Martha Howell And Walter Prevenier

Interpretation of the past is an immense task left mostly to historians, who themselves have differing views and methods among each other. In From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier provide a history of the methodical and theoretical changes that historians have embraced and rejected. Many of these transformations were inspired by other disciplines as well as a reflection of social and political climates. Howell and Prevenier explain the different schools of thought, such as structuralism, post-structuralism, positivist views, as well as inspirations from Marxists, and how historians utilize those schools of thought to describe and interpret the past.
Generally, the book was a well thought and organized summary of the changes in historical methods that utilized real world examples. More interestingly though, Howell and Prevenier examined the thought processes of historians as individuals. The book gave a surprising yet beneficial sense of the psychology of historians. The authors mention a historian’s personal distance to the subject they study as a factor to determine satisfaction in evidence, that personally sparked a question of ethics historians may …show more content…
It did not occur to me personally that historians are responsible for deciding which past events matter enough to be interpreted and investigated. The authors feature how history has advanced from a focus on primary groups, toward the interests in minorities. The shift in studying the average people of the past not only affected history, but also rippled into other fields like archaeology. It was refreshing to know that historians have made the effort to push, often ignored groups, into the historical record and valued as important. However, I do agree with the authors that both men and women can study “women’s history” as multiple perspectives can be