Area of Knowledge:

HISTORY
• What is History?
• How certain is our knowledge of the past?
• Do historians have more in common with
scientists or with artists? Is their work
evidence based or intuition based?
• What constitutes acceptable evidence to a
historian?
 What is History?
• History is the present traces of the past
• In trying to reconstruct the past on the basis of
the evidence two problems may arise:
– Too little evidence – distant past (ex. The knowledge
of the wars between Greece and Persia in the 5th
century B.C.E. is based on a single, rather unreliable
source – Herodotus)
– Too much evidence – more recent events
SCOPE: History studies what happened in the past,
and why it happened.
 Scope:
• If you keep a diary, what determines what you
choose to include and what you choose to
omit?
• What becomes a part of official history?
• Only significant events, not everything that
happened in the past – the problem is with
how can we and who ultimately does, decide
what is significant?
• History is also concerned with explaining and
understanding the history, not merely with
describing the past
 Significance
• Using any criteria of your choice, rate the historical
significance of the following events:
– The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species in
1859
– Your last TOK class.
– The assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948
– The 1930 soccer World Cup Final – won by Uruguay
– The birth of Bill Gates in 1955
– Former US President Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky
– The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon in 2001.
 Why study history?
• Why should you study history?
 Why study history?
• Gives us sense of identity
• Is a defense against propaganda
• Enriches our understanding of human nature
Trotsky or No Trotsky? That is the question!
• How important do you think it is for our
political leaders to have a good knowledge of
history?
 How can the past be known?
• The problem is whether historical knowledge
can be considered objective
• We can know the past only by reconstructing
it on the basis of evidence that exists in the
present. However, memory is fallible, evidence
is ambiguous, and prejudice common
• To what extent can a trained historian
approach the ideal of objectivity?
 WoK and Methods in History
1. The events of the past – sense perception and memory
- Only very recent history deals with living people’s sense perceptions
and memories
- Despite the uncertainties that surround observation and memory, we
do gain first hand information from eyewitnesses and a chance to ask
questions
- The historians cannot rerun the past (No experiments) in order to
take better notes – they are trying to find out what happened from
the echoes that remain
2. Evaluating sources – Language
- Language is a major means for eyewitnesses to give us their
personal knowledge – through records
- The information is skimpy for distant past but vast for recent past;
records that are left require interpretation
3. Historical Event – language and reasoning
- What counts as historical event – decision has implications for the direction
of research and conclusion that are drawn from the documents
- historians cannot describe everything – they must select information relevant
to the stories they want to tell in response to the question they want to ask
4. Conjectures about the past – imagination
- “creative friction” of the historians between fact and interpretation –
historians have to use their imagination to understand what happened in the past –
to connect the dots of evidence
5. Neutrality of history – emotion and imagination
- Is the historical writing necessarily neutral – denotative rather than connotative
and free of emotion?
- facts place constrains on the exercise of imagination ; emotion is almost
inevitably part of the subject matter of human experience (Historical sources contain
emotion, the historian has emotions, and readers interpret with emotions);
- real question is whether the historian should attempt not to let his emotions affect
his writing – it could be argued that an effective presentation of the facts should be
enough to convey the significance of the past events, but it could also be argued that to
write unemotially about genocides would be to miss the point of communicating about
the topic
6. Causal connections – reason and intuition
– We do not observe cause, we infer cause through
reasoning as we make connections between variables.
Historian has to make choices – how far back and out
should he go to capture enough detail to explain the
cause
– Possible fallacy – post hoc ergo propter hoc
– Historians sometimes contradict each other
– Historians might have an intuitive grasp of patterns –
it can happen that historians may grasp relationship
not though conscious reasoning but by intuition.
 Role of intuition
• Sir Isaiah Berlin:
“ If someone tells us “x forgave Y because he loved him”, or “x killed Y
because he hated him”, we accept these propositions easily, because
they, and the propositions into which they can be generalized, fit in with
our experience, because we claim to know what men are like, because
we claim to know (not always justifiably) what – in essentials – a human
being is, in particular a human being who belongs to a cyclization not
too unlike our own, and consequently one who thinks, wills, feels, accts
in a manner which (rightly or wrongly) we assume to be intelligible to us
because it sufficiently resembles our own or those of other human
beings whose lives are intertwined with our own. This sort of “because”
is the “because” neither of induction nor of deduction, but he
“because” of understanding – Verstehen - of recognition”
7. The balance of particular and general: reason
and language
- we are forced to generalize between
specific events, even though they will never
repeat again – we group all armed conflicts as
“war”, etc.
- The very process of identifying similarities
is interpretative as historians choose between
“civil unrest” and “revolution”.
 Nature of Historical Evidence
• Primary Sources: sources written by someone
who was there at the time; very important for
history
• Secondary Sources: later, second-hand
account of what happened.
• What are some limitations of primary
sources?
 Problems of Primary Sources
• Due to knowledge we have about different WOK, we can
say that even primary sources are already contaminated
• Fallible eye-witness: perception and emotion of the
witness will alter the account
• Social Bias: primary sources often reflect the interests of
one social group rather than society as a whole – gives us
distorted picture; example: medieval Europe was very
religious place; however all evidence comes from
religious personnel, because they were the ones who
were literate
• Deliberate manipulation: governments often manipulate
facts to give a different view of history
Despite the issues, can primary documents still
be reliable and valuable sources of historical
knowledge?

