Lesson 1

MEANING OF HISTORY
LESSON OBJECTIVES
By the end of this lesson, the students will be able to:
 Define history and trace its development as a field of study;
 Examine the issues surrounding the historical discipline; and
 Evaluate the importance and function of history.

DEFINITION AND SUBJECT MATTER

History has always been known as the study of the past. Students of General Education often
dread the subject for its notoriety in requiring students to memorize dates, places, names, and
events from distance eras. This low appreciation of the discipline may be rooted in the shallow
understanding of the history’s relevance to their lives and their respective contexts. While the
popular definition of history as the study of the past is not wrong, it does not give justice to the
complexity of the subject and its importance to human civilization.

History was derived from the Greek word historia, which means knowledge acquired through
inquiry or investigation. History as a discipline has existed for around 2,400 years and is as old as
mathematics and philosophy. This term was then adopted to classical Latin, where it acquired a
new definition. Historia became known as the account of the past of a person or a group of people
through written documents and historical evidence.

History can refer to two things. First, history relates to everything that had happened in the
past. Second, history also refers to a kind of research or inquiry. The second meaning is emphasized
in this module. History is a discipline or a field of study and investigation that is primarily
concerned with human activities done in the past. This meaning can be broken down into three
dimensions.

First is history’s focus on human activities. This focus makes it different from, say, theology,
because theology is concerned with the divine and not with human beings. History is also different
from myths or legends because these pieces of literature are concerned not with human activities
but the lives and undertakings of mythical creatures like deities and supernatural entities. Before
the rise of the Ancient Greek civilization, older civilizations like the early Mesopotamian and
Sumerian civilizations did not have a notion of history as a record of human activities. Instead,
instead their history takes the form of theocratic history. Historians call this kind of history quasi-
history because while these stories tell us of their society’s past, they were concerned with the
affairs of nonhuman entities like deities and mythical heroes and heroines. It follows that these
narratives are not records of facts. They are just stories told and passed in a particular society
from one generation to the next, which may serve various purposes like rituals and traditional
ceremonies. They were intended neither to answer hitherto unanswered questions nor to discover
previously undiscovered knowledge.

This discussion leads us to the second aspect of the definition of history: history as an
inquiry.

History, as a field of inquiry, generally falls in the sciences, particularly to the social
sciences. As in other scientific disciplines, history seeks to answer questions. It aims to find out and
make sense of what is previously unknown. The quest for these answers should be done through a
systematic and methodical collection of data and evidence, which in turn would be objectively
interpreted by the historian to arrive at rational findings and conclusions.

Finally, history is concerned with the past. This characteristic makes history different from
other social science disciplines, which are more concerned with the present, such as political
science, economics, and sociology. This disciplines, despite their usual references to historical
studies, are oriented in making sense of the society at present and, in some instances, prescribing
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answers or solutions to pressing issues and problems of today. Meanwhile, history’s primary object
of study is the past. Historians seek to explain past events and processes against a particular
historical background or context.
Contrary to the impression that history is all about listing down events in the past in a
chronological manner or identifying key figures and personalities in specific periods, this discipline
is more concerned with answering the questions of why. Why did a particular event take place?
Why was Jose Rizal executed? Why did Japan invade the Philippines during World War II? Why was
Ferdinand Marcos overthrown in 1986? History is storytelling, but more importantly, it seeks to
explain and answer questions about the past.

However, similar to other fields, the historical discipline has changed in terms of its nature,
significance, and purpose. As mentioned previously, the present meaning of history is a product of
the discipline’s evolution across time. It is during the time of Ancient Greek civilization that history
become concerned with human activities. Recording the past through historical sources was
pioneered by Ancient Greek historian Herodotus. He is recognized as the Father of History because
he was the one who established History as a science. Herodotus’ purpose in writing his work
Histories was to describe the deeds of men in the past for posterity or future use. His quest for
knowledge of the past was not only about retelling past human activities, but also about finding
out and explaining the reasons behind such deeds.

His successor was Thucydides, another Greek historian whose magnum opus was the History
of the Peloponnesian War. If Herodotus was proclaimed as the Father of History, Thucydides was
known as the Father of Scientific History. While Herodotus was the first one who approached
recording the past with a humanistic focus, it was Thucydides who first highlighted the importance
of the systematic and impartial collection of evidence as an essential prerequisite in writing
history. For Thucydides, the only reliable sources of history were testimonies of eyewitnesses. In
his History of the Peloponnesian War, his method was what modern historians would call oral
history.

One noteworthy similarly between ancient Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides was
their focus on the history of limited geographic space and of a recent historical period, i.e., a
period that is within living memory. Consequently, their idea of history was limited to the history of
a particular society in a specific period. For ancient Greek historians, the remote past is
unknowable. This idea changed as the Greek civilization expanded and developed. Once they
developed notions that the world goes far beyond Greek society and that other societies have their
respective pasts, they realized that history is vast and cannot be captured in the memory of a
single generation.

