History & Its Sources

In the last post I tried to establish a more precise definition of the word "history." It's important to go into AP Euro, from the very beginning, understanding that this course is very different from the "history" classes that you have taken in the past. For most of you, that would be middle school social studies classes. The very definition of history as an ongoing inquiry and a living discussion, as opposed to an authoritative narrative of events (wars and dead guys!) sets any of the AP history courses apart from standard social studies classes. This is very important to remember come August. In order to make sense of and do the work of history (you know, that whole "discussion and argument" thing), you must have a basic understanding of the past. That doesn't mean that you are expected to come class understanding every last detail. That's what the discussions are all about; developing and understanding. However, it does mean that you should come to class having read the assigned reading while trying your best to make some sort of sense out of it all. If you have a question, write it down. Questions only add to the discussion. If you don't at least keep up with the reading then we can't really get down to the business of history. We just get bogged down in the "what happened" part of history and can't get to any of the real questions.

Okay, I'll go ahead and step down off of my soapbox and get to the real purpose behind this post. If history is a dialogue about the past, how do historians know what happened in the past? In order to answer this question, it is important to remember that history is a written discipline. It is primarily based upon written sources, and it is presented in a written format. Historians base their primary arguments upon an analysis of the written record of events. Yes, that means primary sources. Primary sources can be written documents, archeological artifacts, stories passed down orally, or (my favorite) works of art. As a student of European history, you will be expected to read and analyze historical evidence, and to come to your own conclusions about that evidence. Don't be afraid to "be wrong." Your teachers are there to guide you. They will help you learn how to interpret evidence in a way that makes sense. As an AP Euro student, you will also be expected to present your own historical arguments in writing. That's right, you will be doing a little bit of your own work as historians. Again, don't go running away. Your teachers are there to help you learn how to become better historical thinkers and writers. You just have to be willing to work and struggle through the process with them.

Historians don't reinvent the wheel every time they sit down to write. They do read the works of their fellow historians, and the works of those who came before them. They may read the works of a different type of historian (Yes, there are different kinds of historians) in order to gain a better understanding of a particular subject or era. For example, an art historian working on an essay about fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance art, might read the work of a social historian about Renaissance Italy to better understand the social context in which these works were created. If we only depended upon our textbook as our only source of historical knowledge, we would get a very broad view of history, but it would be lacking in depth. For that reason, we will also be reading selected passages from the works of other historians (Short passages!).

Okay, I've babbled on long enough for now. I'm not sure what the next post will be about. For now, I suggest that you go back through my blog to the posts I wrote last summer about the disasters of the fourteenth century. This will give you a better understanding of the century before 1450, our starting point in AP Euro. This will provide you with a little bit of context to help you better understand the Renaissance, our first unit of study.

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What is History?

Okay, I've finally knocked the summer cobwebs loose from my head. Time to start up the summer blog again. I had originally intended to keep this blog going throughout the school year, but the sheer volume of work that teaching an AP Euro class places upon my shoulders ended that idea. Who knows; maybe I will come back to that original plan at some point in the future. In any case, welcome (or welcome back) to my summer AP Euro blog. Hopefully, if you're reading this then you are enrolled in, and are excited to being AP European History at Westview High School. Fair warning; it does require quite a bit of time and energy to do this course the right way (that is, successfully). That applies equally to the students and to the teachers of this course. I know that my mind is always spinning about AP Euro and European history in general. In fact, as a begin writing this blog, I am sitting in a cafe in Seattle, the final destination of my summer road trip up the West Coast. I've been thinking about the subject of this first post of the summer since I left San Diego 1,064 miles ago.

I think the best place to begin thinking about the study of European history (or really the history of any civilization) it to first think about what is meant by the word "history." I know it seems a little stupid, right? After all, you can just look up the word history in the dictionary.com app on your iPhone to find out what history is. If you do that, by the way, the dictionary.com app delivers eight different definitions of the word history. Curiously, none of these definitions describes the word history as it is used by the historian. So, what's the deal here? What does a historian, or even a student of history, mean when they refer to "history"? Let's take a closer look at that.

To most people history is simply the events and people of the past; things that happened; people who have lived and died. This is only a part of the picture. Most of the "history" textbooks that you are familiar with treat history in this way. They are simply chronological narratives of the past. They are intended to familiarize the reader with the events of the past in the most efficient way possible. Are they histories? Not really. They are chronologies; a simple accounting of the past. Our own textbook, "Western Civilization" by Jackson J. Spielvogel, is closer to a chronological narrative than it is to a work of history. (I will touch on the importance of this text to our work later on.)

Okay, so if history isn't just the past, what is it? Well, history, like a chronological narrative, takes as its subject the past. However, it doesn't just stop at the question of what happened. History asks why it happened, how it happened, the causes and consequences of events and ideas. History is based upon a constant inquiry into past events. In fact, the word "history" comes from an ancient Greek word meaning something that is learned or known through inquiry. History is first a constant questioning about the past. I'll give you a quick example. Currently, I'm reading a book about the beginning of the First World War called The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark that has opened up a fresh perspective on the beginning of "The Great War". I know what you're thinking. How in the world can there be anything "fresh" about a war that started one hundred years ago? Don't we already know everything there is to know about it? The answer is NO! As we get further away from the events surrounding the outbreak of war in August of 1914 we are able to ask new questions, many of them based upon our own experiences living in the huge wake left by that war in the 20th century. Remember, history is about asking questions. In his book, Clark points out that most post-WWI historians found themselves caught up with the question of why the war started, which inevitably lead to the question of who was to blame for the start of the war. It is not necessarily the job of the modern historian to point the finger of blame. Clark decided to approach the book with the question of HOW the war started. He discovered that this is a much more difficult question to answer because most of the major players in the war spent a great deal of effort after the war pointing the finger at other nations and away from themselves. His approach paints a picture of the events that led to the outbreak of war that is much more complex than the popularly accepted narrative, and makes it much more difficult to point the finger at any one country as "responsible" for the war.

Clarks inquiry into the origins of the first great conflict of the twentieth century isn't the first of its kind, and it certainly won't be the last. That's the nature of history. It's an ongoing inquiry. Will other historians agree with the conclusions that Clark has reached in his book? They may agree with some of them, but certainly not with all of them. History is an ongoing discussion; a debate about the meaning and significance of past events and ideas. Historians read and respond to the works of other historians in an ongoing conversation. They question the conclusions of other historians. They take a critical look at the sources used by other historians to reach those conclusions. Sometimes, reading works of history will lead to new questions and a new perspective on events about which we thought we knew everything.

Okay, I'll go ahead and leave it here for this post. I don't want it to get too long. The main idea to take with you here is that history is an ongoing inquiry, discussion, and debate about the past.

In the next post, we'll take a closer look at the sources that historians use to answer their inquiry into the past. Welcome to AP Euro!