Have you ever wondered how the information in your textbooks get there? Have you ever wondered why new historical studies are being researched each day? That is all thanks to Historians! Historians are people who spend their whole life studying, writing, and teaching about history. Historians require many special skills, education, and are very important in everyday life. Though there are tons of types of Historians, from teachers to museum workers, they all require the same skills. According to MyMajors.com, six of the most important skills to have are reading comprehension, critical thinking, writing, speaking social perceptiveness, and instructing. Reading comprehension and critical hinting are definitely crucial. It is all…
globe, the knowledge of these subjects always intrigued from an early age. From my first Social Studies class in the sixth grade until my final years in highschool, I was always most interested in learning the history of the world. The enjoyment I received from sitting in a History class can never be replaced with any other subject. Sitting in the front row seat, right in front of the teacher, listening to the stories from the past, would put me into a trance that would make me relive the moment…
Historians like all people, have general knowledge and understanding of all domains such as the sciences, business and politics. However, historians unlike most people use facts of general knowledge to help other people connect concepts together to create a general understanding of a topic. For this reason, historians’ present facts to people that helps them to come up with solutions to their current issues. Mostly, the historian has been an important role for centuries because they not only…
It’s the traditional responsibility of the historian to separate themselves from the public. Their role is to provide the masses with facts and theories. After all, there is the sanctity of neutrality we must uphold. I understood and embraced this position prior to reading Zinn. But my view was changed by his book. “[T]he real choice is not between shaping the world or not, but between doing it willingly or unconsciously” he writes. As a historian, we can either maintain the status quo by…
Intervention in the existing historiography is essential for historians to contribute new research while addressing the methodological differences throughout the field. To do so, historians use a combination of both methodological and historiographical approaches. These approaches become the key to unlocking new ideas, challenging previous paradigms, and expanding research. Historians Mark Wilson and Ella Fratantuono provide two case studies to analyze, that subsequently reveal how historians…
Modern historical analysis is bases its existence off of one crucial element; evidence. The First and Second World Wars provide historians with in depth hard evidence from still-existing battlefields as well as thousands of written accounts of the events of a day’s fighting. The further back in history one goes, however, the more scant this history becomes. Amongst the most difficult time periods to analyze can be found in the Classical era; with limited surviving written resources as well as…
In Chapter 1 of “What Is History,” Carr demonstrates how one should use historical facts. Most importantly Carr shows that in the 19th century, historians of the west, for the most part, had a positivist view. What this means is that they viewed historical facts as information that was not aligned with any person’s opinion. Carr noted that this view is faulty because historians choose which facts of the past are deemed historical fact if they’re important enough. For example, Carr states that…
Harry Elmer Barnes, a prominent war historian who wrote during the 20th century from the perspective of the Germans,viewed the war from a different perspective than the one that was already being perceived. Yet where other historians had come to the conclusion that the war was started by the Germans and that the Holocaust was a definitive fact. He stated that “Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime.”…
History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin, Peter Charles Hoffer, a professor of history at the University of Georgia and former member of the American Historical Association 's Professional Division, discusses the issue of professional and ethical misconduct in the field of history. Hoffer analyzes the four cases of Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin, and notes that developments within the field of history have affected historians. Such cases of…
Peter Novick: His Noble Dream of Defining the “Objectivity Question” Among Historians A plaguing question for modern historians, distancing oneself from the source material and becoming “objective” in a subjective world has been a struggle for decades now. While many historians, try as they might, attempt to provide a well-rounded, even-handed account of history through their eyes albeit in the proper historical context, those such as Peter Novick believe many of their efforts to have been in…