DEFINITION

• History refers to the study and interpretation by a

historian on the data and other source of the past
human activity, people, societies and civilizations
leading to the present day.
• Three important concepts in the definition.
• History is based on past events.
• History is interpreted.
• history relies on data and documents.
ETYMOLOGY
“Historia”
(ἱστορία)

Inquiry

Clearly the word “Historia” does not mean past event. It

denotes asking question or investigation of the past done by
person trained to do so or by persons who are interested in
human past. Thus, we can say that historical account must be
based on all available relevant evidence.
SUBJECT MATTER

Like other social science, the subject

matter of history is the life of people
and humanity
NATURE
•Interpretive
• Invites to debate about multiple perspectives, offer their
opinions and educated interpretations, and challenge
existing beliefs.
•Revisionist in Scope
• On-going conversation and constant process of
reexamining the past and deconstructing myths based upon
new discoveries, evidences, and principles.
•Constant Process of Questioning
• Requires questioning the texts, examining them, and asking
new questions.
NATURE
•Integrative of Many Discipline
• Incorporates geography, literature, aesthetics, sociology,
economics, and political science.
•Inclusive
• Ensures that the experiences of all classes, region, and ethno-racial
groups, as well as both genders, are included.
•Incorporates Historiography
• Includes many different interpretations of historical events written
by many different historians.
•Relevant
• It uses past experiences to explain what is important in our lives
today.
PURPOSE
• Crucially important for the welfare of individuals,
communities, and the future of our nation
• To ourselves
• Identity
• Enables people to discover their own place in the stories of their families,
communities and nation.
• Critical Skills
• Teaches research, judgments of the accuracy, and reliability of sources,
validation of facts, awareness of multiple perspectives and biases, analysis of
conflict evidence, sequencing to discern causes, synthesis to present a
coherent interpretation, clear and persuasive written and oral
communication, and other skills.
PURPOSE
• To our communities
• Vital places to live and work
• Economic Development
• To our Future
• Engaged citizens
• Leadership
• Legacy
HISTORY DIFFERENTIATED
• History vs. Past
• Past involves everything that ever happened since the dawn of time.
• History is a process of interpreting evidence or record from the past in a
thoughtful and informed way.
• History vs. Prehistory
• Prehistory is a period of human activity prior to the intervention of writing
systems.
• History is a record of significant events that happened in the past.
• History vs. Other Disciplines
• The ways that we study, write, and teach history have changed dramatically,
often because of influence from other disciplines.
HISTORY DIFFERENTIATED
• History, Historicity, Historiography
• History is a narrative account used to examine and analyze past events.
• Historicity is the authentication of characters in history, as opposed to
legends or myths.
• Historiography is the study of how history was written, by whom and why
it was recorded as such.
• History vs. Herstory
• Feminist argued that it has been men (“his-story”) who usually have the ones
to record the written past.
• Herstory is history written from a feminist perspective, emphasizing the role
of women, or told from a woman’s point of view.
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• Cyclical/Circular View in History
• Stems from the History of the Greeks (events recurred on a regular basis)
• Herodutus (482-424 BCE), in his work “Histories”, stated that the story
of man happened in recurring cycle.
• Thucydides (460-404 BCE) envisioned that time recurs in a circular
manner which man cannot control.
• Francesco Petrarch (1304-1374) suggest that the recurrence and basis of
history was the actions of the people rather than the actions of the gods.
• Niccolo Machiavelli (1496-1527) suggested that history could be seen as a
casebook of political strategy.
• Arnold Toynbee (1884-1975) and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) based
their work on the premise that history is cyclical (civilizations rise and fall,
each new one rising to a greater level).
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• Linear View in History
• Views that history is progressive, moving forward and not
having a cyclical return.
• Augustine of Hippo (350-430 BCE) saw history as being the
unfolding of the plan of God, a process that would end up
in the final judgment. (Parousia)
• Francois-Marie Arouet/Voltaire (1694-1788) envisioned four
great ages of man culminating the scientific enlightenment
of Newton.
• Marxists historians sees history as a series of class struggles
that inevitably ends in a worker’s revolution.
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• The Great God View of History
• Most primitive attempts to explain the origin and
development of the world and man are the creation myths.
• This theological theory was elaborated by Sumerians,
Babylonians, and Egyptians before it came up to the Greeks
and Romans. It was expounded in the Israelite Scriptures
whence it was taken over and reshaped by the Christian
and Mohammedan religions and their state. (Novack, n.d.)
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• The Great Man View of History
• Suggests that dominant personalities determine the course
of history.
• Rulers, warriors, and, statesmen are the decisive forces in
history and history is the record of the deeds of great
people.
• Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) “Everyman” sees history as
being a record of the collective experience of the ordinary
person. “Universal history, the history of what man has
accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the
great men who have worked here”.
THEORIES OF HISTORY
•The Best People View of History
• Some elite, the Best Race, the favored nation, the
ruling class alone makes history
• Israelites, as assumed in the Old Testament, were
God’s chosen people.
• Greeks regarded themselves as the acme of culture,
better in all respects than barbarians.
• Hitler thought that the Arian race was the best
among the races.
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• Ideas of the Great Mind View of History
• The driving force of history is people’s ideas
• Anaxagoras said: “Reason (Nous) governs the world.”
• Aristotle held that the prime mover of the universe and the ultimate
animator of everything within it was God, who was defined as pure
mind engaged in thinking about itself
• G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831) continual refinement of intellectual
understanding. The progress of mankind consisted in the working
out and consummation of an idea
• Some 18th century rationalists believed that “opinion governs
mankind.” They looked toward an enlightenment monarch to
introduce the necessary progressive reconstruction of the state and
society
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• Human Nature View of History
• History has been determined by the qualities of human nature, good
or bad.
• Human nature was regarded as rigid and changing from one
generation to another.
• David Hume asserts that “mankind are so much the same, in all
times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange
in this particular. Its chief use is only to discover the constant and
universal principles of human nature.”
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• Economic View in History
• Sees economic factors as the most important determinant of
history
• The production and exchange of goods and services is the
bases of all social structure and processes
• The economic factor is the foundation for the
superstructure of culture and government
• Karl Marx (1818-1883) is the foremost proponent of this
view. He disagreed with Hegel by saying that it was not
ideas that created material conditions, but rather the
reverse
THEORIES OF HISTORY
• Gender History
• Looks at the past from the perspective of gender
• Considers in what ways historical events and periodization
impact women differently from men
• Gender historians are interested in how gender difference
has been perceived and configured at different times and
places, usually with the assumption that such differences are
socially constructed
THEORIES OF HISTORY
•Post-modern View of History
• No ultimate purpose in History
• Views history as “what we make of it”
• Believes that historical facts are inaccessible , leaving
historian to his/her imagination and ideological bent
to reconstruct what happened in the past
• Use the term historicism to describe the view that all
questions must be settles within the cultural and
social context in which they are raised
THEORIES OF HISTORY
•Other views of History
• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) saw history as
having no beginning or end, just chaos that could
only be understood by the powers of the mind.
• Michel Foucault (1926-1984) posits that the victors of
social struggle use their political dominance to
suppress a defeated adversary’s version of historical
events in favor of their own propaganda, which may
go so far as historical revisionism, as in the cases of
Nazism and Stalinism.
THEORIES OF HISTORY
•Other views of History
• Geographic factors
• Wars
• Religion
• Race
• Climate
HISTORY AND THE HISTORIAN
Historian is an expert or student of history, especially
that of a particular period, geographical region or social
phenomenon.