How can we reduce/overcome these

limitations? Basically, how can be distinguish
between a reliable and a less reliable primary
source?
• Despite their limitations, if properly used primary
sources are very valuable
• We need to always ask questions such as : who
wrote this? What was their motive in writing?
How long after the event was it written? And we
should compare different primary sources with
one another
• We can also look at documents of a legal and
administrative nature, which are likely to be less
biased
• Imagine, you are a historian in the year 2112.
Has the Internet revolution of the early 21st
century made the job of future historians
easier or more difficult?
 Writing History
• History is a selection of selection – historian will select
from available evidence, and the available evidence is
already a selective interpretation of events
• Advantage of hindsight - historian knows how things
turned out
• The division of history into various periods is also
influenced by hindsight
• However, hindsight can also distort our understanding of
the past – hindsight bias - after something bad
happened we may believe that it was obvious what was
coming and that it should have been prevented
3 Epistemological Problems of History
• 1. the weaknesses of the raw material (sources) – most
people who have ever lived and most events that ever
happened left no record. Historian has to use sources
never intended for future interpretations.
• 2. the process of historical research (method)- all history
does is interpret – it constructs plausible meanings from
the evidence left behind
• 3. textual presentation (product) – the historical text can
never correspond to the past as it was, because the past
was not a text, it was a series of events, experiences and
situations.
 Activity 1: Creating a Primary Source
• You have 5 minutes to write about our last
TOK class. Your writing should be about 5 -10
sentences long. Use page. 62 of your
notebook for this activity.
• I might call out a few random students to read
their “histories”.
 Share with your neighbor
• Find a person near you. Read your story to
them; have them read their story to you.
• Discuss the following questions with each other,
and write brief notes under your paragraphs:
– In which ways were your histories similar?
Different?
– Did one of you write in a more or less emotional
way? Does one seem more factual than another?
How about opinions?
 Activity 1: Creating a Primary Source
• How many were just descriptive? How many
included what they felt? How many included
opinions and judgments? How many included
supporting factual information?
• Were the accounts similar or different? In
which ways? Were any of the “histories”
more truthful than others? Better than
others?
• Do you think you should study current events
in history – say, things that have happened in
the last five years – on the grounds that they
are relevant to your experience, or do you
think they should be excluded on the grounds
that they are too close for your to see them
objectively?
 The problem of textual presentation
• 3. textual presentation (product) – the
historical text can never correspond to the
past as it was, because the past was not a text,
it was a series of events, experiences and
situations.
•
Activity 2: Facts and Fillers PG. 63
Read the excerpt below, written by a historian Orlando Figes, describing the events of
Bloody Sunday in Russia, 1905 Highlight only factual essentials of this excerpt, a list of
events in chronological order.
• “Snow had fallen in the night and St Petersburg awoke to an eerie silence on that Sunday
morning, 9 January 1905. Soon after dawn the workers and their families congregated in
churches to pray for a peaceful end to the day…Singing hymns and carrying icons and
crosses, they formed something more like a religious procession than a workers'
demonstration. Bystanders took off their hats and crossed themselves as they passed. And
yet there was no doubt that the marchers' lives were in danger…Church bells rang and their
golden domes sparkled in the sun on that Sunday morning as the long columns marched
across the ice towards the centre of the city. In the front ranks were the women and
children, dressed in their Sunday best, who had been placed there to deter the soldiers
from shooting. At the head of the largest column was the bearded figure of Father Gapon in
a long white cassock carrying a crucifix. Behind him was a portrait of the Tsar and a large
white banner with the words: 'Soldiers do not shoot at the people!' Red flags had been
banned… Suddenly, a bugle sounded and the soldiers fired into the crowd. A young girl,
who had climbed up on to an iron fence to get a better view, was crucified to it by the hail
of bullets. A small boy, who had mounted the equestrian statue of Prince Przewalski, was
hurled into the air by a volley of artillery. Other children were hit and fell from the trees
where they had been perching… When the firing finally stopped and the survivors looked
around at the dead and wounded bodies on the ground there was one vital moment, the
turning-point of the whole revolution, when their mood suddenly changed from disbelief to
 Activity 2: Facts and Fillers
• What are we left with?
• Other than chronologically determined facts,
everything else – selective emphasis,
anecdote, poetic scene setting, dramatic
structure of the story, figurative language,
moral judgment and significance (the turning
point of the whole revolution) , all come from
the imagination of the historian.
• Do you think your cultural background
influences how you read and understand
history?
 Writing of History : The Problem of Bias

