User:LGreg/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge (LG seminar 2020/21)/Seminar 18/Evidence/Evidence in history

Defining the discipline of history

History is a discipline that "studies the chronological record of events (as affecting a nation or people), based on a critical examination of source materials and usually presenting an explanation of their causes”. The study of this discipline is notably the work of specialists called historians.

A further definition of history as a discipline is that it uses the written word to debate the nature of its own discipline as a way of providing perspective and evidence on the current day.

The role of historians

Historians collect and analyze relevant sources about major past events. Their first role is to understand that an event has taken place or, conversely, that it has not. Only then do they try to explain the different causes and consequences of this event. Their historical inquiry is a way to help us understand our today's world. The main difficulty of their work is to be completely neutral and objective as each event is a construction of the past for the historian. It thus leads to various contradictions and divergences about what happened exactly. A relevant example of this situation is the famous debate around the origins of the First World War where consensus seems impossible. To this difficulty of neutrality can be added the debate surrounding the reconstruction or reinterpretation of certain historical events that did not occur. Many people are therefore asking themselves the following question: should we allow certain people to reinvent the past at the risk of destroying the work of historians?

Evidences in the discipline of history

Evidence is fundamental in the discipline of history. Without it, it would be impossible for historians to recount the past because without evidence that an event took place at a given time, no research is carried out. In this discipline, evidences are called historical sources and contains relevant information about the past. They can either be private or public. Their interpretation is a huge part of the work of historians since they have to be studied in completely different contexts. There is a distinction between primary and secondary sources, although some sources can be categorized differently depending on the context in which they are analyzed. A primary source is often more reliable and is defined as a source of information created in the past and more precisely at the time that is of interest to the historians concerned. Manuscripts or diaries are good examples. A secondary source in history complements the primary sources. It cites and comments on the past but is created in the present. Modern books or scholarly journals correspond to this definition.