Duties of a historian.
• Seek historical evidence and facts
• Interpret facts
• Organizes facts chronologically.

The historian therefore, is responsible for reconstructing the past.

HISTORY AND THE HISTORIAN
According to Gottschalk:
“Only a part of what was observed in the past was
remembered by those who observed it, only a part of
what was remembered was recorded; only a part of
what was recorded has survived, only a part of what has
survived has come to the historian attention Moreover
only a part of what is credible has been grasped, and
only a part of what has been grasped can expounded or
narrated by the historian.”
HISTORY AND THE HISTORIAN
• Some authors define history as a study of historical perspective. In
reconstructing the past, a historian can be subjective; after all he is
human, fallible and capable error.
• People’s memories are filled with bias, self righteousness, pride, vanity,
spinning, obstruction and outright lies. Each has his own frame of
reference or a set of interlocking values, loyalties assumptions interest
and principle of action.
• The historian is influenced by his own environment, ideology, education
and influence. His interpretation of the historical fact is affected by his
context and circumstances. It’s like the Indian parable of an elephant
and the blind men, historians have different historical perspective.
Like the Indian parable of an elephant and the blind men, historians have
different historical perspective.
HISTORY AND THE HISTORIAN
Because certain events happened so long ago and
because sometimes the evidence is incomplete, historians
have different approaches and views about what
happened in the past. This is the subjective nature of
history, one historian claims an event happened a certain
way, while another disagree completely. The best
approach is to do all we can to reconstruct as fully as
possible our picture of the past. To do this, most scholars
use historiography or what they call history of history.