PRELIMINARY IB-YEAR
TWO COURSES IN HISTORY, ONE DEALING WITH MODERN FINNISH HISTORY AND THE OTHER WITH WORLD HISTORY (both old and more modern, depending on what you are interested in).
GENERAL AIMS; TO BECOME INTERESTED IN AND FASCINATED BY HISTORY. TO UNDERSTAND HISTORY AS A SUBJECT. TO PROVIDE HISTORICAL KNOWLEDGE AND A HISTORICAL FUNDAMENT FOR FURTHER STUDIES IN THE IB-HISTORY PROGRAMME.
I. DIFFERENT AND CHANGING SOCIETYS. MAN IN HISTORY.
1. What is HISTORY?
-Reliability and bias
2. Essaywriting
-technic and content
WHAT IS HISTORY?
1. The discipline which studies the past.
-the analysis or description of the past.
-the notion of human activity during history (causes -consequences)
2. Events in the past, object to historical research.
-man is the object, therefore the historian is forced to extreme criticism.(You have to examine the motives and background of a certain text or source).
2.1. Every answer to the question "WHY" is in history an interpretation, generalization or a consolidation of different information. The historian's attempt to reconstruct and interpret the past, not the past itself. Predjudice!
3. History is the story of mankind.
Even when historians write about a natural process (climate, diseases) they do so only to understand why and how men and women have lived.
What is unique about the human species is not its possession of certain faculties or physical characteristics, but what it has done with them - its achievments, or history in fact.
4. History is a serious discipline with a rigorous methodology but it involves a high degree of interpretive and creativ imagination.
5. E.H. Carr: "a dialogue between the present and the past". In reconstructing and interpreting the past the historian is always influenced by the attitudes and prejudices of the age and society in which he lives.
A SLIGHTLY DIFFERENT VIEW:
Many different kinds of history exists; History isn't about learning a lot of what have happened in the past or to understand cause-consequence-chains as someone have interpreted them to us. History is also to penetrate a world of prospects where one can get associations and ideas and thoughts which one is able to use in one's life.
History is also something we can not avoid, it's
something we continuosly experience and learn us. We collect a capital of history through our impressions. Fragments which imprint our view of the past, the present and the future but also our attitude towards blurred moralconcepts as wrong or right (evil-good).
JUSTIFICATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF HISTORY
What is the use of history?
Try to imagine what it would be like living in a society where there was no knowledge at all of history (G. Orwell; 1984). History is to community, as memory is to the individual. It's a question of identity. It also help us to orientate ourselves. Thanks to our knowledge of history we find that instead of being totally adrift on the endless and featureless (formlös, intresselös) sea of time, we do have some idea of where we are, and of who we are.
The social importance of history is brought out by the way in which we are constantly coming up against history.
WHEN DOES HISTORY BEGIN?
It's the one subject where you can not begin at the beginning. We can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearence of vertrebates (ryggradsdjur), or even to the photosynthetic cells. We can go even further, even to the origins of the universe. Yet this is not history. The historian is interested (or history appears) when MAN comes on the scene (just when exactly that was, is a matter of dispute.
ON HISTORY
George Orwell "Who controls the past controls the present" (1984)
History, or the image of the past has very much to do with power. The ones who has the power in the society usually also are the ones who "produces" history. A question of manipulating people into a certain view.
Certain values and views are emphazised. There is always somekind of objective behind this. Why do some events appear in the historybooks while others are valued as less important. In a totalitarian society this is quite obvious. A certain historical view has a clear purpose: to legalize and strengthen the rule of the totalitarian state. "Producing" history is a generally used method - falsification of facts. Could you mention any examples?
Generally, at least in the so called "democratic" countries, one assumes that one is presented with more objective history. Of course one seldom runs into examples of clear falsification but especially when dealing with modern history the presentations (or the history presented) are more or less biased. In more traditional cases it's the interpretation of the victors which is presented as "history". Just to mention one example from Finland; The history of our civilwar (1918).
This is of course traumatic and can result in a national historical trauma (something I will return to later) but usually it's dealt with when enough time has passed (In Finland this process began in the 1960's and during the 1990's the national historical trauma of the civil war is definetly accepted and dealt with).
I have mentioned Orwell (and his warnings) a couple of times but alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's BRAVE NEW WORLD.
In Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared thiose who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.
Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture.
While people are very well aware of the Orwellian warnings they tend to forget Huxley's visions.
Especially in the Western World (which in many cases is looked up to as some kind of model example) this is a definitive threat which also includes manipulating history to serve a certain purpose. The war in the Persian Gulf was one clear example of how people were served enrmous amounts of information without revealing what really happened. The war was presented as entertainment, a computergame-soapopera. Which were the objectives behind this?
