What is history

Be Bry in his History of Brazil describes its use and also some interesting particulars concerning the plant. I cannot see in science, nor in experience, nor in history any signs of such a God, nor of such intervention.

History gives them scant notice, and the Federal government has failed to reward them as they deserve. New Word List Word List. Save This Word! See synonyms for history on Thesaurus.

We could talk until we're blue in the face about this quiz on words for the color "blue," but we think you should take the quiz and find out if you're a whiz at these colorful terms. Of course, if history has this vital importance for society, then it must be as accurate as possible, it must be based on evidence and logical thought, not on specious theory or political ideology. Other Justifications for History. Those who study history, for career purposes, or just for personal enjoyment, have other reasons apart from this all-embracing justification for national resources being channelled into the study of history.

Many of us feel the almost poetic appeal of the past, have a passionate interest in finding out what really did happen in the past - practically all of the world's major tourist traps relate to the appeal of the past the Tower of London, San Gimignano in Tuscany, Ephesus in Turkey. It is historians who provide the contextual knowledge that eventually works its way into the guide books, and again the need is for accuracy not specious theory.

Historians also provide the contextual knowledge for great works of art and literature, thus enhancing our enjoyment of these. In addition, the study of history offers to individuals major utilitarian learning outcomes.

Training in history is training in analysing, evaluating, and interpreting both secondary and primary sources. It develops an understanding that everything written pertaining to history, secondary or primary, must be approached with scepticism and caution. It develops the ability to distinguish between pieces of writing which are well-substantiated and logical, and those which simply express theory, hypothesis, or opinion.

The skills and learning outcomes rising from historical study are invaluable in a contemporary world which is dominated by information and communications. The methods and skills required of the historian, and, more important, the attitudes of mind transmitted in the teaching of history, are of vital importance in assessing and filtering the messages constantly battering against us.

History also provides a training in the writing up of the results of one's researches, in the form of essays, reports, dissertations. What is essential in history is clear and effective communication, well structured, and written in precise and explicit language.

The Subjectivity Question. Many who call themselves "historians" do, indeed, use "history" as a vehicle for expressing their own political commitment. That is sheer is self-indulgence. History is a scholarly, not a political, activity, and while, as citizens, we certainly should act upon our political views, in writing history we have an absolute obligation to try to exclude them. Most historians, like, most scientists, are motivated by the urge to find out. Much nonsense is talked about historians inevitably being "subjective"; the real point is that, being mere human beings, they are "fallible", and subject to many kinds of career and social pressures, or indeed common incompetence.

Historians do disagree with each other in their interpretations, as do scientists. But history deals with human values, in a way the sciences do not, so there is more scope for differences in evaluation.

Historical evidence is fragmentary, intractable, and imperfect. Individual books and articles may clash with each other; there will always be areas where uncertainty persists, but steadily agreed knowledge emerges in the form of works of synthesis and high-quality textbooks.

History, like the sciences, is a co-operative enterprise. Some historians today still seem to perceive historians usually themselves as great literary and media figures, as individual intellectual and moral giants giving leadership to ordinary readers. Such historians - subscribers to what I call the " auteur theory" - tend to glory in their own subjectivity. By all means enjoy their literary flourishes, but always remember that the aims of a work of history are very different from those of a work of literature.

History and the Past. The existence of the mistaken notion that historians "reconstruct" the past does indicate that there is an awareness of the distinction between "history" and "the past", though this distinction is often obfuscated. Particularly is this the case with the metahistorians - A. Toynbee, right-wing political scientists like Francis Fukuyama, Marxists, and postmodernists - who, apart from any other uses, apply the term "history" to some great process invented by themselves whereby the past unfolds in a series of stages into the present and on into the future.

In their own studies this process is taken as a given, and they test the history of historians against this given. No, to keep clear of all the misconceptions which abound in historical epistemology we have to make a firm distinction between history as "the bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians", and "the past" as "everything which actually happened, whether known, or written, about by historians or not". It follows from all of this that periodization, the dividing of the past up into the eras or periods, has no a priori existence.

It is simply an analytical tool of historians. A periodization which makes sense for the West, will not make sense for Africa or Asia. A periodization which makes sense for economic history, may well not make sense for social or political history.

Primary and Secondary Sources. The only way we can have knowledge of the past is through studying the relics and traces left by past societies, the primary sources. Primary sources, as it were, form the basic "raw material" of history; they are sources which came into existence within the period being investigated.

The articles and books written up later by historians, drawing upon these primary sources, converting the raw material into history, are secondary sources pedants insist on pointing out that secondary sources may become primary sources for still later historians, but this is a matter of such triviality as scarcely to be worth bothering about. The distinction between primary and secondary sources is a critical one, though no historian has ever pretended that it offers a magic key to the nature of historical study, or that primary sources have a necromantic potency denied to secondary ones.

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