40 replies to this topic

[William O'Chee]

I'm not a historian, so not involved in scientific study of any kind, and not very knowleadgeable of the schools of thought and methodical approaches. History has always been for me not an academic pursuit but a living solid part of the world. History is my warning beacon and my guiding staff, it is a companion both wanted and unwanted, it is a record of our best sides, yes, and also our worst. It is the great chronicle of memory that lets me be more than just a small fragment and become a part of the greater whole. Without this memory I would be an island. The past can be an abrasive rope, and yet also so needed to secure us to the shores of humanity. It shows me the grand mosaic of our different cultures and traditions, and at the same time shows me how much we share, how much we are alike. It is of our creation and we can use it for better or worse, manipulate and falsify it, make it a weapon of hatred or a tool for building greater understanding.
That is my personal vision of history.

Well said. Much of the value of history is what it draws out of us, as well as what we draw from it.

[LYY]

What i meant was that there seems to me to be a greater emphasis on a very methodical and technical approach to history, with a greater emphasis on rigorous analysis and hard evidence, rather than the philosophy of history [collingwood e.t.c]. Its quite hard to explain, or maybe i'm just not very good at it

Just wonder what will happen to History if Science is too primitive to reach a state to analyse and present an objective view of the past ... and again, i am just wondering.

[LYY]

Ranke saw the most important aspect of history to be 'continuity', and genetic relationism was his theory that allowed for this continuity. I have to dash i'm afraid...

In the scenario where a global disaster happens, genetic relationism will only be partially applied to the survivors.
Lots of gaps are needed to be filled up ... as the term "genetic" suggests, a small group of survivors holds the blueprints, the future mankinds pays the price ...

[LYY]

I think we all understand what history is, in its various forms. The real question is why history?

Now before someone comes along and says that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, I want to advance a more contentious opinion. I believe history can be ennobling. That doesn't mean it has to be ennobling - for knowledge for its own sake can be important - but there are elements to the study of history which make us aware of the great and civilising forces of society, which enlighten us on those better aspects of ourselves which we can be with application.

I can only say i agree to you alone for the reason you think like what the God does.
But for normal man and woman, what history preaches is a prediction and acceptance of what the world today and years ahead!

[LYY]

I think we all understand what history is, in its various forms. The real question is why history?

Now before someone comes along and says that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, I want to advance a more contentious opinion. I believe history can be ennobling. That doesn't mean it has to be ennobling - for knowledge for its own sake can be important - but there are elements to the study of history which make us aware of the great and civilising forces of society, which enlighten us on those better aspects of ourselves which we can be with application.

The curse to the pursue of eternality is The (Life) Cycle.
A great civilization goes thru its infancy period to maturity just like a fully grown mature adult.
What man experiences is a microcosm of what society will go about.

Personally i like your contentious opinion.
It explains a lot of things ...

[William O'Chee]

I can only say i agree to you alone for the reason you think like what the God does.
But for normal man and woman, what history preaches is a prediction and acceptance of what the world today and years ahead!

You are quite possibly right in what you say about the normal man or woman. I hope you are right about thinking like God.

It is the role of the sage to see what the ordinary person does not, and to make it possible for these poeple to understand it, or, failing that, to guide them in the path of the way.

[Herod0tus]

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History

History

History studies the past in human terms. For the science of locating events in time, unrelated to humans, see chronology.

History is systematically collected information about the past. When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of humans, families, and societies. Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.

Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities. However, in modern academia, history is increasingly classified as a social science, especially when chronology is the focus.


Classifications



Because history is such a broad subject, organization is crucial. While several writers, such as H.G. Wells and Will and Ariel Durant, have written universal histories, most historians specialize.

There are several different ways of classifying historical information:

* Chronological (by date)
* Geographical (by region)
* National (by nation)
* Ethnic (by ethnic group)
* Topical (by subject or topic)

Some people have criticized historical study, saying that it tends to be too narrowly focused on political events, armed conflicts, and famous people and that deeper and more significant changes in terms of ideas, technology, family life and culture warrant more attention. Recent developments in the practice of history have sought to address this.


Historical records

Historians obtain information about the past from various kinds of sources, including written or printed records, coins or other artifacts, buildings and monuments, and interviews (oral history). For modern history, primary sources may include photographs, motion pictures, and audio and video recordings. Different approaches may be more common in the study of some periods than in others, and perspectives of history (historiography) vary widely.