• Topic choice bias:

– Historian’s choice of topic may be influenced by current
preoccupations
• Confirmation bias:
– Historian may be tempted to appeal only to evidence
that supports his own case and to ignore any counter-
evidence
• National bias:
– National pride interferes with historian’s objectivity
How CAN WE address THESE PROBLEMS?
 Pluralistic Approach
• Cubist history – a multicultural, multi-
perspective view of history – may solve the
problem of bias to some extent
• Pluralistic view of history will open our eyes to
other stories, but it would not make it
relativist
 Theories of History
• It is difficult to establish a single cause of any
historical event; rather causes may be varied and
influenced by things such as geographical
conditions, individual motives, social and
economic conditions, chance occurrences
• The “great person” theory of history states that
history is mainly determined by great individuals –
it implies that if one or other great individual had
not existed, then the course of history would have
been different.
• To what extent do you think that your
country’s history has been influenced by its
geography?
• Collingwood on empathy – Collingwood
suggested we need to empathize with
thoughts and feelings of people in history, so
we can try to understand a situation in the
same way that a historical agent would have
understood it. (kind of like Verstehen position)
• To what extent do you think one can and
should try to empathize with Hitler in order to
understand his actions?
Is human experience chaotic and random, or are
there patterns which can be discovered and
seen over and over?
 Criticism to “great person” approach
• It exaggerates the role played by individuals in the process of
historical change
• Economic Determinism: another theory
– Claims that history is determined by economic factors (Karl Marx)
– Marx said that it was not great individuals but rather economic and
technological factors that are engines of historical change (Arab
Spring?)
– For PT #5 it would be nice to look into Popper’s perspective, and Marx’s
perspective
• The role of chance:
– Some people have concluded that there is no meaning in history and
that it is governed by chance (Blaise Pascal)
– Extreme to say that history is completely random process
• Which invention do you think has had the
most decisive impact on history in the last two
thousand years and why?
• Do you agree or disagree with Marx’s claim
that technology plays a bigger role in shaping
the future than the actions of individuals?
 History and Personal Knowledge
• History is shared knowledge that can
contribute significantly to our personal
knowledge – our sense of who we are and
how we are placed between the past and the
future
• Cultural interpretations of history
• Sense of self as a member of a group (“many
of us died”, “we as victims”)