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History Notes

History Notes. ToK. What is history?. The study of the past, but, more specifically, the study of: traces of the past t he s ignificance of past events With a view to e xplaining and understanding the past. Why study history? . To gain a sense of identity

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History Notes

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  1. History Notes ToK

  2. What is history? • The study of the past, but, more specifically, the study of: • traces of the past • the significance of past events • With a view to • explaining and understanding the past

  3. Why study history? • To gain a sense of identity • As a defense against propaganda • To enrich our understanding of human nature

  4. Knowing about the past • The past cannot be changed, and in this sense it is quite objective. Our knowledge of the past, however, isn’t, due to: • The fallibility of memory • The ambiguity of the evidence • The problem of bias • Objectivity in history nevertheless remains an important ideal.

  5. Primary sources • Fallible eye witnesses • Social bias • Deliberate manipulation • Still, we can distinguish between more and less reliable sources by asking: • Who wrote them? • What was their motive? • How long after the event was it written? • Do the sources agree or disagree with one another?

  6. Secondary sources • Historical investigation is often based on a question or a problem that reflects contemporary preoccupations. • History is a selection of a selection • Hindsight presents both advantages and disadvantages

  7. Is history more biased than, for example, the sciences are? • Topic choice bias – self-selected topics can still be treated in an objective manner, as in the sciences • Confirmation bias – good historians actively seek out counter-evidence • National bias – peer review

  8. One history, or many? • Historical pluralism, not relativism…

  9. Theories of history • There is rarely one single cause of an event. Instead, there is likely to be a range, from the more general to the more specific, such as geographical conditions to individual motives, or social and economic conditions to chance occurrences. • The “great person” theory; role of empathy • Economic determinism; role of technology • Chance • A mixture of all three?

  10. Do we learn from the mistakes of the past? • History never repeats itself, but it is probably able to furnish us with better judgment about human affairs…

  11. Reference • van de Lagemaat, R. (2011). Theory of Knowledge for the IB Diploma. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK.

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