Explain What is History,? and What it means to be a Historian.? ‘How does a historian do his or her job?’ What is the methodology behind the craft? 2. In 1453, the Walls of Constantino

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what is history? The English word history comes from the Latin word historia which means a narrative of past events. At its most basic level, history is a story of the past. Because it is a story or a narrative, all history consists of both facts and interpretation. Facts are persons, places, things and events that most people agree are true or have happened. A fact can be “proved” by consulting other evidence. Facts can be little details: the hair color of former American President Ronald Reagan, for example. A fact can be something big and consisting of multiple events: the Battle of the Bulge during World War II is an example of this kind of fact. What a president's hair color and a major battle share in common is there are multiple, independent sources that can prove these facts beyond any reasonable doubt. But facts on their own do not tell us much, to make sense of these facts we have to select the mand tie them together to create a story. The process of selecting facts and making sense out of them is historical interpretation. Despite what some politicians may think, all history involves interpretation; even if a historian(a professional historian is someone like me who studies the past as a job but here I mean anyone who studies the past) claims he or she is “letting the facts speak for themselves,” the simple act of selecting some facts while leaving out many others involves interpretation. Realizing that two historians can look at the same set of facts and come up with two different interpretations is key to understanding what history is really about. History is not just what happened in the past, but it is also people today trying to make sense of that past.

History is both more and less than the summation of past events. It is more because historians try to understand the past in ways that make sense to the present generation and a dedicated historian can bring insight even to people who lived through an event. Often eyewitnesses do not see everything or do not have enough background to understand what they see, so a historian bringing together multiple eyewitness accounts along with other information may be able to put an event in far broader context than someone who actually lived through the event. The classic example of this is that often a military historian researching a battle years after it has been fought can better understand that battle than a soldier who actually fought in it. Why? Because the soldier may have actually experienced the battle (unlike the historian) but the soldier’s view may have been quite limited, unlike that of the historian who can use multiple accounts to recreate the past. But history is also less than the sum total of the past because many events are “lost.” If we don’t have records, we may never know of specific events. Think about your own life, what records exist that would allow a historian to recreate it? What key events in your life are there no records for? We will look at this in more detail in the next module, but the world of history can be divided into two types of sources: primary and secondary. Basically, a primary source is something that comes from the period you are studying. It can be a book, a newspaper, a chair, a picture: literally anything from that period. A secondary source is anything written or created later about the period you are studying. Please realize that just because something is a primary source does not mean that it is true; people made mistakes and lied in the past, just as they do today. Understanding this difference between primary and secondary sources is an important part of the study of history.

How do historians study the past? Every academic discipline has its own methodology and subject matter. The subject matter of history is easy: the past. This can be the ancient past5,000 years ago, the “prehistoric” past 20,000 years ago (the lecture on Historical Terminology below will discuss the meaning of this term), or the recent past, such as last week. History is not the only discipline that studies the past, almost every academic discipline from Sociology to English to Physics has to deal with some aspect of the past. What separates History from these other disciplines is not just a more focused look at the past but how historians look at the past. This “how” is historical methodology.

Historical methodology: Although different historians study different things, overall historians share the goal of keeping events in “historical context.” What this means is that, unlike many social scientists who compare events across time without first placing those individual events in the broader context of their individual time periods, historians first try to fully understand the precise historical setting for each individual event. Let me give an example to make this important concept more concrete. A historian would, for example, claim it is wrong to compare two events one hundred years apart without fully understanding each event and the specific forces that shaped it. A political scientist, however, may think that human behavior did not change greatly over those hundred years, so the two events can be compared without putting each into its own specific historical context. A historian focuses on a certain, specific past and does enough research to comfortably recreate that specific historical moment. Every historian has an area of specialized research. At Wilkes, we have four full-time faculty in History and we each research something different. I research two things: the creation of international law over the past two hundred years and the effects of economic and technological change on everyday life in urban settings between about 1650 and 2000 (trust me, they are related).

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