What is "history"? And what is involved in historical research? Simply put, History is the sum total of human actions, thoughts, and institutions, arranged in temporal order. We are interested in understanding history for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, we are interested in knowing how people lived and thought in times and settings very distant from our own. Understanding this first kind of thing has a lot in common with ethnography or interpretive research; when we uncover what we can of the circumstances, actions, and symbols of a group of people, and we try to reconstruct their mentality and their reasons for acting as they did. For example, what was it like to be a medieval baker, actor or wife?
Secondly, we are interested in the concrete social arrangements and institutions that existed at various points in time. For example, we would like to know how tax collecting worked in rural China. Understanding such kind of thing requires careful study of existing records that permit inferences about how basic institutions worked. Examples include bodies of law, charters, social records, and the like.
Thirdly, we are interested in the dynamics of change. For example, the reasons for the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the reasons for a rash of peasant rebellions in 18th-century Russia, the reasons for the occurrence and characteristics of the Industrial Revolution. Understanding the third kind of thing has to do with identifying dynamic causal processes of the sort that the social sciences study; why legislatures tend towards certain kinds of institutions and behaviours, why bureaucracies tend towards rigidity, why people are susceptible to extremism.
Fourthly, we are interested in the quantitative assembly of historical data, like population, economic activity, and other kinds of social data. Understanding the fourth kind of thing requires discovering data sources in the historical records and archives that permit estimation of things like marriage rates, grain prices, or church membership totals. And then this data is analysed and presented in convincing ways using established methods in social science quantitative methodologies.
WHAT THE HISTORIAN DOES
What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian's work? It will be useful to offer several simple answers to this foundational question:
Firstly, historians are interested in providing conceptualizations and factual descriptions of events and circumstances in the past. This effort is an answer to questions like these: “What happened? What was it like? What were some of the circumstances and happenings that took place during this period in the past?” Sometimes this entails simply reconstructing a complicated story from scattered historical sources.
Secondly, historians often want to answer “why” questions: “Why did this event occur? What were the conditions and forces that brought it about?” This body of questions invites the historian to provide an explanation of the event or pattern which he or she describes. And providing an explanation requires, most basically, an account of the causal mechanisms, background circumstances, and human choices that brought the outcome about. We explain an historical outcome when we identify the social causes, forces, and actions that brought it about, or made it more likely.
Thirdly, and related to the previous point, historians are sometimes interested in answering a “how” question: “How did this outcome come to pass? What were the processes through which the outcome occurred?” How did the Prussian Army succeed in defeating the superior French Army in 1870? How did Truman manage to defeat Dewey in the 1948 US election? This too is an explanation; but it is an answer to a “how possible” question rather than a “why necessary” question.
Fourthly, historians are often interested in joining together the human meanings and intentions that underlie a given complex series of historical actions. In other words, they want to help the reader make sense of the historical events and actions, in terms of the thoughts, motives, and states of mind of the participants. For example: Why did Napoleon III carelessly provoke Prussia into war in 1870? Answers to questions like these require interpretation of actions, meanings, and intentions of individual historical actors; and of historical cultures made up of whole populations. This aspect of historical thinking is “hermeneutic,” interpretive, and ethnographic.
THE COGNITION PROBLEM IN HISTORY
All writing about history contains a level of uncertainty. Historians write about past events that they themselves did not witness. Even if they had, there would still be uncertainty; eyewitnesses to crimes often make serious mistakes in their accounts, or “histories,” of what they saw. How, then, do historians know things? The short answer is that they do not; a piece of historical writing is not a list of perfectly correct facts. But it is also extremely important that you realize that a piece of historical writing is not simply an opinion piece, either. Historical writing uses evidence to support an argument as every piece of historical writing has an argument or thesis, of which this thesis is the main point the historian is trying to prove. However, the problem of cognition in history emphasizes the fact that erroneous humans are the ones doing history. So, it is sensible to say that history cannot be totally free of errors. Some of the issues about the cognition problem are presented below:
i. People’s memories of events tend to change over time.
ii. Only few important events in history were actually recognised as such when they were happening. Hence written records and other evidence are often lost as people did not really take them serious.
iii. When dealing with more recent history, many people are motivated to hold back on certain details in order to protect their own interests or to protect the reputation of friends or family.
iv. Even major historical figures like to ensure they are seen in a good light. So they might hide or destroy records such as letters which might show a different side of a story.
v. When looking back at a different time and place, it is often difficult to understand the cultural contexts in which certain actions were taken, so that history can show some events in a different light than they may have appeared at the time.
vi. Some historians might be so fascinated by their stories that they end up explaining too much and even adding what is not supposed to be there.
vii. The temptation to ignore historical factors that were important at the time, even if they are not important to one’s story is also an issue. A big part of writing history, is making judgments about which historical points to pursue, and which to "let fall by the wayside". But if one ignores something that was important to the people at the time, then one risks throwing some people out of the story.
Furthermore, historians speak of two kinds of evidence; primary source evidence and secondary literature evidence. Primary sources are documents or other records created at the time of the events under analysis; for example, primary sources about the French Revolution would include any documents created in the late 1780s and early 1790s that shed light on the French Revolution. Secondary literature includes everything written about the French Revolution by other historians, right up to today. Generally speaking, historical writing based on primary source evidence enjoys higher prestige than historical writing based on secondary literature. The preference of historians for primary sources makes sense; after all, we are more likely to believe something we hear about first hand than something we hear about at second or third hand. Reliance on primary sources alone, however, is often impossible as the relevant sources may be located in distant libraries, or they may be written in foreign languages, or they may require expert knowledge to understand properly. In such cases it is perfectly legitimate to rely on secondary literature and this may not be ideal.
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