An other way to manipulate history is to emhazise a certain event and at the same time forget an otherone. Noam Chomsky, an american professor in linguistqs has turned his attention to this feature. I will show you a short example of the American presentation of the genocides in Cambodia and East-Timor which took place approximately the same time. But while the Worldopinion was focused on what happened in Cambodia there was an almost complete silence about the terrible development on East-Timor. The reason why I think this is an good example of how history is produced is the fact that when historians creat history they use all avaible sourcematerial and the more sources they can get (the more a certain episode has been covered) the bigger is the chance that this event is valued as "important". How do you think the historian chooses what to include and what to exclude when he is writing for example a schoolbook in history?
Chomsky, who isn't actually working with the past but with the present, is talking about THE MANUFACTURE OF CONSENT - A technic to control the people to serve the purposes of the ruling class. When you can't control people with force you have to control what they think.
According to Chomsky it's, what he call the elitémedia which does this while they are the agendasetting media - the major televisionchannels and newspapers. They set the framework and local media adopt to their structure.
They do this in many ways;
-by selection of topics
-by distribution of concerns
-by emphasizm
-by framing the issues
-by filtering the information
The elitémedia determent, select, shape, control and restrict in order to serve the interest of dominant elitégroups of the society.
They produce a perception of the World.
I could examplify Chomsky's point by one example from the mid-70's.
If we study our historybooks of today (eventhough we are dealing with events which are not more than 20 years away) I'm quite convinced that we can find quite a lot on the atrocitys which the Khmer Rouge are responsible for while I think we would find it difficult to find anything on what happened on East-Timor the same time.
NATIONAL HISTORICAL TRAUMA
When a nation, or parts of the population in it, is suffering from a trauma the reason can usually be found in the past and how the history have been presented.
To understand this I think one could compare it with an individual trauma.
A trauma appears when you have experienced something terrible but you can't deal with it. The only way to cure yourself is to try to find out what happened in the past and deal with it.
When talking about a nation we are dealing with a historical trauma when something terrible have occured (civil war, war) but the people isn't allowed to find out what exactly happened. The only cure is to try to find the truth and in this case historical research is of great importance.
In this process one should aim at revealing the truth which requires sincerity and an openminded attitude.
Finally one can conclude that the written history, or the interpretations on what have happened is changed by time.
The historical view, or presentation, is usually becoming more objective as time goes by. The victors story turns into history.
Assignment: Examine a historical event (any) from two different point of views and present; a. the differences and possible explanations to them. b. Your personal judgement of the sources used. Which of them is more accurate or reliable?
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
To discover what people thought and did and to organize this into a chronological record of the human past, historians must search for evidence - for the sources of history. Most sources are written materials, ranging from government records to gravestoneinscriptions, memoirs and poetry. Other sources include paintings, photoraphs, sculpture, buildings, maps, pottery and oral traditions. In searching for sources, historians usually have something in mind - some tentative (hypotetiska) goals or conclusions that guide their search. Thus in the process of working with sources, historians must decide which ones to emphasize. What historians ultimately write is a synthesis of the questions posed, the sources used, and their own ideas.
THOUGH THE WORD "RESEARCH" is used frequently it has quite a strict meaning when talking about academic historical research. In history : diligent(omsorgsfull) and scholarly investigation in all available primary and secondary sources in order to extend human knowledge in a particular area. Research, as generally understood by historians, implies work carried out in primary sources.
THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES:
PRIMARY SOURCE:
-A source which came into existing during the actual period of the past which the historian is studying - the basic contemporary (samtida) raw material of history.
-Documents written or formed by individuals involved in the matter under investigation. Historians consider these documents their main building blocks for learning about and interpreting the past. They are pieces of evidence that show what people thought, how they acted, and what they accomplished. At the same time historians must critizise these sources both externally - to attempt to uncover forgeries and errors - and internally - to find the authors' motives, inconsistencies within the documents, and different meanings of words and phrases.
SECONDARY SOURCE:
-Is any interpretation, written (or made) later looking back upon a period in the past - often interpretations written later by historians.
-Secondary sources are documents written by scholars about the time in question. Usually, they are interpretations of what occured based on examination of numerous primary documents and other sources. They reflect choices the authors have made and their own particular understandings of what has happened. Often there are important differences of opinion among scholars about how to understand significant historical developments. Secondary sources should therefore be read with these questions in mind: What sort of evidence does the author use? Does the author's argument make sence? What political or ideological preferences are revealed in the author's interpretation? How might one argue against the interpretation presented by the autor?
At times the distinction between Secondary and primary sources becomes blurred, as when the author is a contemporary (samtida) of the events she or he is interpreting. If a document by that author is read as an interpreatation of what occured, it would be a secondary source. As evidence for the assumptions and attitudes of the author's times, however, the document would be a primary source.
CRITICISM AND EVALUATION OF PRIMARY SOURCES
-AUTHENTICITY (If the source is a falsification it doesn't mean it's worthless on the contrary but it's essential to know).
You have to question any information, material or statement you come across to test and establish its meaning and truth.