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HIS 101 1a

The document discusses the definition and significance of history, emphasizing its role in understanding human actions, decisions, and societal structures. It critiques the current state of historical study, arguing against the misuse of history for ideological purposes and advocating for a broader, more inclusive approach to historical narratives. The author reflects on the evolving relationship between past and present, suggesting that history should illuminate lost perspectives and complexities to foster a deeper understanding of contemporary issues.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
20 views3 pages

HIS 101 1a

The document discusses the definition and significance of history, emphasizing its role in understanding human actions, decisions, and societal structures. It critiques the current state of historical study, arguing against the misuse of history for ideological purposes and advocating for a broader, more inclusive approach to historical narratives. The author reflects on the evolving relationship between past and present, suggesting that history should illuminate lost perspectives and complexities to foster a deeper understanding of contemporary issues.

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dreamwrld99
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF ONDO STATE UP TO 1900

HIS 101 LECT 1


Definition of History and Sources of History
What is History?
‘History is the study of people, actions, decisions, interactions and behaviours’.
History is narratives. From chaos comes order. We seek to understand the past by determining and
ordering ‘facts’; and from these narratives we hope to explain the decisions and processes which
shape our existence. Perhaps we might even distill patterns and lessons to guide – but never to
determine – our responses to the challenges faced today. History is the study of people, actions,
decisions, interactions and behaviours. It is so compelling a subject because it encapsulates themes
which expose the human condition in all of its guises and that resonate throughout time: power,
weakness, corruption, tragedy, triumph … Nowhere are these themes clearer than in political
history, still the necessary core of the field and the most meaningful of the myriad approaches to
the study of history. Yet political history has fallen out of fashion and subsequently into disrepute,
wrongly demonised as stale and irrelevant. The result has been to significantly erode the utility of
ordering, explaining and distilling lessons from the past.

History’s primary purpose is to stand at the centre of diverse, tolerant, intellectually rigorous
debate about our existence: our political systems, leadership, society, economy and culture.
However, open and free debate – as in so many areas of life – is too often lacking and it is not
difficult to locate the cause of this intolerance.

