IB Topics in 20th Century History
Historiography
People who are not historians sometimes think of history as the facts about the past. Historians are supposed to know
otherwise. The facts are there, to be sure, but they are infinite in number and speak, if at all, in conflicting, often
unintelligible, voices. It is the task of the historian to reach back into this incoherent babel of facts, choose the ones that are
important, and figure out what it is they say.
This is not an easy job. Although we have rules of evidence to help keep us honest, a large subjective element necessarily
enters into all historical scholarship. Which facts we choose and which meanings we invest them with are deeply influenced
by the questions we ask and the assumptions we operate under, and these questions and assumptions, in turn, reflect the
concerns that are uppermost in our minds in any given moment. As times change and concerns shift, the questions and
assumptions reflecting them also change. Thus, it is often said, each generation of historians must rewrite the history written
by the preceding generation.1
1) The Study of History - Historiography
a) Why
b) History as Stagnant or History as Dynamic
i) There is no "Right Answer"
ii) History as Argument
(1) Claim and Warrant
(2) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel The Dialectic
The Dialectic
Thesis
… At the foundation of Hegel's thought
Synthesis
was his understanding of dialectic,
according to which all things unfold in a
Anti-Thesis
continuing evolutionary process whereby
every state of being inevitably brings
New Thesis
forth its opposite. The interaction
between these opposites then generates a
third stage in which the opposites are
New Anti-Thesis
integrated - they are at once overcome
and fulfilled - in a richer and higher
synthesis, which in turn becomes the
basis for another dialectical process of opposition and synthesis. Through philosophy's comprehension of this
fundamental process, Hegel asserted, every aspect of reality - human thought, history, nature, the divine reality
itself - could be made intelligible.2
(3) Evidence
iii) The Craft of History
(1) The Story
(2) The Selection of and Access to Evidence
All historians confront an essential problem: The past is dissolving under our feet at every moment. The
Romans had a proverb: Tempus edax rerum, "Time the devourer of things." Time destroys. The evidence for
past events is always incomplete and fragmentary, like a jigsaw puzzle washed out of a shipwreck and cast upon
a rocky beach by the waves. Many pieces are lost. Those that remain are often faded and warped. Historians
fit the pieces together as carefully as possible but holes remain in the picture they try to reconstruct. They do
their best to fill in the holes with inferences that seem plausible and that fit the available facts. What emerges
may closely resemble what happened, but we can never be sure that what we know as history is exactly right.
Our knowledge of history is always in flux, and historians are always in dialogue, not only with primary sources
of the events they write about but also with other historians of those events. To write history is to be engaged in
endless argument.3
1
Paul A. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past. Columbia University Press. 1984 (Page ix).
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that have shaped Our World View. Ballantine Books: New York, 1991. (Page
379).
3
Ricahard Marius, A Short Guide to Writing about History. 3rd Ed. Longman. (Page 5).
2
(3) The Historian
Historians study sources that tell them about the past, and they write because they see something that needs to
be explained. Like journalists, they ask who, what, where, when, and why. What happened? Who was
responsible? Where did this event happen? When or in what order did things happen? Why did they happen?
What have other historians said about the event? What mistakes did they make that I can now correct? The
historian is a curious and relentless questioner.4
c)
Understanding different perspectives
Historians know that any history written is destined to be superceded. They know that access to any history is limited
by evidence, language, ideological orientation, and place. These limitations are important but to be free of them not only
is impossible, but also loses the context that is needed to understand the past.
To understand how two historians can reach different conclusions regarding the same historical event, it is helpful to
ask three questions: 1) when did they write and what access to evidence did they have? 2) where are they from and does
this effect their view? and 3) what is the ideological background that shaped their worldview? By answering these three
questions, one can begin to place historical interpretations within a graphic framework that might help to explain
historians’ different views (fig. 1)
Place
Time
Ideology
Fig. 1
By placing historical works within this graphic representation, one can see how different factors have affected historical
understanding and how historical understanding has changed over time.
i)
Time
(1) Orthodoxy
(2) Revisionism
(3) Post-Revisionism
ii) Ideology
(1) Realism
(2) Liberalism or Pluralism
iii) Place
4
Ricahard Marius, A Short Guide to Writing about History. 3rd Ed. Longman. (Page 1).