History TOK

History

1. Why does your past matter?2. How good is your memory? How reliable is it?3. You take photos, you keep a diary; what do you

include, what do you omit?4. Would you be more inclined to trust an autobiography

or a biography of the same individual written by a historian?

5. To what extent do you think people learn from their mistakes, and to what extent do you think they keep making the same mistakes?

Head of UN Scenario

• Write down ten things in your room that you will bring to college on a piece of paper without your name on it.

• Give it to the teacher and get one back that belongs to someone else

• Can you judge the new person based on this evidence?

• Write 3-5 lines that would describe this person

Artifacts Scenario

• Write down ten things in your room• Suppose you wake up and have lost your

memory• How could you reconstruct your identity by

examining the objects in your room• Compare this to what Historians do• How accurate is this?

What is History?

• History • Give two answers as to what you think history

is?

History• History is the study of ‘present traces’ of the past.• Look at the Persia and Greece wars in the 5th century• Our view is based on a single, quite unreliable source-

the Greek historian Herodotus

Problems with History

• Evidence– Too little distant past– Too much modern recent

What is History?

• Significance– History is not a record of everything that

happened in the past– History is a record of significant things that

happened in the past– Can a TOK class be a significant event?

Rate the Historical significance of the following events

1. The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Speicies in 1859;

2. The birth of Bill Gates in 1955;3. The deposition of Muamar Gadaffi in 2011;4. England’s World Cup victory in 1966;5. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001;6. Bingu Mutharika becoming President of Malawi in 2005;7. The publication of US diplomatic despatches by Wikileaks

in 2011.

What is history?

• Explaining the past• Understanding the past– Historians devote considerable energy to

establishing what happened and then to why• We know WWI happened but what were the main

reasons

Why Study History?

• A page of history is worth a volume of logic”• Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1841-1935

• “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”• William Faulkner, 1897-1962

• “Those who don’t study the past are condemned to repeat it”

• George Santayana, 1863-1952

History for IB

• The study of history is so important that is should be a compulsory IB subject.

• Think of an many arguments as you can for and against this claim

Why Study History?

• Gives us a sense of identify• Is a defense against propaganda• Enriches our understanding of human nature.

Key points

• History seeks to study and explain the significant events of the past on the basis of currently existing evidence

• The study of History can be justified on the grounds that it contributes to our sense of identity, is a defense against propaganda, and enriches our understanding of human nature.

• History is based on primary sources, but since they are a selective interpretation of events they cannot always be taken at face value

Key points

• Since historians usually make a selection from available evidence, there is a sense in which history books are twice removed from what actually happened

• In seeking to explain the past, a historian has the advantage of hindsight, but this can sometimes result in hindsight bias

• Although it is impossible to achieve completely objective, god’s eye view of history, we can perhaps get closer to the truth by exploring the past from a variety of perspectives.

Key points

• Since History deals with complex situations, historical events rarely have a single cause but are usually the result of a combination of factors

• Two contrasting theories of history are the great person theory, which says that history is determined by great individuals and economic determinism, which says that is determined by economic factors

• We can understand both the past and ourselves better if we study history than if we choose to ignore it.

Key Words• Bias• Primary source• Secondary source• Significance/Significant Events• Cubist History• Economic Determinism• Empathy• Great person theory of history• Hindsight bias• Self-realising expectations