Writing history can be a powerful tool; it has shaped identities, particularly at the national
level. Moreover, it grants those who control the narrative the ability to legitimise or discredit
actions, events and individuals in the present. Yet to marshal history and send it into battle merely
to serve the needs of the present is misuse and abuse. History should never be a weapon at the
heart of culture wars. Sadly, once again, it is: clumsily wielded by those who deliberately seek to
impose a clear ideological agenda. History is becoming the handmaiden of identity politics and
self-flagellation. This only promotes poor, one-dimensional understandings of the past and
continually diminishes the utility of the field. History stands at a crossroads; it must refuse to
follow the trend of the times.
Any thoroughly researched and well-argued study of any aspect of the past counts, for me, as
history. I do have a preference for historians who probe into the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ but, overall, I
think that our scope should be as broad and as catholic as possible. I am old enough to remember a
time when women’s history was a separate field – left, in many universities, to Women’s Studies
programmes – and the existence of non-white people was recognised by historians only in the
context of imperial history. Back then – I am talking only about the late 1980s – English,
Anthropology and even History of Science departments were often more adventurous in
addressing the history of ‘others’ but their work, we were often told by ‘real’ historians, wasn’t
proper history: ‘they use novels as evidence, for heaven’s sake!’ ‘Have any of them been near an
archive?’
If things are better today in History departments, it is because the disciplinary frontiers have
been redrawn. But we still have our borders, not all of which are imposed by our institutions or
funding authorities. How many History departments would exclude an otherwise excellent
candidate only because her sources are mostly literary? A great many, I dare say, including my
own. Many of the field’s old fixations may have disappeared, but quite a few antiquated fences
still await a well-aimed boot.
Political, economic and social history are, without question, essential; so is the history of
Europe and America. But they are not the alpha and the omega of History as a discipline. We still
do not pay enough attention to histories of ideas, of the arts, of medicine, of philosophy, of
entertainment, of technology, whether in Europe or America or elsewhere. Nor do we feel
particularly comfortable about biographical approaches to history. None of these potentially
enriching themes can be addressed unless we jettison our atavistic equation of the archive with a
collection of yellowing reams of paper. It won’t be easy to dislodge this idol, but I would like to
hope that coming generations of historians will chip away at it with greater conviction than mine
has been able to muster.
Though almost 60 years have passed since E.H. Carr first posed the question, undergraduates
still continue to find much to unpack in his answers. Indeed, Carr’s 1961 book What is History?
has enjoyed a longer shelf-life than most works of actual history.
But it is a curious fact that What is History? remains a go-to reference for teachers and
students everywhere. After all, much of Carr’s argument and the debates to which he was
contributing might strike us now, as we attempt to answer the question, as being quaintly archaic.
The interim 60 years encompass postmodernism, the rise of gender history and the ‘memory
boom’, to name but a tiny sample. Today’s students inhabit a completely different intellectual
universe.
Carr’s ideas clearly resonate more with our contemporary sensibilities than do those of his
detractors, who remained wedded to the idea of an objective historian unfettered from all current
assumptions. By contrast, Carr saw history as fundamentally a problem-solving discipline. Not
only should historians divest themselves of the illusion that they could somehow stand outside the
world in which they live, he argued. They should in fact embrace the fact that the study of the past
could be oriented to the needs of the present.
One can immediately see the appeal of such an argument today. In an academic world where
the humanities are under greater pressure to justify their significance than ever before, studying
‘the past for the past’s sake’ no longer cuts it. But I don’t think this is the whole story. Rather, I
sense that the enduring fascination with Carr reflects something much more fundamental in how
we view the relationship between past and present. For instance, we are surely less inclined than
previous generations to demand rigid dichotomies between ‘history’ on the one hand and
‘memory’ or ‘heritage’ on the other. Furthermore, we’re more democratic in who we believe
history belongs to: who from the past it includes, and who in the present can benefit from it.
Each historian will view the relationship between past and present differently. But it was
Carr’s great achievement to identify the tensions of this relationship as the very engine of the
discipline itself.
One way to attempt to answer this question is to ask ourselves what and who are histories for?
A common starting point might be that histories are useful for telling us how we got ‘here’. Such
histories might take the form of origin stories, of relatively linear and perhaps teleological
accounts – how did we come to organise our societies and political systems in the ways that we
have now, for instance – or, as the apocryphal saying goes, a series of lessons to learn from in
order to avoid the ignominy of repetition.
Such an understanding of history conceals within itself a more exciting and fraught – though
not necessarily antithetical – possibility. Just as we might look to the past to better understand the
myriad, complicated ways in which our present world came to exist, historians might also set
themselves the task of illuminating worlds unrealised and of other presents that might have
existed. Such histories, counter-intuitively, help us understand our own times better either by
underscoring the contingency of the world around us or, depending on your perspective, the
enduring power of the structures responsible for foreclosing those other paths.
These kinds of histories require attending to – and often recovering and reconstructing –
narratives and perspectives that have been lost in dominant historical accounts. My own work has
focused on unsuccessful revolutions and failed political visions in the early 20th century. More
broadly, we might consider it a fundamental task of history to reveal the complexity and plurality
that people lived with in the past. Such histories can demonstrate how differently people have
thought about and related to the world around them, including other ways of recording their ideas
and experiences. Much of this terrain used to be marginal to ‘History’ proper; M.K. Gandhi noted
as much in 1909 when he dismissed conventional history as simply a record of war. In recovering
what has been subsumed and forgotten – for instance, radical dissenting traditions that were
drowned out, or anticolonial resistance movements that were defeated – history might instead
serve much more emancipatory ends and open up spaces of critical and imaginative possibility for
our own times.

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