Historical Thinking

What is History?

• The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history– G.W.F. Hegel

• The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things– James Joll

• “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

• Which of the definitions below do you like most? Why? • Create a definition of history that you think would be better than

the definitions above.

Educational and Information History

• History is often treated as an informational subject - read the textbook and memorize the facts -.

• The history we read in our textbooks is often taken as “The True Story”.

• History becomes a body of information you are required to absorb.

Why Study History? – Alan Wilson

• “Our Elders are important, our young people are really important-that’s our future. If we can take what our young people have to offer us with their knowledge of today, take the knowledge of our elders with their knowledge of yesterday, and combine those two things, we have something to hand on to our young people’s children and their children’s children.” – Alan Wilson, Words of Power: Voices From Indian

America• What concepts does Wilson use to refer to the past

and present?

Why Study History? – H.G. Wells

• “Upon this matter of teaching history, I am a fanatic, I cannot think of any education as even half done until there has been a fairly sound review of the whole of the known past, from the beginnings of the geological record up to our own time. Until that has been done, the pupil has not been placed in the world. He is incapable of understanding his relationship to, and his role in, the scheme of things. He is, whatever else he may have learned, essentially and ignorant person.”– H.G. Wells, The Salvaging of Civilization

• Why is understanding history, according to Wells, important to anything you are involved in? Do you agree or disagree with this idea?

Why Study History? – R.G. Collingwood

• “History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what he or she can do until they try, the only clue to what humanity can do is what humanity has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what humanity has done and thus what humanity is.”– R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

• Based on this statement, how important is history to humanity and why? Explain why you hold this opinion?

Why Study History? – George Orwell

• “ Who controls the present, controls the past, who controls the past controls the future”– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

• What do you think Orwell meant by this statement? • How might the study of history give us a sense of

identity?• How might history be a defence against

propaganda?• Does history exist?

The PastAll Actions and Thoughts

By All Individuals In All Times and Places

1. Events observed by someone.(Events not observedhave been lost to history)

2. Events observed and remembered.(Events observed but notremembered have been lost to history)

3. Events observed, remembered and recorded.(Unrecorded actions and thoughts have been lost to history)

4. Events for which we have surviving records.(This is the raw material of History)

5. Available, usable, believable records for a given historical account.

6. The Account

Dimensions of Historical Thinking

SignificanceEvidenceContinuity and ChangeCause and ConsequencesHistorical PerspectiveMoral Judgement

What are your top five?

• Choose five events in your own life and explain in writing why you chose them as significant.

• Question: What does it mean when we say a certain event has significance?

• Can an event be significant even if you are not aware of how it has affected you?

• Extension: compare perspectives on family history – how might your “top five” vary from family member to family member?

Historical Significance• Questions of significance are foundational because

historians cannot include all that has happened in the past.

• How do we decide whether an historical event is significant for everybody or just for some people. (Columbus Day)

• Thinking about significance helps us learn how decisions about what to report and study in history are made and to recognize that the very nature of historical inquiry is open to ongoing change.

Historical Significance

• Determinations of significance are unavoidable. (Winnipeg General Strike vs. Operation Solidarity)

• Significance depends upon one’s perspective.(union leader vs. First Nations leader)

• Significance depends upon purpose.(Canadian History vs. American History)

• Significance varies with time.(fall of soviet union, collective bargaining common place, gender equality, election of Barack Obama)

• Significance is not simply a matter of personal reaction. Significance does not equal “interesting to me”

Criteria for determining significance

1. Resulting in Change (The event/person/development had deep consequences, for many people, over a long period of time.)

2. Revealing (The event/person/development sheds light on enduring or emerging issues in history and contemporary.

Evidence

• How do we know what happened?• Which version of events should we believe?• Is this a reliable source of information

(Soprano’s episode (A.J. Textbook, Tony memory of family stories.)

• Issues of evidence ask us to think about the role of primary and secondary sources in constructing accounts of the past

Evidence is derived from two sources of information.

Primary SecondaryOriginal and first hand in terms of time and access to the event

One that has been constructed from other sources of information.

1. Natural records – tree rings, fossils, volcanic ash, soil samples

2. Constructed artifcacts - Child’s toy, train schedules, population census, newspaper ads, diaries or sketches of the days events

1. Deliberately prepared accounts – history textbooks, second hand reports, movies about the past.

2. Created artifcacts that are produced from information drawn from other sources – replicas of lost historical objects, translations of obscure documents, reconstructed scenes in a museum.

Aspects of EvidenceNote that the term “author”” is used to mean whoever

wrote, painted, photographed, drew or constructed the source.

• Good questions are necessary in order to turn a source into evidence, the first question being, “What is it?”

• Authorship: the position of the author(s) is a key consideration.

• Primary sources may reveal information about the (conscious) purposes of the author as well as the (unconscious) values and worldview of the author.

• A source should be read in view of its historical background. (context)

Continuity and Change

• “Flintstone History” – nothing really changes over time. The only real difference between ourselves and people in the past is that they wore funny clothing.

• Radical Relativism – events that occurred along time ago must by definition be completely unlike modern times.

Aspects of Continuity and Change

• Progress and decline – change does not always mean progress

• Chronology can help to organize our understanding of continuity and change

• Periodization (dividing time into named blocks) can also help to organize our understanding

Task

• Place pictures of Portage and Main in chronological order.

• Be prepared to justify your choice

1870

1873

1881

1900

1915

1928

1938

1956

1999

Cause and Consequence

• Focus on the contributing influences in history.• There are factors that influence what happens

in the world. • Is it possible that we have a role as citizens in

shaping history today?

Dimensions of Cause and Consequence

• Events have a myriad of different and often unappreciated causes.

• Prior events may have no causal influence on subsequent events.

• Looking for broad underlying factors is as, or more important than identifying immediate particular causes.

• Actions have unintended consequences.

Example• Potential causes of a car accident• Skill and response time of the driver• State of health or drowsiness of the driver• Distraction of the driver• Violation of driving rules• Condition of the cars• Technology of the cars• The weather• The road signs• The absence of traffic lights• The culture which glorifies speed• The size of the oncoming SUV

Historical Perspective

• “The past is a foreign country” and thus difficult to understand.

• At the same time understanding the foreignness of the past provides a sense of the range of human behaviour and social organization.

• It is the act of understanding the different social, cultural, intellectual, and even emotional contexts that shaped people’s lives and actions in the past.

• Sometimes called historical empathy, but it is very different from having deep emotional feeling for and identification with another person.

Aspects of Historical Perspective

• Depends on evidence for inferences about how people felt and thought.

• Avoids presentism (applying contemporary ideas and values to the past)

• Understanding multiple perspectives of historical actors is a key to understanding the event.

• Adopting a historical perspective requires suspending moral judgement.

• Taking an historical perspective does not mean identifying with that actor.

Dimensions of Moral Judgment

• http://archives.cbc.ca/politics/civil_unrest/topics/101/• Moral judgments are a particular kind of evaluative (or

value) judgment.• Value judgments are often explicit but they may be

implicit.• Moral judgments about the past must be sensitive to

historical context.• There is value in withholding moral judgments until

adequate information had been acquired.• Determining cause is different from assigning

responsibility