Because of this, they would develop a new historical method that is not limited to collecting
eyewitness testimonies. They would learn to study the remote past through a compilation of
various works and records kept by different people at different places and times. The importance
that this new method would place in records, specifically in written records, would usher in the
period of tedious and meticulous record-keeping that would start in the subsequent medieval
period. The voluminous written accounts produced and kept by different institutions may be the
most plausible explanation on why modern history gives primacy to written documents over other
kinds of historical sources like, artifacts, oral tradition, visual arts, and architecture, among
others.

With the accumulation of historical records and the gradual expansion of the Western
civilization caused by the rise of powerful empires like the Roman Empire, World History would
emerge. It would serve as the record of many different civilizations, nations, and societies. Such
would be written to serve various purposes and would be defined in different ways. Up until the
present, the purpose, subject matter, and nature of the discipline are still debated among
historians and students of history.

KEY CONCEPT
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POSITIVISM. The philosophy that a particular knowledge can only be true if it can be observed in
a sensorial manner.
HISTORIOGRAPHY. The study of history as a historical discipline.
HISTORICISM. The belief that history should be studied only for its own sake.

ISSUES AND QUESTIONS

Since the earliest historical works that followed Herodotus and Thucydides were derived
from written sources, then it is quite expected that the sectors whose past will figure in history are
those who were in the higher level of the social ladder that included monarchs, military heroes,
clergymen, scholars, nobilities, and saints. The topics written about were also the ones that were
perceived to be historical importance and thus, were reflected on official records. These topics
include revolutions, wars, conquests, and crusades. These traditional scope and subjects of
historical writing would give rise to different questions and issues on the discipline.

By the nineteenth century, a particular school of thought would emerge and dominate
various scientific disciplines for many generations: positivism. Positivism is an essential philosophy
that would serve as a vital anchor of the scientific method. It asserts that real knowledge lies in
the actual observations of facts. Meaning, for an idea to be real, it must be verified with sensory
experience. It should be observable by the senses and be the subject of experimentation. In
history, positivism created the mantra of “no document, no history.” It means that, unless the
written records can support a specific historical event, then it cannot be considered as a historical
fact.

The rise of the positivist history contributed to the further development of history as a
scientific field. However, because history is a unique field of inquiry, positivism also has a set of
limitations. Unlike other scientific fields like biology, physics, and chemistry, historical truth is not
something that can be experimented on in science laboratories. The past is not something that can
be contained in test tubes and Petri dishes, observed, and from such sensorial observation,
interpreted. In simpler terms, no document can capture entire historical truths.

Moreover, the preference for written source potentially privileges the sectors mentioned
earlier because their lives were reflected in voluminous sources. Nobilities, monarchs, the elite,
and even the middle class would have their birth, education, marriage, and death as matters of
government and historical record. But what of peasant families or indigenous groups who did not
give much thought about being registered to government records? Indeed, if we hold “no
document, no history” as true, do we also accept that people and societies who were not reflected
in written sources and documents, such as peasants, workers, the urban poor, and indigenous
peoples, do not have history?

This loophole was recognized by historians who started using other kinds of historical
sources, which may not be in written format but were just as valid. A few of these examples are
oral traditions in the forms of epics and songs, artifacts, architecture, and memory. History, thus,
became more inclusive and started collaborating with other disciplines as its auxiliary disciplines.
With the aid of archeologists, historians can use artifacts from a bygone era to study ancient
civilizations that were formerly ignored in history because of the lack of documents. Linguists can
also help trace historical evolutions, past connections among different groups, and the flow of
cultural influence by studying languages and the way that they changed and developed. Even
scientists like biologists and geneticists can help with the study of the past by analyzing genetic
and DNA patterns of human societies. These data can explain how past societies interacted, how
they migrated from one location to another, and so on. With these advances, history is a
continuously developing discipline that is shaped by productive debates and discussions on its
nature, method, and purpose.

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 Indeed, history as a discipline has already turned into a complex and dynamic inquiry. This
dynamism inevitably produced various perspectives on the discipline regarding different questions
like: what is history? Why study history? And for whom should history be? This question can be
answered by historiography. In simple terms, historiography is the history of history. History and
historiography should not be confused with one another. The former’s object of study is the past,
the events that happened in the past, and the causes of such events. The latter’s object of study,
on the other hand, is history itself. Examples of historiographical questions are: How was a specific
historical text written? Who wrote it? What was the context of its publication? What was the
particular historical method employed? What were the sources used? and so on. Thus,
historiography lets students of history have a better and deeper understanding of the past. They do
not only get to learn historical facts, but they are also provided with an understanding of the facts
and the historical contexts. The methods employed by the historian and the theory and perspective
which guided him are also analyzed. Historiography is essential for anyone who studies history
because it teaches students to be critical with history lessons presented to them.

