Definition of History
I thought I could easily define what history is without looking up a reputable reference source. Initially, I considered history to be the written records describing past events and people. However, this definition would include every experience that occurred after the present moment—rendering the definition overly broad and imprecise.
Okay, then. More research and study are needed about the methodology of good history.
Let’s go to people who have given this topic their time and devotion—the experts.
We read from How History Is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline (Cole, Breuer, Palmer, Blakeslee, 2022):
What is History?
Deciding what is important—which among myriad of past events should be retold, the order to put them in, how to phrase stories so that they reach the right audience—that is what history is. As historians James Davidson and Mark Lytle put it, “History is not ‘what happened in the past;’ rather it is the act of selecting, analyzing, and writing about the past.
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Historians are tasked with finding evidence about the past and then deciding what to do with it. They research, evaluate, and write using what past actors have left behind.
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Writing history is at heart the art and science of deciding how to stitch together what remains of the past in a way that is meaningful to readers in the present.
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Where does the (social) science part come from? Though gaps in the record mean that we can never know everything about the past–and thus a certain amount of art and interpretation is necessarily a part of history–historians mimic scientific processes, posing and testing hypotheses and placing weight on the use of peer review before publication. Guidelines about the value of a source, rules about how you record where you find it, and advice on how to present your findings when you present them to the public (or just your instructor) are all part of an effort to create reliable scholarship that can be replicated—the key elements of reason.
Conclusion
With this brief dive into the definition of history and some regurgitation of the above source: History is the science of studying, evaluating, interpreting, and writing about the elements that are important to your audience in a peer-review environment. Elements are the focused events and people of the past.
Armed with my current definition of history, I can judge the versions of history that I’ve studied in school. Some of it is very biased and narrow, I dare say. However, to at least be knowledgeable of how I need to examine my sources and have an analytical approach to evaluating these sources, makes me less gullible to believe everything I read and see. That’s an important start.
This video on historical thinking further clarifies what elements go into having a proper historical mind when writing about history.
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