FOCUS AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
From the Point of View of a Person Who is Not a Historian.
If it is the case that history is the study of the story of mankind, then the purposes of history probably concern themselves with assisting in navigation through the very same ongoing soap opera in our own days.
In order to do this, it is necessary to know both what happened in a particular time-space context and also to know why it happened. Knowing the former and not the latter would make it difficult to translate the findings to inform our own age. In other words, history might not be about pinpointing individual actions in time, but in identifying the patterns which link the actions. It is probable that the patterns are ongoing whereas the isolated events are not ongoing: the patterns which link behaviour of different groups of people in time are likely to be determined by factors which are either constant in effect or else very slowly evolving. These factors might include economic triggers, whereby the actions of a group are dictated by their need for finite natural resources, and social triggers, such as the need for acceptance by a family group, the need to achieve power in a group and the need to produce successors. My point here is to stress the need for interpretation of events. And interpretation is an art, not a science. This makes things tricky. Precision in pinpointing factual evidence and deciding what is relevant is essential. But working out the implications involves reading in to the minds of people that lived, possibly, under very different conditions to our own.
So… who decides what is a relevant fact?
Who decides what is a relevant period of history to study?
A passion for a particular era of history seems to be a suspicious basis upon which to understand the present. While I quite understand someone wanting to escape to the perfected, being completed, days of yore, it is not quite the same as wishing to understand the ticking of the human mind so as to infuse our sense of the present and future. I’m very, very open to other people’s views on this matter.
Once investigation is under way on a particular historical issue, whether it be one of time, place or abstract concept as it changes over time, what is to be considered relevant?
Every situation involves an apparently infinite number of variables, as a situation is the product of many other situations, all interconnected, one way or another. Just as in the divorcing of a couple in a marriage there are always two sides to the story, so in the divorcing of relations between nations there must be as many aspects as there are individuals involved, plus all the people that influenced those individuals.
What is to be considered relevant in a historical investigation? This is not a rhetorical question. I really don’t know and I wish someone would make helpful suggestions.
For a part of history for which there is abundant evidence, such as recent political history, it must be tough sorting.
The careful extraction of factual matter from acres of documents is time consuming. The attention to detail required and the enormity of the task seem to me to be like cataloguing the entire class of insects.
And presumably the interpretation of history has to be always a team effort. It would be awful for people to put in all that work and not publish their findings. The piecing together of elements of history, a kind of metaphysical patchwork quilt with ever changing dimensions, must be awesome.
I would imagine that there is a role for people who collate and interpret huge bodies of information to form understandable blocks of history that the non-historian can assimilate into their everyday lives.
To go back to the beginning again, the assimilation of the lessons of the past would be most useful if as many people as possible could contemplate their lives with insight gained from communal experience. History is of the masses and has to be for the masses in order for it to have a social use. Otherwise it’s just a very intellectual way of passing time.
So…
Where do the historians of Undernet’s #history put themselves in that frame of endeavour?
Are people:
And what is the most useful position for a person to take, should they not be prepared to dedicate large chunks of their lives to the pursuit of historical knowledge?
by fand