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Chapter One
Basic Concepts of History
History is the study of the human past. Based on the careful analysis of surviving texts and artifacts, the historian attempts to reconstruct past events and processes which have created the world we live in.
The Study of History
Why Study History?There are as many answers to this question as there are people who have reflected on the human condition. Several possible responses are often given by historians.
Understanding the World
Understanding the world we live in, with its complex collection of events and developments, is impossible without understanding the past which created the present. Many past events, often from hundreds or even thousands of years ago, are still exerting important influences on the world, creating the parameters within which we live our lives.
Collective Memory
Just as individuals would lose their identity if they lost their memory, so a society also loses, or more correctly transforms, its identity by its changing perception of the past. Nations, communities, groups, and individuals all understand themselves through their collective or individual memories of the past. Many modern social and political conflicts and issues arise from conflicting interpretations of the past. The historian serves as both the guardian and the interpreter of our collective memory.
Individual Intellectual Freedom
A knowledge of the past liberates the mind to view the world from different perspectives. Many of the fundamental questions concerning the problems of human existence have been asked for thousands of years. How should human groups relate to one another? Is war justifiable, and if so, under what conditions? How should society be organized? How should the benefits and responsibilities of society be distributed? Why are other communities and peoples different from us? Does God exist, and if so, how does He interact with humans? Many different answers to these and other important questions have been given by different sages and prophets throughout history. Some of their answers have been formed into intellectual or religious traditions which remain definitive for hundreds of minions of people. History forces us to recognize that, just like us, many peoples in the past have thought that their particular forms of civilization were the finest and most advanced the world has ever seen. Most of these civilizations no longer exist. History can thus serve as a mechanism to guard against temporal, geographical, or ethnic provincialism by allowing us to see the human experience from the broadest possible perspective.History as a Humanistic Study
History is also an exciting branch of the humanities. It is an endlessly fascinating tale of human achievement and folly. At its finest, history is also literature, having for its plot the entire breadth of human experience. The great heroic deeds, sublime acts of selfless charity, and heinous crimes of mankind form the fundamental facets of history. Many people find a great deal of pleasure from journeying into the past. Without a knowledge of the past we cannot fully appreciate the great literature, art, architecture, and music of the world.
The Nature of Historical StudyThe fundamental role of the historian is to ask questions about the past and to try to answer those questions. What happened? Who was involved? When and where did it occur? Why did it happen, and what were the results? The historian is thus often compared to a detective. A crime, such as a murder, is a historical incident: a unique event which occurred in the past. Just as a detective will examine the material evidence and question the witnesses in an attempt to reconstruct a crime, so the historian will also examine historical evidence in order to reconstruct past events.
Evidence
Historians cannot directly observe the past. Nor can we create historical laboratories in which we can set up experiments in which the past can be recreated or modified. The historian's goal is to reach out and somehow comprehend and grasp a past that doesn't exist anymore; all that is left are fragmentary bits and pieces. In their attempts to reconstruct the past, historians must thus rely on the accidental survival of evidence, which they divide into two categories: artifacts and texts.
Artifactual Evidence: Archaeology. Any manmade material object which survives from the past is an artifact. Historians often divide artifacts into three categories based on the different methodologies used to analyze them, and the different types of information we can derive from them: (1) monuments and buildings which were built in the past; (2) art depicting past events, customs, gods, etc.; (3) objects, such as tools, weapons, or clothing, which were made and used in the past. The specialized study of the artifactual remains from the past is technically the domain of the archaeologist, but historians nonetheless frequently use archaeological and artifactual evidence in their attempts to reconstruct the past.
Textual Evidence: History. The most important types of artifacts from the past are those with writing on them. Indeed, written documents are absolutely crucial to the historical enterprise of reconstructing the past. In a sense a written document is a fossil idea. It is only through texts that we can enter into the minds of people long dead, to discover their hopes and hatreds, their gods and inner demons. Any document written in the past can have historical importance. Historical texts range from complete books of hundreds of pages to small inscriptions on coins. They include monumental inscriptions in rock, and obscure fragments of papyri. Private letters and journals are often as important as official government documents. The fundamental job of the historian is to read and analyze such documents in an effort to reconstruct past events and processes.
Primary Documents. Historians always attempt to get as close as possible to the actual past event they are trying to reconstruct. On occasion they go to the actual site of an event. They may attempt to handle or examine photographs of the artifacts that were involved in a particular past event. But most important, they read the surviving records of eyewitnesses in the...
