Meaning of History

Meaning of History

• Derived from the Greek word historia which means learning by inquiry.

• Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, looked upon history as the systematic accounting of a set of natural phenomena, taking into consideration the chronological arrangement of the account.

Theories in Investigating History

• Factual history

Presents readers the plain and basic information vis-à-vis the events that took place (what), the time and date with which the event happened (when), the place with which the events took place, and the people that were involved (who).

• Speculative history

Goes beyond facts because it is concerned about the reasons for which events happened (why), and the way they happened (how). “It tries to speculate on the cause and effect of an event.”

• Individuals who write about history are called historians. They undertake arduous historical research to come up with a meaningful and organized rebuilding of the past.

• The practice of historical writing is called historiography, or the traditional method in doing historical research that focus on gathering of documents from different libraries and archives to form a pool of evidence needed in making a descriptive or analytical narrative.

The Limitations of Historical Knowledge

• The incompleteness of records has limited man’s knowledge of history. Most human affairs happen without leaving any evidence or records of any kind, no artifacts; or if there are, no further evidence of the human setting in which to place surviving artifacts.

History as the Subjective Process of Re-Creation

• From the incomplete evidence, historians strive to restore the total past of mankind. For them, history becomes only that part of the human past which can be meaningfully reconstructed from the available records and from inferences regarding their setting.

• The historian’s aim is verisimilitude (the truth, authenticity, plausibility) about a past.

Unlike the study of the natural science that has objectively measurable phenomena, the study of history is a subjective process as documents and relics are scattered and do not together comprise the total object that the historian is studying.

Historical Method and Historiography

• The process of critically examining and analyzing the records and survivals of the past is called historical method.

• The imaginative reconstruction of the past from the data derived from that process is called historiography.

• By means of historical method and historiography, the historians endeavor to reconstruct as much of the past of mankind as they can.

Historical Analysis

In historical analysis, historians:

1. Select the subject to investigate

2. Collect probable sources of information on the subject

3. Examine the sources genuiness, in part or in whole

4. Extract credible “particulars” from the sources.