2. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Dionysius of Halicarnassus)
History is philosophy
drawn from examples.
3. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Sir Walter Raleigh)
The end and scope of all history is to teach
us by example of times past such wisdom
as may guide our desires and actions.
5. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Hegel)
What experience and history teach is this –
that people and governments never have
learnt anything from history; acted on
principles deducted from it.
6. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Karl Marx)
The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of
class struggles.
8. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(E.H. Carr)
History is a continuous process of
interaction between the historian
and his facts, an unending dialogue
between the present and the past.
9. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(R.G. Collingwood)
The philosophy of history is concerned neither
with the past by itself, nor with historian’s
thought about it by itself, but with the two
things in their mutual relations.
11. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(G. Kitson Clark)
History is the record of what has
happened in the past, of anything that
has ever happened in the past however
long ago or however recently.
12. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Crabtree, David)
History is a story about the past
that is significant and true.
13. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(J.R. Seeley)
History is past politics and
politics is present history.
14. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Polybius and Thucydides)
History is a story of things
worthy of being remembered.
15. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Sir Francis Bacon)
It is a discipline that
makes men wise.
16. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
It is the art of choosing from
among many lies that one which
most resembles the truth.
17. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Henry Johnson)
History in the broader sense is everything that
ever happened, and we have to limit our
understanding and study those events that are
very significant and have left behind a deep
impression on man.
18. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Prof. Maitland)
What men have done and said,
above all what they have thought –
that is history.
19. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Carlyle)
History is nothing but the biography
of great men and that it is a record of
human accomplishment, particularly
of great souls.
20. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Lord Acton)
History is the unfolding story
of human freedom.
21. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(A.L. Rowse)
History is essentially the record of
the life of men in societies in their
geographical and their physical
environment.
22. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
(Ernest Bernheim)
History is a science that investigates and presents in
their context of psycho-physical causality the facts
determined by space and time of the evolution of
men in their individual as well as typical and
collective activity as social beings.
23. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
A. TRADITIONAL DEFINITIONS
IN A NUTSHELL
1. History is the record of the past.
2. History is a record of the human past from the time written records began to appear.
a. The above definitions are weak because they view history as based merely on
written records.
b. According to Gottschalk, history is actuality; hence it must study the past as it
happened. This demands that the historian abandon the present. The practical
value of studying and using the past to understand the present is lost. History is
studied, written, and taught for its own sake.
c. Interviews or oral history and oral traditions, and cultural artifacts are not
considered.
d. This notion of “no written record, no history” has confined history to the literate
and articulate and has resulted in the production of historiograhies from upper-
class male perspectives.
24. INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY
1ST SEMESTER, AY 2022-2023
A. MODERN DEFINITIONS
IN A NUTSHELL
1. History is the reconstruction of the past based on written records, oral
history, cultural artifacts and folk traditions.
2. It is the imaginative reconstruction of the past, the study of events
concerning people in the past.
3. Aside from recording, a historian should do two other important tasks:
a. To interpret facts in an orderly and intelligible manner, and
b. To discover patterns and trends which govern the behavior of people
and of nations, and to make generalizations of these.
4. Therefore, history is the interpretative and imaginative study of surviving
records of the past, either written or unwritten, in order to determine the
meaning and scope of human existence.
