Studying Studying History History

TASK

It is time to elect the world Leader and

YOUR

vote counts

The following are the facts about the three leading candidates

The Candidates

No.1 Associates with the crooked politicians and consults astrologers. He’s had two mistresses (and a wife). He also chain smokes and drinks 8-10 Martinis a day

No. 2 Was kicked out of office twice, sleeps until noon, used addictive drugs at college and drinks a quart

of whisky every day.

No.3 Is a decorated war hero. He’s vegetarian, doesn’t smoke, has an occasional beer and hasn’t had

any extra martial affairs.

Yes, of course this is a trick!

But if this was a real scenario, and you where honest, you would probably select

the third candidate.

SO WHO WHERE THESE PEOPLE?

SURPRISE!

CANDIDATE 1: Roosevelt the AmericanPresident during World War 2

CANDIDATE 2: Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Great Britain During World war two

CANDIDATE 3: Adolf Hitler, and if you don’t know who he is please change subjects

• This task has been to used to get you thinking about the nature of a historical study

•Look back on what has been said about each of the candidates

•The evidence given is very selective•And what has been selected is meant to determine the readers’ opinions of the candidates

Not only had evidence been selected to influence our opinion, just as importantly, evidence has been

omitted.

So let’s add some vital pieces of evidence

WHAT OTHER EVIDENCE IS RELEVENT TO OUR DISCUSSION?

WE NEED TO ADD:

• Roosevelt got his country out of a depression and spearheaded the America’s contribution to the war effort that enabled the Allied forces to win

•Churchill led Great Britain and the Allies to win the war against Nazism. He was military genius.

•Hitler, do I have to tell you? Let’s just mention the genocide of six million Jews, the destruction of his own country and the devastation of Europe.

Let’s look at some other ways the selection and omission of evidence about the candidates influences our decisions

The facts are selected to appeal to OUR values.

• These days we know that to drink and to take drugs is not good for us

• Many of us think vegetarianism is a good idea• Politicians who are kicked out of office, work with

crooks and astrologers, or sleep until noon, sound unreliable

• Being a war hero sounds good

Through the selection and omission of evidence,

Candidate 3 (who we know is the bad guy)

is made to sound more moral and reliable than the other candidates because we make judgments about them according to our values

The evidence has also been shaped to reflect our political/ethical concerns

• There has always been a concern in the Western world about the private lives of politicians

• SEX and POLITICS don’t mix• Mostly, it has been assumed that someone with

‘bad’ private morals won’t be trustworthy in their public duties

SO AGAIN,

The combination of our values and the deliberate selection and omission of

evidence shapes our view of the candidates

By now you should be seeing some pattern in the issues involved in studying history:

• The selection and omission of facts shape our understanding of history

• We need to ask – do we know all the relevant evidence?

• In reading History we bring our values to make ethical judgments about people and event in the past

• We need to ask- how do our biases influence our interpretation of the sources we read?

Furthermore,

We need to be aware that if we don’t have all the relevant evidence and if our

interpretation of the evidence is influenced by our biases or prejudices, we cannot

reach an understanding of what might be historical truth.

Let’s take a further look at this:

You are used to dealing with the idea of FACTSBut a fact is just information

EVIDENCE is more important Evidence means the facts are relevant to the evidence

• ANTIQUARIANS establish FACTS• HISTORIANS work with EVIDENCE. They must

sift the known fact to construct a hypothesis from the relevant evidence

A Historian does not use all the known facts:

• They use those facts that support their interpretation • Facts are selected and omitted to support

argument/opinion• Many facts are omitted• As you have seen, a dishonest historian can distort our

understanding of History .

There are other problems. For a variety of reasons, we simply do not have all the facts. And new facts about the past are always being discovered so our understanding

of the past is always changing.

Think back to the information about the three candidates:

• We say how the facts given where to selected to appeal to our values and hence shape our opinion

• Another word for our values could be our prejudices, or biases.

• There is a difference between these two words.

WE ARE ALL BIASED

It means that our values and perspectives are shaped by factors such as age, gender, education. We cannot avoid this but historians need to be aware of how their bias shapes their interpretation of history.

Prejudice is dangerous

• Prejudice in historical writing means to shape historical understanding to promote a political ideology

• Historical writing becomes propaganda, a way to indoctrinate readers

For example:In Nazi Germany the school history syllabuscentered around the Jews as Germany’s enemies.

In Communist Russia the government required historians torewrite history books to show the evil of the Tsars and the advantages of communism

This sort of historical writing;

• Deliberately distorts the truth through the prejudiced selection of evidence to shape public understanding

• We call it propaganda or apologia• Its purpose is not to tell the truth but to

shape public opinion to support its ideology.

From this you can see that because historians control what we know about the past they can greatly influence our decisions about the future

Now that you’ve read about the facts and evidence, bias and prejudice, interpretation and ideology, you should be wondering about how much of the history you read is ‘true’.

So you should be thinking about four issues in studying history:

• The need to recognise bias and prejudice

• The nature of the problems faced by facts and evidence

• How to define and reach historical truth

• The responsibilities of being Historians