What is History and How/Why do We Study it?

Follow along with booklet

Reasons to Study History, p. 3• learn what it means to be a citizen of Canada• develop awareness of Canada’s global

interconnectedness • understand the diversity and range of human

experience • enrich cultural literacy • help deal with complex social and political problems • understand how the discipline of history is constructed• refine general competencies and skills • encourage and enhance intellectual independence

Thinking Historically

• Historians reconstruct the past on the basis of evidence.

• This evidence is often incomplete, sometimes contradictory, and always needs explaining. Like a detective, a historian must first uncover the facts and then explain what they mean.

• This means testing the accuracy of facts, judging their significance, and arranging them into an account or narrative.

• Historians try to be as objective as possible. • They cannot ignore or falsify evidence, and

whatever they say must be based on the evidence available to them.

• Historians do not simply describe the past; they explain and interpret it.

• When we read a historical account we should always ask: – What is this telling us? – On what evidence is it based? – Why should we believe it? How significant is it?

• Historians also use particular historical concepts when they investigate the past.

• They adopt the perspective of the people they are studying in order to see the world as the people of the past saw it.

• They are interested in change and continuity, in what stays the same and what changes over time, and why.

• They look for the causes and origins of events and their results and consequences.

• This means they have to judge and evaluate. • Historians do not simply say that such-and-

such a thing happened at such-and-such a time: they want to know why it happened, and what results it produced.

Evidence

Types of Evidence:

• Evidence can be found in primary and secondary sources.

• A source is primary if it is original or first-hand in terms of time and access to the event.

• A secondary source is one that has been constructed from other sources of information – it is second-hand; it is not direct in its access to the past.

Primary sources

• can be natural records (e.g., rings of a tree, fossils, volcanic ash, soil samples) or constructed artifacts and documents (e.g., child’s toys, train schedules, population census, newspaper ads, diaries, or sketches of the day’s events) that are from or close to the time under study.

Secondary sources:

• include deliberately prepared accounts (e.g., narratives by historians, history textbooks, secondhand reports, and movies about the past) and created artifacts (e.g., replicas of historical objects, translations of obscure documents, reconstructed scenes in a living museum).

Image for Analyzing Evidence, p.11

Judging Credibility of Primary Accounts, p.9 Shaping Canada Text

Textbooks and Visual Images, p. 13

Terms and Definitions:• Type of source: Identify whether each is a

primary or secondary source.• Summary of ideas: Paraphrase or list in point

form what is actually reported in each document.• Authorship: Consider who authored or created

each document and what is known about the person or group. How might this affect the information presented?

• Context: Try to identify a purpose and intended audience for each document. Consider how this might affect credibility.

• Inferences: Look to draw inferences from each source about the question you are trying to answer.

• Corroboration: Check if any of the sources support or challenge the inferences drawn.

• Conclusion: Considering all of the evidence, offer a conclusion that clearly and specifically answers the question offered for consideration.

• Justification: Support your conclusion with evidence from the sources and suggest why alternative hypotheses are not as plausible as the conclusion you are putting forward. If applicable, explain why sources which may seem to contradict your conclusions are not really a concern.

Historical Significance

Historical Significance, p.7• Questions of significance are foundational to

thinking about history because historians cannot include all that has happened in the past and you must be concerned to learn about and appreciate the most important events.

• But what is important, historically speaking? • How do we decide whether an historical event is

significant for everybody or just for some people?

• Whose history is it?

• Thinking about significance will help you to learn how decisions about what to report and study in history are made and to recognize that the very nature of historical inquiry is open to ongoing change.

Remember to keep the following in mind when dealing with historical

significance:• Determinations of significance are

unavoidable• Significance depends upon purpose• Significance varies with time• Significance is not simply a matter of

personal reaction• Significance depends on context

Continuity and Change

• The concepts of continuity and change are the basis for exploring how lives and conditions are alike over periods of time and how they changed from the people and societies that come before or after.

• Learning to identify significant changes as well as the constants of human existence helps us to understand our place in the continuum of time.

Dimension of continuity and change

• Change and continuity are ongoing and ever present

• Change can occur at different rates• Change and continuity can be both positive and

negative• Comparisons can be made between points in

history and between the past and the present.• Per iodization is a way of marking historical

change and continuity.

• To a large extent our references points in history are anchored in how we have changed from previous times and how we are alike (e.g., the industrial revolution, pre-and post-computers, the nuclear age, the information age).

Cause and Consequence

• The concepts of cause and consequence address who or what influenced history and what were the repercussions of these changes.

• By “who” we mean individuals, groups and social movements.

• The “what” we refer to ideologies, institutions and other systemic factors.

• Some events are caused by intentional acts carried out by individual and groups to bring about change. Other causes are the result of accident, omission, or broader social factors that are unintended.

Dimensions of Cause and Consequence:

• Events have a myriad of different and often unappreciated causes.

• Prior events may have no causal influence on subsequent events

• Looking for broad underlying factors is as or more important than identifying immediate particular causes

• Action have unintended consequences

The Criteria for Immediate Cause:

• Immediate Causes are often the most obvious and easily identifiable.

• Immediate Causes directly cause the event in question.

• Often, the removal of the immediate cause will do little to prevent a similar event from occurring again. For this reason, immediate causes are often seen as being less important than underlying.

The Criteria for Underlying Causes:

• The underlying cause is usually less obvious and more difficult for the historian to identify.

• The underlying cause is often an underlying belief, ideal, or practice amongst a group of people, and not isolated to a single historical event.

• Often, the removal of the underlying cause will prevent a similar event from occurring again. For this reason, underlying causes are often seen as being more important than immediate.

Historical Perspective

• The past is a “foreign” country and thus it is difficult to understand what was meant by and what we can legitimately conclude from the clues that remain from these bygone times.

• Historical perspective involves the viewing of the past through the social, intellectual, emotional and moral lenses of the time.

• We must remain mindful of the potentially profound differences between our own worldview and that of the past worldviews.

Dimensions of Historical Perspective

• Presentism is the antithesis of historical perspective.

• Historical perspective is concerned with understanding the prevailing norms of the time more than it is adopting a particular person’s point of view.

• There are diverse historical perspectives on any given event in the past.

• Adopting an historical perspective requires suspending moral judgment.

Moral Judgment

Dimensions of Moral/Ethical Judgment:

• Moral judgments are a particular kind of evaluative (or value) judgment:– Judgments can be of many kinds such as

economic, political, educational or environmental

• Value/Ethical judgments are often explicit but they may be implicit, – Explicit(straightforward) value judgment: “Life as a

consumer is much better now than it was in pioneer times.”

– Implicit(implied/hinted) value judgment: “In pioneer times, people endured travel by food over long distance to secure supplies in tiny trading post with limited selection and uneven quality. Now we have the freedom to drive in temperature-controlled cars to our choice of malls where we find a wide selection of dependable goods.”

• Moral judgments about the past must be sensitive to historical context.

• There is value in withholding moral judgments until adequate information has been acquired.– It is difficult to responsibly assign blame or credit

to historical actions because we cannot know all the facts and we need, out of fairness, to be sensitive to the values and conditions of the time.

• Determining cause is different from assigning responsibility

Review:

Historical Thinking Concepts

– Establish historical significance– Use primary source evidence– Identify continuity and change– Analyze cause and consequence– Take a historical perspective – Consider the ethical dimensions of history

Questions???