Historical records have been maintained for a variety of reasons, including administrative (such as censuses, tax records, commercial records), political (glorification or criticism of leaders and notable figures), religious, artistic, sporting (notably the Olympics), genealogical, personal (letters), and entertainment.


History and prehistory

Traditionally the study of history was limited to the written and spoken word. However with the rise of academic professionalism and the creation of new scientific fields in the 19th and 20th centuries came a flood of new information that challenged this notion — archaeology, anthropology and other social sciences were providing new information and even theories about human history. Some traditional historians questioned whether these new studies were really history, since they were not limited to the written word. A new term, prehistory, was coined, to encompass the results of these new fields where they yielded information about times prior to the existence of written records.

In the twentieth century the artificial division between history and prehistory was proving problematic. Historians were looking beyond traditional political history narratives with new approaches such as economic, social and cultural history, all of which relied on various sources of evidence. Additionally, "prehistorians" such as Vere Gordon Childe were using archaeology to explain important events in areas that were traditionally in the field of history. The distinction was also criticized because of its implicit exclusion of certain civilizations, such as those of Sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America from the historical record. In recent decades the barriers between history and prehistory have thus largely disappeared.

Today there is no generally accepted definition for when history begins. In general history is today seen as the study of everything that is known about the human past (but even this barrier is being challenged by new fields such as Big History). Sources that can give light on this past such as oral history, linguistics, and genetics, have all become accepted by mainstream historians.


Etymology


The term history entered the English language in 1390 with the meaning of "relation of incidents, story" via the Old French historie, from the Latin historia "narrative, account." This itself was derived from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, historía, meaning "a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative," from the verb ἱστορεῖν, historeîn, "to inquire."

This, in turn, was derived from ἵστωρ, hístōr ("wise man," "witness," or "judge"). Early attestations of ἵστωρ are from the Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes' oath, and from Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either "judge" or "witness," or similar). The spirant is problematic, and not present in cognate Greek eídomai ("to appear").

ἵστωρ is ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European *wid-tor-, from the root *weid- ("to know, to see"), also present in the English word wit, the Latin words vision and video, the Sanskrit word veda, and the Slavic word videti and vedati, as well as others. (The asterisk before a word indicates that it is a hypothetical construction, not an attested form.) 'ἱστορία, historía, is an Ionic derivation of the word, which with Ionic science and philosophy were spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenism.

In Middle English, the meaning was "story" in general. The restriction to the meaning "record of past events" in the sense of Herodotus arises in the late 15th century. In German, French, and indeed, most languages of the world other than English, this distinction was never made, and the same word is used to mean both "history" and "story". A sense of "systematic account" without a reference to time in particular was current in the 16th century, but is now obsolete. The adjective historical is attested from 1561, and historic from 1669. Historian in the sense of a "researcher of history" in a higher sense than that of an annalist or chronicler, who merely record events as they occur, is attested from 1531.
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Historiography


Historiography has a number of related meanings. It can refer to the history of historical study, its methodology and practices (the history of history). It can also refer to a specific a body of historical writing (for example, "medieval historiography during the 1960s" means "medieval history written during the 1960s"). Historiography can also be taken to mean historical theory or the study of historical writing and memory. As a meta-level analysis of descriptions of the past, this third conception can relate to the first two in that the analysis usually focuses on the narratives, interpretations, worldview, use of evidence, or method of presentation of other historians.
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Historical methods



The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history.

Ibn Khaldun laid down the principles for the historical method in his book Muqaddimah. Other historians of note who have advanced the historical methods of study include Leopold von Ranke, Lewis Bernstein Namier, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, G.M. Trevelyan and A.J.P. Taylor. In the 20th century, historians focused less on epic nationalistic narratives, which often tended to glorify the nation or individuals, to more realistic chronologies. French historians introduced quantitative history, using broad data to track the lives of typical individuals, and were prominent in the establishment of cultural history (cf. histoire des mentalités). American historians, motivated by the civil rights era, focused on formerly overlooked ethnic, racial, and socio-economic groups. In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history.


The lessons of history

In addition to being an interesting topic of study in its own right, historians often claim that the study of history teaches valuable lessons with regard to past successes and failures of leaders, military strategy and tactics, economic systems, forms of government, and other recurring themes in the human story. From history we may learn factors that result in the rise and fall of nation-states or civilizations, the strengths and weaknesses of various political, economic, and social systems, and the effects of factors such as trade and technology.

