History and Historiography

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 474.

UNIT 1

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History, in its broadest sense, is the totality of all past events, although a more realistic definition would limit it to the known past. Historiog­raphy is the written record of what is known of human lives and soci­eties in the past and how historians have attempted to understand and interpret them. The term historiography also refers to the theory and history of historical writing. Of all the fields of serious study and liter­ary effort, history may be the hardest to define precisely, because the attempt to uncover past events and formulate an intelligible account of them necessarily involves the use and influence of many auxiliary disciplines and literary forms. The concern of all serious historians has been to collect and record facts about the human past and often to discover new facts to fill up as many gaps as possible in our histori­cal knowledge.

Except for the special circumstance in which historians record events they themselves have witnessed, historical facts can only be known through intermediary sources. These include testimony from living witnesses; narrative records, such as previous histories, mem­oirs, letters, and imaginative literature; the legal and financial records of courts, legislatures, religious institutions, or businesses; and the unwritten information derived from the physical remains of past civi­lizations, such as architecture, arts and crafts, burial grounds, and cultivated land. All these, and many more sources of information pro­vide the evidence from which the historian deciphers historical facts. The relation between evidence and fact, however, is rarely simple and direct. The evidence may be biased or mistaken, fragmentary, or nearly unintelligible after long periods of cultural or linguistic change.

Historians, therefоre, have known that the information requires careful attention and they have to assess their evidence with a critical eye. All have tried to discover in the facts patterns оf meaning addressed to the enduring questions of human life.

Before the late 18th century, historiography or the writing of histo­ry did not stand at the centre of any civilization. History was almost never an important part of regular education, and it never claimed to provide an interpretation of human life as a whole. This was more ap- propriately the function of religion, of philosophy, even perhaps of poetry and other imaginative literature. The historian's education was that of any cultivated man: careful reading of general literature, fol­lowed by the study of rhetoric, the art of fluent and persuasive use of language that dominated ancient higher education. The ideal histori- an would combine rigorous truthfulness and freedom from bias with the gift of developed expression. As examples of literary art, early his­torical accounts are interesting and dramatically unified, though sometimes at the expense of truth or verifiability of evidence. Imparti­ality was at least a goal, if it was not always achieved. Many of these works set standards for historical writing in their lands and beyond their bounds. The complex relation between literary art and historiog­raphy has been and continues to be a subject of serious debate.

Modern historians aim to reconstruct a record of human activities and to achieve a more profound understanding of them. This concep tion is quite recent, dating from the late 18th and early 19th centuries when history aligned with other modern sciences as an independent academic discipline with its own critical method and approach, re­quiring rigorous preparation. The combination of the neutral, non-partisan approach to the sources (at least as an ideal) with the acute realization that all observers are the products of their specific time and place and are thus necessarily subjective recorders promised to break history's ancient connection to the intuitive literary arts.

The purpose of history as a serious endeavour to understand human life can never be fulfilled by the mere shifting of evidence for facts. Fact-finding is only the foundation for the selection, arrangement, and explanation that constitute historical interpretation. The process of in­terpretation informs all aspects of historical inquiry; beginning with the selection of a subject for investigation, because the very choice of a par­ticular event or society or institution is itself an act of judgement that asserts the importance of the subject. Once chosen, the subject itself suggests a provisional model or hypothesis that guides research and helps the historian to assess and classify the available evidence and to present a detailed and coherent account of the subject. The historian must respect the facts, avoid ignorance and error as far as possible, and create a convincing, intellectually satisfying interpretation.

Furthermore, in the 20th century the scope of history has expand­ed immeasurably, in time, as archaeology and anthropology have pro­vided knowledge of earlier ages, and in breadth, as field of inquiry en­tirely unknown in the past (such as economic history, psychohistory, history of ideas, of family structures, and of peasant societies) have emerged and refined their methods and goals. To many scholars, na­tional history has come to seem an outmoded, culture-bound ap­proach, although history written on thoroughly international assump­tions is extremely difficult to achieve.

Historians have looked more and more to the social sciences — sociology, psychology, anthropology, and economics — for new meth­ods and forms of explanation; the sophisticated use of quantitative data has become the accepted approach to economic and demo­graphic studies. The influence of Marxist theories of economic and social development remains vital and contentious, as does the appli- cation of psychoanalytic theory to history. At the same time, many scholars have turned with sharpened interest to the theoretical foun­dations of historical knowledge and are reconsidering the relation be­tween imaginative literature and history, with the possibility emerging that history may after all be the literary art that works upon scholarly material.

TASKS

1.1 Answer the following questions to check how carefully you have read the text:

1. What is the difference between the notions “history” and “histori­-ography”?

2. How can you specify literature and historiography? How can we as­sess early writings of history from literary point of view and from the point of view of their verifiability?

3. What kind of sources can historians use?

4. What qualities and attitudes are necessary to make history a serious endeavour? What should every historian try to avoid?

5. Has history always been an independent science? Did Greek and Roman historians get a special rigorous education?

6. How did history change in the 20th century?

7. Why do modern historians look more and more to social sciences?