Oral History And Two Important Types Of History

Two important categories of history are oral history and political history. Oral history is important because it can come from the common people and tells us the characteristics of who they are by the stories that they tell. Political history is important because it is the study of the largest institution that has existed, the government. Both these types of history share the common characteristic that they are used to reinforce values. Oral history is important to look at first because it involves everyday people rather than the elite.

Oral history is historical events that are learned about through stories told by people without the physical documentation of that event. This category of history is important because it can show the personal experiences of individuals as well as customs and traditions of a society or group of people who do not write down their history but tell it through generations. John Tosh says that “social memory prioritizes material that validates cultural values or political loyalties in the present, sometimes in the teeth of the available evidence about the past.” This means that social history, by being told orally, is used to take historical events or stories to enforce the values of society.

Political history is the historical events that surround the topic of nations and states as well as political affairs. Tosh says, “it includes the institutional organization of the state, the competition of factions and parties for control over the state, the policies enforced by the state, and the relations between the states.” This means that political history is made up of how the different levels of the state interact with one another. Tosh also says that one problem with political history is that it is so...

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...was mostly absent in responding to Nazi aggression. This second category could be further divided into subcategories that state that the Catholic Church was absent because of political and ideological reasons and the second subcategory states that antisemitism was the only reason why the Church did not respond.

My research before doing the historiographical essay seemed confusing because it looked like there were so many different kinds of interpretations. The essay helped me establish that each argument could be categorized into two schools of thought and then later subdivided even further. The essay also helped me understand more about historiography. This is so because it forced me to evaluate arguments made by individual historians and compare them to others. It also forced me to look for potential biases by researching background information on those authors.