What is history?

History is the past, and the study of the human past through written sources
Some might think the past and  history is the same thing, however the past is the time that has ever gone by whilst from a scientific perspective, history is to gather the information and doing research to find out what happened in the past. We interpret facts and choose how to add it together.

It’s from when we took our first steps as humans until present time, and what events that has affected and formed how our world looks today. History also changes when new things are being discovered.

.

But how do we know what we think happened, really happened?

Well, with research we’ve found remnants like books, clothes, tools, paintings, letters and photographs.
There's some parts in history that we never will know for sure how it happened, but with different sources like scientific evidence, archeology and evolution one can draw a conclusion of how it could have been.

So it's important to use logical thinking (like analyze why we did certain things in a special way) and primary sources (sources that came from that specific time when it happened) 

So why and how is history useful?


History is knowledge that we can learn from e.g. by looking how we acted in the past we can learn from our mistakes (example WWII)

      But maybe the biggest reason why we study history is to being able to better answer the big questions (metaphysical): What are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going?

During the Age of Enlightenment, historian started to gather and establish facts with different methods:

àPositivism - A method to interpret history, prove facts (this is what we’ve reached and know). You use source-critical methods which means:

·         Close-in time - The sources are so close in time when it happened, it becomes primary sources.

·         Dependent - Sources that are not build on each other. A source should not be taken from another source, the source must be independent  from any other source.

·         Tendency – Is it completely biased or impartial, objective or subjective, written in honor of a king or written for a particular view? (is it a mission from someone or is it from a perspective you’ve seen it?) Is it colored by someone's opinion?

àEmpirically - Must be evidence of what you say, and it’s based on experience-study or facts-study. From that, one can draw conclusions.

Empiricism and positivism tries to gather lots of facts and draw conclusions based on source-critical method. These methods came at the same time during the Enlightenment and go hand in hand.

Historians interpret facts based on the purpose and motive:

àHermeneutics (a method to interpret history) - To answer questions like –Why? Why did they go there, what was the purpose? and why did so many do what they did?

Interpret facts based on objective and motives , which helps you to understand and get into the situation and making it a living history.

Hermeneutics is used mostly to go deeper and answer why they did certain things.

àAnachronistic - it’s when you interpret too much from your own "frame of reference" (You look at the situation from a present perspective when you interpret another time, you should “take a walk in their shoes” and try to understand what they were thinking)

The goal with history 

- is to get close to the truth and to search for the understanding.