A sense of history: some components
by Gerald W. Schlabach
All students who graduate from a liberal arts college should take with them an indelible awareness of the following:
1. Some things happened before other things.
Studying history is much more than the memorization of dates. But if we get things out of chronological order, we’ll inevitably get a lot of other things wrong too. Imagine that we are in a new city trying to find “408 N. 5th St.,” but vandals have taken down the signs for 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th streets and rearranged them in random order. We’ll probably fail. Neither can we expect to succeed in the study of history if we think Socrates was Aristotle’s student, and they both argued with St. Paul when the Christian apostle preached in Athens.
2. Some things only happened in certain places.
Athens is in Greece, of course. It may be nearer to Jerusalem than some people think, but the two cities are on different sides of the Mediterranean Sea. In other words, geography is as basic to the study of history as is chronology. Time and space are the most basic units of historical study because they are the most basic units of historical existence. We must respect them both.
For a human being to exist in a “place,” however, also means to exist in a particular community, society, and culture. When the third-century Christian apologist Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” he was not denying that there were routes for travelling between the two. He was not talking about geography. He was insisting that Greek philosophy and Christian theology grew out of very different cultures or worldviews. He may have been wrong to exaggerate their differences — but he was right to expect differences. To expect and recognize cultural differences is also to exercise a sense of “place.”
3. Meanings and definitions of words change.
Let’s say we read the word “virtue” in an English translation of a text that the Christian thinker Tertullian wrote 200 years after the birth of Jesus. Later we read the word “virtue” in an English translation of a text that the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote 350 years before the birth of Jesus. Should we assume they mean the same thing? No!
If nothing else, we must should remember that Tertullian wrote in Latin, whereas Aristotle wrote in Greek. So we can’t assume that the words behind the English translation meant exactly the same thing. (If you are studying a foreign language while in college, you should already know this. If you aren’t studying a foreign language — why aren’t you?)
More importantly, words get their meanings from the times, places, and cultures in which people use those words. (Remember points 1 and 2?) Aristotle was both reflecting and deliberately changing the meaning of “virtue” that he had learned from other Greeks, such as the ancient poet Homer. Tertullian and other early Christians had rejected some of the Greek virtues entirely, and modified the meaning of others. So there is no way to understand the meaning of words except to read them in context — noting how they are used, associating them with related words, learning as much historical background as possible, and so on.
Lesson: there are no short cuts to reading, and reading carefully. We reluctantly allow ourselves a huge short cut when we use English translations! What more can we ask?
Hint: unless you really want to aggravate your professors, never begin a history paper with Webster’s definition of “virtue” or any other word.
4. Where there is no record there is no history.
Professional historians get as frustrated as their students over this one. Sure, stuff happened before human beings started leaving artifacts and writing things down. And sure, a lot more stuff happened afterwards that nonetheless left no trace. So we’d like to know more. We’d like to fill in the gaps. But we can’t draw conclusions where we don’t have evidence. Sometimes we can make educated guesses and speculate, but we dare not pass our speculations off as facts. So students shouldn’t try either. Show your professors your evidence.
5. Texts that powerful educated people have written are not the only kind of record, however.
Writing is an absolutely wonderful invention. We know infinitely more about other times and places because people have left textual records. And we know those people more intimately because they wrote down their thoughts. Texts are virtual miracles. The survival of many ancient texts, against terrible odds, might really be miraculous (though see point 7 below).
Still, texts suffer from one huge problem. During most of human history, only a few people have known how to read and write. Even when the literacy rate has increased, only a few people have enjoyed the luxury to systematically record their thoughts. The textual record, marvelous as it is, therefore suffers a bias toward elites of almost every time and place.
Fortunately, other human artifacts count as records too: chards of pottery, coins and tools, preserved grains, unearthed shacks, layers of city lay-outs buried as one civilization built over the ruins of the last, paintings on walls of caves and catacombs, jewelry and children’s toys, stories passed down orally for many generations before being written down. To understand the lives of common folks, historians can also piece together clues from mundane forms of writing that no one thought of as literature: tax records, law codes, bills and inventory lists, ships’ logs, baptismal records, advertisements for slave auctions, letters of scared and lonely soldiers. By studying all these, historians can correct somewhat for the bias of people rich, educated, and powerful enough to have imagined themselves “making history.”
6. History is almost always complex:
- Events have multiple causes.
- Societies involve a mix of good and bad.
- Changes depend on continuity.
Therefore, conflicting explanations of historical events and developments are almost always possible.
Why are you in college? If you are thoughtful you can probably list five or six reasons. So why did the Roman Empire fall? Don’t expect any one reason to suffice! We’re talking about a 500-year-plus empire here! It had incorporated many cultures, depended on a vast network of trade, tried to defend many borders, and recently switched religions (sort of). Expect a cluster of reasons. Expect scholars to argue over which reasons were more important. Expect complexity.
