approach to history has come under attack from the post-modernist school, inspired by theories from literary and cultural studies. In most cases these attacks have been deflected, due to the resurgence of a traditionalist school led in Britain by G.R. Elton and in the USA by the colourful J.H. Hexter. Postmodernism's ultimate contribution to historiography was to instill a greater skepticism of historical certainty and force historians to confront the inherent weaknesses of the source material from which they based their analyses. In a broader sense, postmodernism proved unworkable as it implicitly condemns any value judgements. The obscuritan nature of this sophistry is wonderfully dissected by Richard J.Evans in his In Defence of History.

[edit] Academic history and the Bible

See the main article on this topic: Evidence for the historical existence of Jesus Christ

Christian apologetics frequently makes extraordinary claims and try to say that history proves Jesus was God. People who have not studied New Testament and Old Testament history at degree level are unlikely to know enough to assess claims and counter claims from Christians and their opponents. (Those who have studied the relevant history at degree level tend to agree with their professors and lecturers.)

One effective counter argument against all Christian apologists is simply to point out if the evidence were as strong as some Christians claim the consensus among academic historians would be for Christianity. In reality there is no such consensus, academic historians have a wide variety of different faiths and some have no faith. Therefore those who can assess the evidence are not universally convinced through Christian apologetics.

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  • Evans, Richard J.: In Defence of History (London, 1997)
  • Iggers, Georg I.: Historiography in the Twentieth Century. From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hannover, 1997)
  • Jenkins, Keith: Re-Thinking History (London, 1991)

[edit] References

  1. The Devil's Dictionary. Castle Books, NY, 1967
  2. Scott Gordon and James Gordon Irving, The History and Philosophy of Social Science. Routledge 1991. Page 1. ISBN 0-415-05682-9
  3. Garraghan, Gilbert J. (1946) A Guide to Historical Method, Fordham University Press: New York . ISBN 0-8371-7132-6)
  4. Olden-Jørgensen and Thurén Källkritik. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell
  5. Howell, Martha & Prevenier, Walter (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8560-6.
  6. Shafer, R. J. (1974) A Guide to Historical Method, The Dorsey Press: Illinois . ISBN 0-534-10825-3.)
  7. Garraghan, Gilbert J. (1946) A Guide to Historical Method, Fordham University Press: New York . ISBN 0-8371-7132-6)
  8. McCullagh, C. Behan (1984) Justifying Historical Descriptions, Cambridge University Press: New York . ISBN 0-521-31830-0.
  9. C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions, Cambridge University Press: New York (1984). ISBN 0-521-31830-0. pg 48
  10. C. Behan McCullagh, Justifying Historical Descriptions, Cambridge University Press: New York (1984). ISBN 0-521-31830-0. pg 85
  11. Sagan, Carl (1980) "Journeys in Space and Time" Cosmos
  12. Madden, Thomas F. "The Truth About the Spanish Inquisition" Catholic Education Resource Center
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