What is History?

So, I've pretty much decided to make this a series, of sorts. I began asking the question, What is Death? and continued with What is Pain? and What is a soul? Feel free to check them out.

This installment, I'm answering my version of 'What is History?' Now, to be fair, I didn't come up with this question. It was posed to my History of Ancient Rome class a few weeks ago (and I've had it written for a few weeks, but just turned it in today) as just an exploration of the idea of history, after we discussed the works by Plutarch, who was a philosopher.

Here are my thoughts.

History, very simply, is the study of the past. It is learning and attempting to understand past by using a variety of sources. Historians use a variety of resources in an attempt to reconstruct an event. Is this study of pure facts, though?

Facts are certainly important in history. Without the facts, historians cannot reconstruct events. At the same time, it is not just the study of facts, though. Archaeology provides hard evidence about civilizations living in a certain area, but that is just one aspect historians draw on to recreate events. They also look for more subjective information, the motivations behind a leader’s actions, for example.

When studying the Holocaust, it is not enough to say that six million Jews were killed, that cyanide was used to gas prisoners, that people starved and suffered horrible diseases while in concentration camps. The questions continually asked require more interpretation: why did the Germans allow this to happen, why were the Jews targeted, why did so few people fight back, why did other countries not help, etc. The question is not so much ‘what happened?’ as it is ‘why did this happen?’

There is the old saying “history repeats itself,” and if this saying is true, people study history in order to prevent the mistakes of the past from happening again. If this is the case, then the focus of history is on the motivations of the people involved, rather than a simple account of what happened. In some sense, then, history becomes less about knowing what happened than attempting to understand human nature. It becomes important to understand the people of the past, through their myths and customs, as well as the actual events that took place during their lives.

There is no correct answer to the question ‘what is history?’ Some historians focus on what happened in an effort to understand the mechanisms for some event. They focus on why a war was lost, based on the circumstances in which the battles were fought. Others will focus on understanding a past culture. These historians will look to see how these people saw themselves, what their motivations for going to war were in the first place, and look at the customs and beliefs of that people. Neither system is wrong; each simply offers its own interpretation to a given set of events.

What are your thoughts?

Dr. Duvick, if for some odd reason you want to check to see if I copied this paper, please note that I turned it in to you at roughly 11:45 am, and am posting it at almost exactly 7:00 pm.

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