Understanding history a primer of historical method pdf

Understanding history a primer of historical method pdf full#
Understanding history a primer of historical method pdf professional#

It is sometimes called вЂњmetahistoricalвЂќ-literally, вЂњbeyond historyвЂќ-because the knowledge involved is not part of what historians study, but knowledge of the kind of study in which they are involved. There is no convenient agreed-upon term for this knowledge of the discipline. They shape our understanding of what it is to вЂњdoвЂќ history and allow us to organize our content knowledge (see Box 2-1). Nevertheless, concepts such as evidence lie at the heart of history as a discipline.

Rather, they use their own (usually sophisticated) understandings of evidence or explanation to write books about Columbus or the Maya or the American Revolution. They give their readers explanations, they use evidence, and they write accounts, but their books are not about the idea of explanation, or the notion of evidence, or what kind of thing a historical account is.

Understanding history a primer of historical method pdf full#

Their histories are full of pioneers, politicians, and preachers, or of battles, bureaucracies, and banks.

Historians talk and write about things that go on in the world. But understanding history also involves concepts of a different kind, such as evidence, cause, and change. These substantive concepts include, for example, political concepts such as state, government, and power, and economic concepts such as trade, wealth,ДЄnd tax. Some of the key concepts for the study of history are concerned with the content or substance of history-with the way people and societies work. Even when we think we are making a difference, students may simply be assimilating what we say into their existing preconceptions.ДЄnother principle of How People Learn is that students need a firm foundation of factual knowledge ordered around the key concepts of the discipline. If, as teachers, we do not know what ideas our students are working with, we cannot address such misconceptions.

They will think that because we cannot go back in time and see what happened, historians must just be guessing or, worse, making it up. If they believe, for example, that we can know nothing unless we were there to see it, they will have difficulty seeing how history is possible at all. Students also have ideas about how we know about the past. But problems with everyday ideas can go deeper. The very fact that we are dealing with the past makes it easy for misconceptions to arise (soldiers and farmers are not the same now as in the seventeenth century, and вЂњlibertyвЂќ did not have the same meaning for people then as it does today). Such ideas can be helpful to history teachers, but they can also create problems because ideas that work well in the everyday world are not always applicable to the study of history. They bring with them ideas based on their own experience of how the world works and how people are likely to behave. 'By analyzing shared procedures and categories of knowledge across different mediums of history, offers a theoretical and methodological rationale for the current tendency to bring public and academic history together in fruitful conversations about the representations of the past.Putting Principles into Practice: Understanding HistoryДЄ major principle emerging from the work on How People Learn is that students do not come to their classrooms empty-handed. His advocacy of a middle path will make this book a timely and invaluable contribution for years to come.' - Martha Hodes, author of The Sea Captain s Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century provides the reader with indispensable background, discusses the products of history - admirably construed to include texts, material culture, and film - and argues that social and cultural history must contend with postmodernism without taking it too far.

Understanding history a primer of historical method pdf professional#

'Fashioning History offers professional and aspiring historians a learned and absorbing overview of historical research and writing in the context of postmodern methods. It is a very valuable book for diverse constituencies.' - The Historian continues his previous explorations of theoretical issues underlying the practice of history writing with a very systematic attempt to account for what is happening when historians tell their tales. 'In his latest book, the distinguished historian of Native Americans Robert F. he offers a theoretical and methodological rationale for the current tendency to bring public and academic history together in fruitful conversations about the representations of the past.' - The Journal of American History