3. HISTORY
• History is traditionally regarded as the study of the
recorded past.
• It comes from the Greek noun iotopia or Historia meaning
learning as used by Greek philosopher Aristotle.
• History meant a systematic account of a set of natural
phenomena, whether or not chronological ordering was a
factor in the account.
4. HISTORICAL SOURCES
• History tries to reconstruct the past given the available sources.
• Two types of sources:
a. Primary sources – a testimony of an eye witness or an account
of someone who has firsthand information on the subject.
- it has to be written or recounted by someone who is
contemporary to the event being narrated.
- a primary source does not have to be original source
Example: journal, transcript, video interviews
5. HISTORICAL SOURCES
• Secondary sources are works that analyze, assess or
interpret an historical event, era, or phenomenon,
generally utilizing primary sources to do so.
• Secondary sources often offer a review or a critique.
Secondary sources can include books, journal articles,
speeches, reviews, research reports, and more.
6. ANCIENT PEOPLE HAS A SENSE
OF HISTORY
• Hieroglyphs in Egypt
• Cuneiform engraved in the mud brick tablets
in Mesopotamia.
• The drawing of cro magnons in their cave
7. HERODOTUS
• A product of Greek Hellenic age which is
the golden age of Greece.
• He wrote about Greek war against Persia
during third decade of the fifth century,
this narratives intitled “ The Histories”.
• Rigorous method has been employed.
• Information has been checked against eye
witness accounts and participants of the
event.
8. HERODOTUS
• Around the year 425 B.C.
• Herodotus published his magnum opus: a long account of the Greco-
Persian Wars that he called “The Histories.” (The Greek word
“historie” means “inquiry.”)
• Before Herodotus, no writer had ever made such a systematic,
thorough study of the past or tried to explain the cause-and-effect of
its events.
• After Herodotus, historical analysis became an indispensable part of
intellectual and political life.
• Scholars have been following in Herodotus’ footsteps for 2,500 years.
9. THERE ARE TWO PARTS IN THE HISTORY
• 1. The systematic narrative of the war of 480–479 with
its preliminaries from 499 onward (including the Ionian
revolt and the Battle of Marathon in Book VI),
• 2.The growth and organization of the Persian Empire
and a description of its geography, social structure, and
history.
10. HERODOTUS’S WORK AS HISTORIAN
• His work has remarkable feature of his love of and gift for
narrating history in the storyteller’s manner (which is not
unlike Homer’s).
• In this regard he inserts not only amusing short stories but
also dialogue and even speeches by the leading historical
figures into his narrative, thus beginning a practice that
would persist throughout the course of historiography in
the classical world.
11. QUALITIES AS A HISTORIAN
• Herodotus was a great traveler with an eye for detail, a
good geographer, a man with an indefatigable interest in
the customs and past history of his fellow citizens, and a
man of the widest tolerance, with no bias for the Greeks
and against the barbarians.
13. THE PAST TEACHES US ABOUT THE PRESENT
• Because history gives us the tools to analyze and explain
problems in the past, it positions us to see patterns that
might otherwise be invisible in the present – thus
providing a crucial perspective for understanding (and
solving!) current and future problems.
• In many ways, history interprets the events and causes
that contributed to our current world.
14. HISTORY BUILDS EMPATHY THROUGH STUDYING
THE LIVES AND STRUGGLES OF OTHERS
• Studying the diversity of human experience helps us
appreciate cultures, ideas, and traditions that are not our
own – and to recognize them as meaningful products of
specific times and places. History helps us realize how
different our lived experience is from that of our ancestors,
yet how similar we are in our goals and values.
15. HISTORY CAN BE INTENSELY PERSONAL
• In learning about the past, we often discover how
our own lives fit into the human experience.
16. “DOING” HISTORY IS LIKE COMPLETING A
PUZZLE OR SOLVING A MYSTERY
• Imagine asking a question about the past, assembling a
set of clues through documents, artifacts, or other
sources, and then piecing those clues together to tell a
story that answers your question and tells you something
unexpected about a different time and place. That’s doing
history.
17. EVERYTHING HAS A HISTORY
• Everything we do, everything we use, everything else we
study is the product of a complex set of causes, ideas, and
practices. Even the material we learn in other courses has
important historical elements – whether because our
understanding of a topic changed over time or because the
discipline takes a historical perspective. There is nothing
that cannot become grist for the historian’s mill.
