Henry Ford
• “History is more or less bunk”
Winston Churchill
• “History is written by the victors”
• “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it”
Distinctions of history
• "facts of the past“ (historical information that historians deem unimportant)
• "historical facts", information that the historians have decided is important
history
Edward Gibbon (1700s)
• “History is, indeed, a little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”
Napoleon
• “History is a myth we all agree to isciplinary’
• "History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick".
Foundations of history
• "Social history is the bedrock. To study the bedrock alone is not enough; and becomes tedious; perhaps this is what happened to Annales. But you can't dispense with it".
Objectives
• Study the different interpretations of history • Understand different research methods • Examine debates in historiography (Marc
Bloch and E H Carr) • Understand the role of interdisciplinary
Interrogate the sources
• “From the moment when we are no longer resigned to purely and simply recording the words of our witnesses, from the moment we decide to force them to speak, even against their will, cross-examination becomes more necessary than ever. Indeed it is the prime necessity of well-conducted historical research”.
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft
• ‘The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.” (1943)
E H CARR
• "The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate".
Karl Popper
• “there can be no history of the past as it actually did happen; there can only be historical interpretations, and none of them final, and every generation has to frame its own”
• Reject concepts like good and evil when making judgements about events and people
Understand the context
• “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts….. When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing. If you can detect none, either you are tone deaf or your historian is a dull dog…. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants. History means interpretation.”