carter ] THE MEANING OF HISTORY, SOURCES OF HISTORICAL DATA, & HISTORICAL CRITICISMS OVERVIEW Lesson 1 introduces history as a discipline and as a narrative. It discusses the limitation of historical knowledge, history as the subjective process of re-creation, and historical method and historiography. Lesson 2 presents the sources of historical data, the written and non-written sources of history, as well as the differentiation of primary and secondary sources of information or data. Lesson 3 discusses historical criticisms, namely, external and internal criticisms. These are important aspects in ascertaining the authenticity and reliability of primary sources upon which narratives are crafted. Scanned with CamScannerUesson1 | THE MEANING OF HISTORY ed historia which means learning by ingy, .e systematic accountin, The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, looked upon peal Sea min aa nee of natural phenomena, that is, taking into consideration 10 TW NT TAT Nt ngemeny of the account. This explained that knowledge is deriv! Process of scientific investigation of past events. The word History is referred usually for accounts of eee sPecay human affairs in chronological order. There are theories oe i z toring in investigating history: the factual history and the speculate iscory ae history presents readers the plain and basic information vis-a-vis the e ts that took plac (what), the time and date with which the events happened (when), the place with which the events took place, and the.people that were involved (who). Speculative history, on the other hand, 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” (Cantal, Cardinal, Espino & Galindo, 2014), HISTORY is derived from the Greek wo! History deals with the study of past events. Individuals who write about history are called historians: They seek to understand the present by examining what went before. They undertake arduous historical research to come up with a meaningful and organized rebuilding of the past. But whose past e: talking about? This is the basic question that the historian needs to answer because this sets the purpose and framework of a historical account. Hence, a salient feature of historical writing is the facility to give meaning and impact value to a group of people about their past. The practice of historical writing is called historiography, 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 modern historical writing does not only include examination of documents but also the use of research methods from related areas of study such as archeology and geography. THE LIMITATION OF HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE The incompleteness of records has limited m: 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 Although it may have happened, but the past has the past (called his 1an's knowledge of history. Most human place surviving artifacts: Perished forever with only occasional READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY Scanned with CamScannerHistorians study the records or evidences that survived the time. They tell history from what they understood as a credible part of the record. However, their claing may remain variable as there can be historical records that could be discovered, which may affirm or refute those that they have already presented. This explains the “incompleteness” of the “object” that historians study. HISTORY-AS THESUBJECTIVE PROCESS OF RE-CREATION From the incomplete evidence, historians strive to restore the total past of mankind. They do it from the point of view that human beings live in different times and that their experiences maybe somehow comparable, or that their experiences may have significantly differed contingent on the place and time. Eor the historian, history becomes only that part of the human past which can be meaningfully reconstructed from the available records and from inferences regarding their setting, In short, 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. Some of the natural scientists, such as geologists and paleo-zoologists who study fossils from the traces of a perished past, greatly resemble historians in this regard, but they differ at certain points since historians deal, with human testimonies as well as physical traces. 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 by that process is called historiography. By means of historical method and historiography (both of which are frequently grouped together simply as historical. method), the historian endeavors to reconstruct as much of the past of mankind as he/ she can, Even in this limited effort, however, the historian is handicapped. He/She rarely can tell the story even of a part of the past as it occurred. For the past conceived of as something that “actually occurred” places obvious limits upon the kinds of record and of imagination that the historian may use. These limits distinguish history from fiction, poetry, drama, and fantasy. Historical analysis is also an important element of historical method. In historical analysis, historians: (1) select the subject to investigate; (2) collect probable sources of information on the subject; (3) examine the sources genuineness, in part of in whole; and (4) extract credible “particulars” from the sources (or parts of sources) The synthesis of the “particulars” thus derived is historiography. Synthesis and analysis cannot be entirely separated since they have a common ground, which is the ability to understand the past through some meaningful, evocative and convincing historical or cross-disciplinary connections between a given historical issue and other historical contexts, periods, or themes. 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