The study of history has always been systematic with historians asking questions, collecting background information, evaluating sources, linking evidence, and presenting a conclusion while maintaining objectivity. The methods of explaining history has largely been a similar process. While the nineteenth century movement focused on altering the study of history through the importance of objectivity and professionalism, it did little to change it completely. New methods may have emerged to become more objective and added new perspectives, but the study of history has always consisted of obtaining information and presenting the findings. The study of history maintained the same methods of processing information and sense of objectivity since the time of the ancient world to the Renaissance and Progressive Era.
The ancient world used similar methods in history that have remained unchanged, which modern historians still use today. Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), from the late nineteenth century, disputed the methods of early historical studies and insisted on changing the study of history by means of empirical methods involving the use of primary sources to write about the past. The empirical methods, which are based on observation and experiments, are similar to the methods of the Greek scholar Thucydides (460-400 BCE), who wrote about the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides wrote about the war between Sparta and Athens based on his observations by presenting different accounts on the war and by linking the evidences together. He experimented with the contradicting sources, which led him to a conclusion. In addition, the use of contradicting sources helped maintain a sense of objectivity to find the “truth.” While objectivity encouraged Ran...
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...g data and then allowing “the data to dictate to the scholar its meaning.” Positivism is similar to the systematic methods used in the study of history to obtain the truth. While objectivity was one of the goals of positivism, it did not influence the idea entirely, but still applied the interest of scientific knowledge to history.
Since the time of the ancient world to the Renaissance and Progressive Era, the study of history has remained the same. Most of the methods that emerged or used during these times were largely influenced by other ideas and not only objectivity. While objectivity and professionalism may have affected the study of history, it did not challenge or completely alter it. The study of history has always been a systematic approach, and although new methods emerged throughout the past, the same sense of objectivity to finding the “truth” remains.
...es are manipulated for his argument. Goldhagen’s controversial and stimulating study encourages research to continue and in 2013 Jewish leaders pressured Pope Francis to open the Vatican archives from 1939-1947. The opening of these archives will instigate more investigations in this field and until these archives are opened the historical record will not be clarified. The importance of these archives illustrates the interesting nature of historical literature. The study of history focuses predominantly around primary materials, however these materials do not provide a definitive depiction of the past. Historians analyze primary sources to deduce an interpretation of the past. The discrepancies between historian’s interpretations form historiographical debate. It would be interesting to examine the extent to which historians are perhaps just academic storytellers.
The study of past events have been a common practice of mankind since the verbal telling of stories by our ancestors. William Cronon, in his article “Why the Past Matters,” asserts that the remembrance of the past “keeps us in place.” Our individual memories and experiences shape how we act in our daily lives. In addition to influencing us at an individual level, our collective history binds us together as a society. Without knowing where we have been or what we have experienced, it is nearly impossible to judge progress or know which courses of action to pursue. The goal of the historian is to analyze and explain past events, of which they rarely have firsthand memory of, and apply the gained knowledge to make connections with current and future events.
The purpose of this essay is that history is a result of point of view.
History is a discipline based on textual accounts of the past however it became necessary to look closer. A group of French historians watched as countless historians drew the same conclusions from the same experiences time after time, divorcing themselves from the “new social scientist adventuring among the economies and societies of the present.” The Annales school is interested in a science of humanity, human activities. “The function of the historian is not to declare that such a thought is objectively right or wrong but to state, or to suggest, what circumstances, in a particular time, made it thinkable.” The scholars of the Annales school used non-historians as much
John Lewis Gaddis, in his book, The Landscape of History, generates a strong argument for the historical method by bringing together the multiple standpoints in viewing history and the sciences. The issue of objective truth in history is addressed throughout Gaddis’s work. In general, historians learn to select the various events that they believe to be valid. Historians must face the fact that there is an “accurate” interpretation of the past ceases to exist because interpretation itself is based on the experience of the historian, in which people cannot observe directly (Gaddis 10). Historians can only view the past in a limited perspective, which generates subjectivity and bias, and claiming a piece of history to be “objective” is simplistic. Seeing the world in a multidimensiona...
Ana-Mauríne Lara’s Erzulie’s Skirt positions the female body as the scene where lives are interconnected across history and as a dissertation of the human condition. Her protagonists, Micaela and Miriam, tell a story of love, struggle, and survival that echoes the historical significance of slavery and the Caribbean middle passage across time and space. Divided into several sections based on time and location, one particular period in Lara’s novel connects Micaela and Miriam’s experiences most closely with slavery as a whole. After a voyage across the Mona Strait as an attempt to escape from the conditions in the Dominican Republic, they find themselves captured, trapped in a brothel, and forced into prostitution. Many parallels can be drawn to interpret Lara’s use of the brothel as a metaphor for the slave ships used to travel across the original Middle Passage, including the comparable use of people as commodities, the specific imagery and language Lara uses, the historical narrative presented at the beginning of each section, and the larger themes in which identities were simultaneously stripped by oppression and also preserved within the context of community and spirituality.