This is the human condition after all: complex. A mixture of good and bad. A mixture of creativity and stupidity. A mixture of generosity and greed. Heroic actions and good intentions in the service of dubious causes. Just causes defended through violence and other dubious means. To study history is to learn to distinguish between shades of grey.
Come to think of it, when did Rome fall? Did it ever really fall? Something changed in Western Europe between 400 CE and 600 CE. But much continued. History involves both change and continuity. Expect to find both.
7. God may indeed intervene in human history, but this is hard to document and historians require footnotes.
Sorry, but to suggest the ways that God may be involved in human history is to move into theology or philosophy of history. Those are different from the documentary study of history. To be sure, all study of human history should raise larger questions of meaning. Philosophy, literature, art, and religion take up where historical study leaves off and enjoys greater freedom to answer the question of what it all means. But good historians bind themselves to the historical record. Until they can provide footnotes referring to the pages of a heavenly scroll, they refrain from making claims about what God has done in history. (Besides, scrolls have columns, not pages.)
All students who expect to make the most of their liberal arts education should also be able to explain statements such as the following:
8. To attempt to live without a memory is to attempt to lose one’s humanity.
I said it is your job to explain this statement! But okay, I’ll help you get started: Without a memory, would you recognize your family? recognize your house? know how to say your prayers or know why you have stopped praying? learn from your mistakes? know which friends to embrace? stay in love when you fall in love? Be the person you are?
Now, how is all of this true for entire families, neighborhoods, societies, nations, civilizations?
The answer is the reason we study history.
9. Our memories fail us, however, and so we must continually work to recover and test our collective memory.
Now that you know how important history is, you may also start to understand why families, neighborhoods, societies, nations and civilizations tend to twist, distort, or conveniently forget parts of their histories! A lot may be at stake. Violence, oppression, injustice, racism, sexism and other unsavory patterns of human behavior may have allowed us to enjoy the lives we now live. The unvarnished truth may painfully force us to choose between becoming different people or repressing our humanity.
But do we really want to live out lies? If not, we have no choice but to test, argue and challenge one another’s memories, in the hope of remembering and living more truthfully.
10. Historical study has at least as much to do with interpreting the past as with gathering “the facts.”
By now you’re wondering: How are we supposed to get the facts right? Historians must have lots of different interpretations!
Hey! You’re catching on. Don’t despair! Good historians always seek to interpret the past, not just gather “the facts,” and they know it. Good historians work to acknowledge their own locations in history too. They are “coming from” somewhere. Even while letting history cast light on their own “somewhere” — their own perspective or worldview — they are letting their own “somewhere” cast light on history. Think of it as a good conversation, which continually moves back and forth, but hopefully moves forward.
So how do you decide which interpretation of history to trust? Get in on the conversation! Let the study of history help you recognize self-critically your own location — your values, your convictions, your faith, as well as your privileges. Then become a good conversationalist: By turns listen respectfully and by turns argue persuasively. Be open to testing and changing your own perspective, yet also be prepared to argue well. You can do both at once if you are drawing both on a rich worldview that need not fear the truth of others and on a competent familiarity with the best available historical evidence.
All interpretations are not created equal. Some are more cogent than others. Some have more evidence in their favor. Some are false and some are lies. Even though history is more than a bunch of facts, evidence still counts for a lot. So how do we know? So how do we interpret? We converse well, and we keep conversing. And we approach, even if we never fully attain, the truth.
All “A” students who graduate from a liberal arts college and all history majors should show that they have mastered points 1-10 by handling historical evidence with a care that reflects the following:
11. Nothing is more important for historians than to chart cause and effect — even though nothing is harder to prove.
Remember: there are gaps in the record (points 4, 5 and 9). Sometimes we know exactly who read what (because they said so) and have a pretty good hunch about how this affected them (because they immediately changed their course of action). But such instances are rather rare. And even when someone has said that a text or an event or another person has influenced them — can we be sure that other forces were not influencing them as well? Do you know all the reasons you are in college?
Still, the chain of causes and effects that have shaped our world is what makes history most interesting! Why do we live in one kind of society and not some other? Why do we dream the dreams we do, yet make the mistakes we do? We want to know! So we keep trying to learn and to learn from history.
Just be careful with the evidence! Please.
12. Intriguing coincidences sometimes point to relationships of cause and effect, but never are enough to prove cause and effect.
Just because two things happened simultaneously does not automatically mean that they are related. Just because one event followed another does not necessarily mean that the first caused the second. Yes, these patterns are intriguing and suggestive. In fact, when there are gaps in the record, they may be all historians have to go on.
But we must be careful how we present the evidence, lest we claim more for it than it deserves. Really.
13. Human history sometimes seems to involve themes that are common to many cultures and continuous through many ages — but historians do not have the right to assert them until they have paid long and close attention to particular differences of time and space.
So return to point 1 and start over, again and again.
Why Study History? (1998)
By Peter N. Stearns
People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?
Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is.
Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.
In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline. History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.
History Helps Us Understand People and Societies
In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives. History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.
The Importance of History in Our Own Lives
These two fundamental reasons for studying history underlie more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives. History well told is beautiful. Many of the historians who most appeal to the general reading public know the importance of dramatic and skillful writing—as well as of accuracy. Biography and military history appeal in part because of the tales they contain. History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding. Stories well done are stories that reveal how people and societies have actually functioned, and they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the "pastness of the past"—the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives—involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.
History Contributes to Moral Understanding
History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration. "History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.
History Provides Identity
History also helps provide identity, and this is unquestionably one of the reasons all modern nations encourage its teaching in some form. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion. For many Americans, studying the history of one's own family is the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts about genealogy and (at a slightly more complex level) a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Family identity is established and confirmed. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, such as ethnic groups in the United States, use history for similar identity purposes. Merely defining the group in the present pales against the possibility of forming an identity based on a rich past. And of course nations use identity history as well—and sometimes abuse it. Histories that tell the national story, emphasizing distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.
Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship
A study of history is essential for good citizenship. This is the most common justification for the place of history in school curricula. Sometimes advocates of citizenship history hope merely to promote national identity and loyalty through a history spiced by vivid stories and lessons in individual success and morality. But the importance of history for citizenship goes beyond this narrow goal and can even challenge it at some points.
History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. History provides data about the emergence of national institutions, problems, and values—it's the only significant storehouse of such data available. It offers evidence also about how nations have interacted with other societies, providing international and comparative perspectives essential for responsible citizenship. Further, studying history helps us understand how recent, current, and prospective changes that affect the lives of citizens are emerging or may emerge and what causes are involved. More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple observer.
What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?
What does a well-trained student of history, schooled to work on past materials and on case studies in social change, learn how to do? The list is manageable, but it contains several overlapping categories.
The Ability to Assess Evidence. The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence—the sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the most accurate pictures of the past that they can. Learning how to interpret the statements of past political leaders—one kind of evidence—helps form the capacity to distinguish between the objective and the self-serving among statements made by present-day political leaders. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of data. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.
The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations. Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations. Understanding how societies work—the central goal of historical study—is inherently imprecise, and the same certainly holds true for understanding what is going on in the present day. Learning how to identify and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an essential citizenship skill for which history, as an often-contested laboratory of human experience, provides training. This is one area in which the full benefits of historical study sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the past to construct identity. Experience in examining past situations provides a constructively critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.
Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change. Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of change means developing some capacity for determining the magnitude and significance of change, for some changes are more fundamental than others. Comparing particular changes to relevant examples from the past helps students of history develop this capacity. The ability to identify the continuities that always accompany even the most dramatic changes also comes from studying history, as does the skill to determine probable causes of change. Learning history helps one figure out, for example, if one main factor—such as a technological innovation or some deliberate new policy—accounts for a change or whether, as is more commonly the case, a number of factors combine to generate the actual change that occurs.
Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the promotion of that elusive creature, the well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual information about the background of our political institutions and about the values and problems that affect our social well-being. It also contributes to our capacity to use evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze change and continuities. No one can ever quite deal with the present as the historian deals with the past—we lack the perspective for this feat; but we can move in this direction by applying historical habits of mind, and we will function as better citizens in the process.
History Is Useful in the World of Work
History is useful for work. Its study helps create good businesspeople, professionals, and political leaders. The number of explicit professional jobs for historians is considerable, but most people who study history do not become professional historians. Professional historians teach at various levels, work in museums and media centers, do historical research for businesses or public agencies, or participate in the growing number of historical consultancies. These categories are important—indeed vital—to keep the basic enterprise of history going, but most people who study history use their training for broader professional purposes. Students of history find their experience directly relevant to jobs in a variety of careers as well as to further study in fields like law and public administration. Employers often deliberately seek students with the kinds of capacities historical study promotes. The reasons are not hard to identify: students of history acquire, by studying different phases of the past and different societies in the past, a broad perspective that gives them the range and flexibility required in many work situations. They develop research skills, the ability to find and evaluate sources of information, and the means to identify and evaluate diverse interpretations. Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential. Historical study is unquestionably an asset for a variety of work and professional situations, even though it does not, for most students, lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do some technical fields. But history particularly prepares students for the long haul in their careers, its qualities helping adaptation and advancement beyond entry-level employment. There is no denying that in our society many people who are drawn to historical study worry about relevance. In our changing economy, there is concern about job futures in most fields. Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.
Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. Studying history can help us develop some literally "salable" skills, but its study must not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history—that confined to personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—is essential to function beyond childhood. Some history depends on personal taste, where one finds beauty, the joy of discovery, or intellectual challenge. Between the inescapable minimum and the pleasure of deep commitment comes the history that, through cumulative skill in interpreting the unfolding human record, provides a real grasp of how the world works.
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