Etymological:: What Is History? I. Definition

WHAT IS HISTORY?

I. Definition

Etymological:
 Latin historia "narrative of past events, account, tale, story,"
 Greek historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record,
narrative,"
 Greek eidenai "to know."
 Greek istōr ‘learned, wise man’

Essential:
 EDWARD HALLETT CARR - was an English historian, diplomat, journalist and international
relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography.
 He defines history as “a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his
facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past”.
(the past which a historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living
in the present and that the main work of the historian is not to record, but to evaluate; for, if he
does not evaluate, how can he know what is worth recording)
Positivism - is the term used to describe an approach to the study of society that relies specifically
on scientific evidence, such as experiments and statistics, to reveal a true nature of how society
operates.
Positivist – “to put”  concrete evidence factsdatum of experiencedistinct from
conclusions
- objective and impartial not just in their arguments but also in their conduct of historical
research.
 Carr begins his essay by criticizing the common misconception, often held by
Positivists, that history is simply about the gathering of facts. This is because Positivists, or those
who believe in the Empirical Theory of Knowledge, believe that history could be studied as a hard
science. This belief, according to Carr, is based on the (mistaken) assumption that an (unbiased)
conclusion could be extracted by simply analyzing what are deemed to be empirical facts.
In other words, Positivists believe that the facts would simply “speak for themselves.”
Based on this erroneous belief, the Positivists then presupposed that history, like the hard sciences,
have a dependent variable, the “conclusion”; an independent variable, the “facts”; and a controlled
variable, the “objectivity” of the facts. This view is unsurprisingly consistent with the Empirical
Theory of Knowledge which argues that outside stimuli are separate from one’s capacity to
process them. In other words, Positivists believe that gathering information is not influenced by
the issues of language and translation.
 ROBIN GEORGE COLLINGWOOD - as an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist.

Collingwood describes history as “a kind of research or inquiry … He is not interested
in history “as it actually happened”, for even if we could know that, it is not really very interesting.
For Collingwood, history is not simply an account of what people did, which is mere chronicle.
“For the historian there is no difference between discovering what happened and discovering why
it happened.” “What the historian is looking for is … processes of thought. All history is the
history of thought.”
Collingwood takes this to an extreme, as for him, “all history is the re-enactment of past
thought in the historian’s own mind.” The historian is not interested in events in themselves, nor
even in their causes but in the thought that lies behind the events.
History, for Collingwood, is quite a subjective endeavor. “What particular parts and aspects
of the past we now recall by historical thought depends on our present interests and attitudes
towards life…”
Ancient: Phythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Democratus, Ptolemy
Medieval: Rene Descartes, Galileo Galilei,
Renaissance: Nicolaus Copernicus, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton
Post-modern: Stephen Hawking
 KARL MARX - was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist,
journalist and socialist revolutionary.
 History of the world is a history of class struggle
Throughout history we see the oppressor and oppressed in constant opposition to each other.
This fight is sometimes hidden and sometimes open. However, each time the fight ends in either
a revolutionary reconstruction of society or in the classes' common ruin.
In Marx’s view, social stratification is created by people’s differing relationship to the

means of production: either they own productive property or they labor for others.
In Marxist theory, the capitalist mode of production consists of two main economic parts:
the substructure and the Superstructure. In a capitalist society, the ruling class, or the bourgeoisie,
owns the means of production, such as machines or tools that can be used to produce valuable
objects. The working class, or the proletariat, only possess their own labor power, which they sell
to the ruling class in the form of wage labor to survive. These relations of production—employer-
employee relations, the technical division of labor, and property relations—form the base of
society or, in Marxist terms, the substructure. From this material substructure, the superstructure
emerges. The superstructure includes the ideas, philosophies and culture of a society. In a
capitalist society, the ruling class promotes its own ideologies and values as the norm for the entire
society, and these ideas and values are accepted by the working class.
 consciousness does not determine social existence; it is social existence that determines
consciousness. (For Marx, this process is an economic one, between those with money and power
and those deprived of it. This economic determinism defines history, struggle, and human
consciousness. For Marx, individual consciousness is something that cannot be divorced from
one's class or social- economic group.)
II. History vs. Historiography

History would study the past events and factors that causes the events while historiography is the
study, comparison and evaluation of historians’ interpretations of the people and events of the past.
Historiography: Gk. graphein, means visual (sources, authors, materials, methods)

Questions:
1. How is a certain historical text is written?
2. What is the certain context of the publication?
3. What source does it came from?
4. Who is the author?
5. What are the methods used? What are the criticism used?
III. Sources
Historical source is original source that contain important historical information. These sources
are something that inform us about history at the most basic level, and these sources used as clues in
order to study history.
It has two types: Primary Sources – sources produced at the same time as the event, period, or
subject being studied. Examples of a primary source are: Original documents such as diaries, speeches,
manuscripts, letters, interviews, records, eyewitness accounts, autobiographies.
Second Sources – sources that are produced by an author who used primary sources to produce the
material. Examples: Original documents such as diaries, speeches, manuscripts, letters, interviews,
records, eyewitness accounts, autobiographies; Empirical scholarly works such as research articles,
clinical reports, case studies, dissertations.
IV. Criticisms
- Historical criticism, also known as the historical-critical method or higher criticism, is a branch of
criticism that investigates the origins of ancient texts in order to understand "the world behind the text".
... That may be accomplished by reconstructing the true nature of the events that the text describes.
> External Criticism – the practice of verifying the authenticity of evidence by examining its physical
characteristics; consistency with the historical characteristic of the time when it was produced; and the
materials used for the evidence.
Examples of the things that will be examined when conducting external criticism of a document
include the quality of the paper, the type of ink, and the language and words used in the material, among
others.
>Internal Criticism – looks at the content of the source and examines the circumstances of its
production.
- looks at the truthfulness and factuality of the evidence by looking at the author of the source, its
context, the agenda behind its creation, the knowledge which informed it and its intended purpose.
- entails that the historian acknowledges and analyze how such reports can be manipulated to be
used as a war propaganda.
- validating historical sources is important because the use of unverified, falsified and untruthful
historical sources can lead to equally false conclusions
- without thorough criticisms of historical evidences, historical deceptions and lies will all be
probable.

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WHAT IS HISTORY?

 ROBIN GEORGE COLLINGWOOD - as an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist.

In Marx’s view, social stratification is created by people’s differing relationship to the

II. History vs. Historiography

Historiography: Gk. graphein, means visual (sources, authors, materials, methods)

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