It’s truly fascinating how there are so many different approaches to history, how so many different types of minds and schools of thought can come together to study the events of the world’s past. There are so many ways to approach what happened in our past, and the groups of historians previously mentioned are only a fraction of the actual number of different ways of researching and thinking that exists as it pertains to the study of history. History is in some ways, always a mystery, and all historians, regardless of schooling, training or biases, seek to accomplish one goal: to understand what occurred before us and why, and to use that knowledge to learn how the world was shaped into the world we live in today.
The article looks at the Roman philosopher Cicero’s first law of history, which states that “the historian must not dare to tell any falsehood” (1), and the idea of historical truth and objectivity in modern thought. Assis mainly addresses the criticism of contemporary philosophers and historians, especially postmodernists, who argue that “extra-disciplinary, non-cognitive, interest-led, ideological, gendered, moral, rhetorical, or literary factors that strongly frame the production of historical knowledge” (2). The author defends Cicero’s first law by redefining it and arguing that it has a basis in epistemology and professional ethics. After putting forward several arguments, he eventually concludes that “Objectivity... does not stand in opposition to subjectivity—on the contrary, it is actually tied up with subjective dispositions, virtues, and skills that help shape responsible historiography” (1). His first argument is to redefine Cicero’s first law. Dismissing the interpretation of it as a radical rationalist statement, Assis argues that it can simply be seen as saying that “historians ought not to pass on as true what they know is untrue.” and “should shun the kind of partiality or animosity that could lead them to deliberately distort what they believe to be the truth, or omit inconvenient facts from their accounts of the past” (7). He expounds by explaining that “lying, either in history writing or in ordinary life, differs categorically from making a mistake” (7). By doing this, Assis shows that the first law does not necessarily discount natural human limitations and supports his thesis. Furthermore, Assis argues that the principle in question is essential to historiography and that “the very existence of serious historical research and writing is highly dependent on [its] effectiveness” (16). The principle of
Through examining these texts, it is evident that the advantages historians have when drawing on evidence such as this is that they can easily reveal certain social and cultural values of the society from which the authors came from, just as easily as it shows social and cultural values of the society of which it was written about. The limitations for historians when collecting written evidence is that some key features of the complex civilizations written about were often left out or could be easily misinterpreted or
To study history, the facts and information must be passed down. To do so, historians record the information in textbooks and other nonfiction works. Whether or not the historians retell facts or construct their own version of history is debatable. History can be percieved as being “constructed” by the historians due to their bias, elimination of controversy, strive for entertainment, and neglect to update the information.
The discipline of history and its study can have its origin traced to ancient Greece. Ironically, this detailed, research driven study along with all of its associated research methods had its humble beginnings rooted in story telling and fanciful tales designed for the enjoyment its population, not its education. Gradually, the people of Greece became aware of more than just their geographical and political surroundings, forcing the idea of history and how to understand it to evolved. From these beginnings came the fact-driven field of study that we now know.
...a cut above the method of the poets and the prose-writers. Thucydides takes pride in the fact that he is not promoting myth, that he has a historian's concern with truth. Yet Thucydides as historian falls short of latter-day historians, for he does not record speeches as they were spoken but instead reconstructs them according to what he thinks people might have said. Thucydides is more accurate when it comes to the action of the war than the speeches. One notes, however, that even with regard to the action of the war he is handicapped by the limitations of his sources. He cannot, like modern-day historians, turn to documents, films, photographs, newspaper accounts, etc..., but must rely exclusively on oral testimony. Even so, he acts much more like a historian when it comes to the action of the war than when it comes to the speeches associated with the war.
Positivists is believe that reality is constant and observable and describable from an objective viewpoint (Levin, 1988), i.e. Study of phenomena without interfered. Positivists should repeat the isolated phenomenon and observations. This frequently includes control of reality with varieties in just a solitary autonomous variable in order to distinguish regularities in, and to frame connections between, percentage of the constituent components of the social world. (dissertation.lib, 2015)
Knowledge is gained through a myriad of personal experiences through a variety of ways that shapes a person’s understanding. The knowledge we obtain is the culmination of our experiences as we learn what our brain interprets from our senses. Knowledge is the transmission of information that shapes a person’s understanding on a particular topic using a way of knowing. The language used by others to formulate our own ideas and thoughts produce knowledge. The knowledge obtained can either be objective and subjective. The two areas of knowledge, history and arts, are both typically at fault for being inaccurate or bias. The role of history is to study, interpret and analyse the events of the past and relay these findings through language. Language communicates thoughts and ideas through a verbal or written broadcast, thus allowing knowledge to be conveyed. The arts are a broad area of knowledge that communicate knowledge through the manipulation of our sense perceptions that allow us to experience sensations through any of our five senses. The inaccuracies and biases of these areas of knowledge and ways of knowing is due to the pre-set beliefs and values that affect how an artist or a historian chooses to express a particular message to others. Each historian belongs to a school of historiography that holds the belief that an event was due to a specific set of factors and the language used supports this claim. Similarly, artists utilize our sense perceptions to convey a message through a painting. Arts are a broad area of knowledge to i...
To successfully analyses whether History is a science, or more, or less than we must decide on an accurate approach to the term science. Mikael Karlsson stated in a lecture to the University of Genova that...