What is History?
History is the study of the past and our attempts to understand the people, societies, events, and problems of the past. It is something that all human societies do.
History can be told in the form of a great story, a moving narrative full of interesting people and stories of struggle and success. Each generation adds its own chapter to history while also reinterpreting and finding new things in the chapters that have already been written.
History gives us a sense of who we are. If we know where we came from, we can learn more about who we are. History gives us a sense of where we come from and why we are here. It helps us figure out why things are the way they are and how we might handle things in the future.
History teaches us what it means to be human by showing us both the great things people have done and the terrible things they have done. History also teaches us by giving us examples of how to better organize and run our societies for the good of everyone.
History is not just “the past.” It is our attempts to understand and explain the past.
“The past” and “history”
People who are just starting to learn about history often think that history and the past are the same thing. It’s not like that. The past is a time in the past, along with the people and societies that lived there and the things that happened there. History is how we try to find out about, study, and explain the past.
This is a small, but important, difference. What happened in the past can’t be changed because it’s already happened. History, on the other hand, changes all the time. The past is real and can’t be changed, but history is a conversation that goes on about the past and what it means.
The English word “story” comes from the Latin word “historia,” which means a story or account of what happened in the past. The word “history” comes from the same root. History is a collection of many different people’s thousands of stories about the past.
Rewriting and writing history
There are so many of these stories that they are often different, contradictory, and even at odds with each other. This means that history is always open to being changed and reinterpreted. Each generation has its own view of the past. It looks at the past with different standards, priorities, and values, and comes to different conclusions.
Historiography is the study of how history is different and has changed over time.
Our ideas about what history is and how it should be told are as flexible and open to debate as the stories we tell about it. Since the beginning of history studies, historians have had different ideas about how the past should be studied, written, and interpreted.
So, historians may look at history in different ways, using different ideas and methods and putting more or less emphasis on different things. In the next few paragraphs, we’ll talk about some of the most popular historical theories:
The study of important people
historian plutarch
Plutach, who was a Greek historian,
Plutarch, a Greek writer from the past, said that real history is the study of great leaders and innovators. People who are known for their personality, strength of character, ambition, skills, leadership, or creativity change the course of history.
Plutarch wrote his histories almost like biographies or “life-and-times” stories about these people. They talked about how the things these great people did changed the way their countries or societies worked.
Plutarch’s method was used as a model by many historians who came after him. It is sometimes called “top-down” history because it starts with rulers or leaders and works backwards.
One benefit of this method is that it is simple and easy to use. It’s easier to do research and write about people than about more complicated things like social movements or long-term changes. Focusing on individuals is often more interesting and easy for readers to understand.
The main problem with this approach is that it might skip over, simplify, or ignore historical events and conditions that did not start with important people, such as unrest among the people or changes in the economy.
“Winds of Change” is being studied.
history
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall comes down, it is a “winds of change” moment.
Other historians have focused less on people and more on themes, looking at the factors and forces that have caused big changes in history. Some people pay attention to what could be called the “winds of change,” which are strong ideas, forces, and movements that shape or change the way people live, work, and think.
People with power often start or drive these great ideas and movements, but they grow into much bigger forces for change. As the “winds of change” get stronger, they shape or change political, economic, and social events and conditions.
Christianity was a big “wind of change” in medieval Europe because it changed the government, society, and social norms. The European Enlightenment was another thing that shook up old ideas about politics, religion, and the natural world. This started a long time of curiosity, learning, and new ideas.
Marxism started in the late 1800s and grew to challenge the old way of doing things in Russia, China, and other places. It changed the way government and society worked in these countries. The “winds of change” can be seen in the Age of Exploration, the Industrial Revolution, decolonization in the middle of the 1900s, and the end of communism in eastern Europe in the late 1900s.
The study of how people react to a challenge
Some historians, like the British writer Arnold Toynbee (1889–1975), thought that challenges and responses are what cause history to change. Civilizations are not just defined by who runs them or how they live, but also by how they deal with hard problems or crises.
There are many ways these problems show up. They can be physical, related to the environment, about money, or about ideas. They can come from either inside or outside forces. They can come from inside or outside the group.
How civilizations deal with these challenges determines whether or not they will survive and thrive. This often depends on how creative, resourceful, flexible, and adaptable its people are.
Human history is full of real-life examples of challenges and how people dealt with them. Many countries have had to deal with strong enemies, wars, natural disasters, economic downturns, new ideas, new political movements, and disagreements among their own people.
For example, the process of colonization was hard for both the new settlers and the people who lived there before. Changes in the economy, like new technologies and more or less trade, have led to problems in the form of social changes or tensions between classes.
Dialectics is a field of study.
history
Karl Marx, who came up with the idea of “material dialectic,”
In philosophy, dialectics is a way for people with very different ideas to come to a compromise and agree on something. Georg Hegel, a German philosopher, put the idea of dialectics to use in history (1770-1831).
Hegel said that dialectic interaction was the cause of most changes and outcomes in history. Hegel says that for every thesis, which is a statement or “idea,” there is an antithesis, which is a reaction or “opposite idea.” When the thesis and antithesis meet or fight, a synthesis (a “new idea”) is born.
This never-ending process of struggle and growth shows people new ideas and truths. Karl Marx was a German philosopher who lived from 1818 to 1883. He was a student of Hegel and based his own theory of history on Hegel’s dialectic, with one important difference.
Marx said that the “material dialectic,” which is the struggle between economic classes, was the driving force behind history. Marx thought that most social structures and interactions were based on who owned capital and wealth. Marx wrote that all classes fight and try to make their economic situations better, usually at the cost of other classes.
Marx’s harsh criticisms of capitalism were based on his material dialectic. Capitalism is a political and economic system in which people with money control production and take advantage of workers to make as much money as possible.
The study of what goes wrong
ideas from the past
When Franz Ferdinand was killed in June 1914, a lot of things changed.
Some historians think that history is shaped by things that happen by chance, surprise us, or come out of the blue.
History and changes in history tend to follow patterns, but they can also be random and chaotic. Even though we are interested in timelines and how things move in a straight line, history does not always follow a clear and predictable path. The past is full of unplanned events, surprises, and discoveries made by accident.
Some of these have set off forces and changes in history that could not be predicted, stopped, or controlled. A few have happened at very important times and been the spark or “flashpoint” for big changes. For example, the discovery of gold led to gold rushes that changed the history of whole countries.
In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car went a different way through Sarajevo and passed an aimless Gavrilo Princip. This was one of the things that led to World War I.
Daniel Boorstin, an American historian who lived from 1914 to 2004, was a fan of this interest in historical accidents. He said that if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, which would have made her less beautiful, the history of the world might have been very different.