As discussed previously, history’s nature and meaning have changed over long periods.
Corollary to this, history’s purpose and uses have also changed from one era to another. Initially,
history was recorded for posterity. Herodotus and other historians of the ancient world wrote
history so that people can have something to look back on as reference should they be faced with
similar challenges in the present and the future. In other words, by recording the past, the
historian creates a guide for the following generations. In doing so, Herodotus and Thucydides
envisioned that the future generation, equipped with the lessons of past human actions, would be
more able and empowered to control their destiny.

In the medieval period, when Christianity and the Church became the most powerful
institutions, history ceased to be a record of man’s deeds. It started to be a record of how man
became instrumental in the fulfillment of the divine plan. In this sense, history was no longer
written to enable man to control his destiny because God already predetermined his destiny.
Instead, history became a crucial part of the endeavor to discover and expound on this divine plan.

As history developed as a scientific discipline, due in part to the rise of the positivist
philosophy, professional historians who made a career out of history’s academic study argued that
studying history should not have any other purpose but for its own sake. This intellectual
movement is referred to as historicism. In their view, assigning a pragmatic reason for the study of
the past, like political training and historical analyses of social problems, renders a sense of
partiality or bias on what should be historically studied and how. Leopold von Ranke, the leading
positivist historian of the nineteenth century, was the primary advocate of this idea. He argued
that the task of the historian is neither to guard certain values nor to judge certain pasts. Instead,
the task of the historian should be to bring past back to life. Ranke popularly declared that the aim
of history is “merely to show how things actually were.” Insisting on the social relevance of history
obscures a faithful and complete reimagination of the past because it tends to be viewed in light of
the recent problems.

However, this view disregards the fact that any historical writing, albeit highlighting certain
aspects of the past, would always be influenced by the context of the historian who is writing from
the present. Recent developments in the historical discipline, such as the emergence of
subdisciplines like Women’s History, Environmental History, labor History, and Urban History, were
products of present issues that demanded a thorough and scientific explanation of historical
processes that led us to the current situations. As the Italian historian Benedetto Croce said, “All
History is contemporary History.”

Moreover, faithfulness to the past and social relevance are not necessarily incompatible with
one another. A historian can respond to present issues without compromising academic rigor,
impartiality, and objectivity. Aside from this, whether the historian refuses to engage in present
relevance or not, history can always be used and distorted to serve different agendas.

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 In the relatively recent past, states and governments used history to unite a nation and to
legitimize regimes by forging a sense of collective identity through the manufacture of social
memory. This use of history was especially true for nations who prescribe official versions of their
history, such as North Korea, Nazi Germany during the war period, and Thailand. Aside from
legitimizing their regimes, distorted notions of the past have also been used to justify atrocious
policies and to escape historical accountability for past wrongdoings. When American historians
depicted the Filipino people as uncivilized in their publications, they intended to justify their
colonization of the Islands. They wanted colonization to appear not as a means of undermining the
freedom of the Filipino people who recently gained independence from Spain but as a civilizing
mission to fulfill what they call the “white man’s burden.” At present, the family and loyalists of
former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos have been systematically revising and changing history
to acquit Marcos of his sins in the past and to falsely paint his corrupt and brutal regime as a
Golden Age of the Philippines. In these instances, isn’t it the duty of the historian to rescue the
past from entities who intend to use it to escape accountability, justify oppression, and spread
deceit? The Historian’s mission of preserving and resurrecting the past, as argued by historicists, is
always attached to his duty to respond to the issues of the present.

If history should not be studied only for the sake of studying the past, what other purpose
should it then serve? One answer is that history can provide us with multiple ways to view,
interpret, and respond to a particular problem. History reminds us that there can be a range of
different options that have manifested in the past, which we can use for present issues. History’s
utility has always been referred to as “learning from the mistake of the past,” as if everything that
has been happened in the past was a mistake. This reference is not necessarily accurate. History
can also be an “inventory of alternatives.” It is also a repository of good ideas. Aside from this, the
Ancient Greek notion that history can provide humanity with lessons from the past to have better
control of their destiny is also true. History can help us control not just our future, but also our
present situation.

Finally, history helps humanity to acquire a sense of self-knowledge. As British historian R.G.
Collingwood elegantly put it, “Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody
knows what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The
value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.”

LESSON SUMMARY
 History is the study of human activities in the past. This definition makes history a unique
discipline.
 The meaning and characteristics of history changed from the ancient period to the present.
These changes were dependent on the purpose that history served.
 History is a scientific discipline that relies on different sources.
 Several issues revolve around the meaning and function of history as a discipline. These
issues relate to different aspects of the discipline, such as meaning, method, and use.

REFERENCES:
Collingwood, R. G. (2005). The Idea of History. Oxford University Press.
Tosh, J. (2002). The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and new directions in the study of modern
history. London: Pearson Education.