One of the most famous quotations about history and the value of studying history, by Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, reads: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The German Philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel remarked in his Philosophy of History that "What history and experience teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it." This was famously paraphrased by the British statesman, Winston Churchill, who said "The one thing we have learned from history is that we don't learn from history."

An alternative view is that the forces of history are too great to be changed by human deliberation, or that, even if people do change the course of history, the movers and shakers of this world are usually too self-involved to stop to look at the big picture.

Yet another view is that history does not repeat itself because of the uniqueness of any given historical event. In this view, the specific combination of factors at any moment in time can never be repeated, and so knowledge about events in the past can not be directly and beneficially applied to the present.

There is no general consensus, even among historians, as to which of these views is true.

[Herod0tus]

The query is not just interesting to the readers of this Website, but it is philosophical question pertaining to the human condition.
After all, for peoples all over the globe, those with and without written records, many if not most of them believed their past was 'good, true, valid.' When in fact their past may or may not have been good, their beliefs were often of false or superstitious things and such traditions could not be valid.
The notion of History then turns on a) Universal truth and some local (in spacetime) truth.
By their nature, local truths may be false and wrong. For example, at some time in human past, most people did not know the shape of the planet Earth. The fact that they believed it was a 'flat' is a local truth. As knowledge expanded, such local truth are revealed to be false and replaced by something else.
So, by HISTORY we can mean the totality of all human experiences both the true and the false, the good and the evil, the interesting and the uninteresting. OR history can mean what each person, tribe, people wants it to mean.

[mohistManiac]

The query is not just interesting to the readers of this Website, but it is philosophical question pertaining to the human condition.
After all, for peoples all over the globe, those with and without written records, many if not most of them believed their past was 'good, true, valid.' When in fact their past may or may not have been good, their beliefs were often of false or superstitious things and such traditions could not be valid.
The notion of History then turns on a) Universal truth and some local (in spacetime) truth.
By their nature, local truths may be false and wrong. For example, at some time in human past, most people did not know the shape of the planet Earth. The fact that they believed it was a 'flat' is a local truth. As knowledge expanded, such local truth are revealed to be false and replaced by something else.
So, by HISTORY we can mean the totality of all human experiences both the true and the false, the good and the evil, the interesting and the uninteresting. OR history can mean what each person, tribe, people wants it to mean.

Query indeed. Imagine that a person who doesn't speak your language tries to learn how to speak your language from you. Since neither of you speaks a single word of mutual understanding the only things to understand are body language such as pointing and smiling for approval and mouthing out sounds in a way as to express how the sound is voiced. Of course knowing that as soon as you could get across a certain grouping of words for the other person to understand then all the pointing nonsense can stop and the language itself can be used to learn more about the language. In other words a round earth only became part of new found wisdom after someone tried to sail off the edge of the earth but found that it was impossible. History is much like learning an entirely new language one word at a time until an effusion of understanding is made possible.

[Aaliah thomas]

Really history is very important. But before studying history it's important to understand the relevance of history.

The only way we can understand who we are and how we got to be that way is by studying the past. Similarly, the only way we can understand others is by studying their past. If we don't understand what made them, who they are and how they think and act,we will make all sorts of mistakes in our interactions with them. Think of how you treat people differently based on how you know them. The same is true for countries when it comes to diplomacy. So here we can say that history should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. So in no condition history can be avoided.

Edited by Aaliah thomas, 04 July 2011 - 01:58 AM.

[shunyadragon]

Really history is very important. But before studying history it's important to understand the relevance of history.

The only way we can understand who we are and how we got to be that way is by studying the past. Similarly, the only way we can understand others is by studying their past. If we don't understand what made them, who they are and how they think and act,we will make all sorts of mistakes in our interactions with them. Think of how you treat people differently based on how you know them. The same is true for countries when it comes to diplomacy. So here we can say that history should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. So in no condition history can be avoided.

OK, yesterday is history, tomorrow today is history.

There nonetheless problems with recording and writing history, as well as the cultures surrounding history. The bias and misinformation is overwhelming in our current written histories. Answer some of these questions about the history of the Orient.

Where is the origin of the majority of the Japanese people?

What region and Neolithic Cultures of China dominate Chinese culture origins?

What trading goods were most important first in the earliest Silk Road?