Three Lectures on History

Created @January 25, 2023 9:07 PM

Class GERPHIS A55C

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I. WHO IS CLIO? WHAT IS SHE?

Clio is the Muse of History

She has taken out naturalization papers in practically every country of the
globe.

“The more history you have, the better”

History deals with FACTS, HAPPENINGS, and EVENTS

History is concerned with PAST EVENTS

Only those in which MEN — human beings — are somehow involved.

These form the subject matter of history.

NATURAL HISTORY

domain of the geologist and the paleontologist

the “history” of the universe and of this planet before the coming of man

“When man does appear, we do not at once have history”

History bases its account of what man has done on WRITTEN RECORDS

The period of time which clapsed between the appearance of man and the
appearance of written redcords is called PRE-HISTORY

the particular domain of the archaeologist, aided and abetted by the

anthropologist

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 they try to find out what happened to man and what be caused to happen

It must also be admitted that they do a lot of guessing

HISTORY PROPER

man’s past reconstructed from written records

the historian is not interested in individual men as individuals; he is interested in

the doings of communities, of socielies of men, and in individuals as they affect
the lives of their communities

for this reason, HISTORY IS OFTEN CLASSED AMONG THE SOCIAL

SCIENCES

💡 The working definition of history;

History is the social science which reconstructs man’s past

from written records.

Historians look for documents which are the closest to the event he wishes to
reconstruct. These documents are called his sources.

Source material can be almost anything.

The narrative account; “this is what happened; this is how it began, and this is
what followed from that beginning.”

Thucydides wrote the history of the war waged by the Peloponnesians and the
Athenians

The narrative of Thucydides is what you might call the formal or full-dress account.

There are other types in varying degrees of informal dress

for instance: the dispatches which Caesar sent back to Rome from his ever
moving command post in France, Germny, and Britain

another: the narrative of a journery across the limitless expanse of Central Asia
into the half-legendary world of China under the Mongol emperors, written in
prison by Marco Polo

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 another: Bernal Diaz del Castillo recalled how a handful of conquistadors
(himself included) followed an adventurer named Cortés to the very pinnacle of
the ancient empire of the Aztecs

But these narratives are not the only sources of information.

Even more informative sometimes are those documents which people write with no
particular intention of being informative.

for example: CONTRACTS

a contract drawn up by Governor Francisco Tello de Guzmán of the

Philippines in 1598 which granted an encomienda on the islands of Samar
and Leyte to two officers of the Spanish army

This contract tells us what an encomienda was. It was a grant of

jurisdiction. Includes what obligations the Spanish government attached
to the office of the encomendero.

An economic historian will eventually arrive at the point where

a pattern does emerge, and thus illuminate one more obscure
corner of our national past.

EPOCH-MAKING DOCUMENT

Magna Carta

The American Declaration of Independence

The Communist Manifesto

There is magic in these familiar phrases; yet if we look at them more closely we
shall perceive that these documents are of little value in themselves, in
isolation

It is only after the historian/s have reconstructed from a mass of other contemporary
documents that their full meaning and import becomes clear

DOCUMENTS BY THEMSELVES ARE NOT HISTORY.

they are the raw material of history

The historian must reconstruct the past.

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 Tools and Equipment a historian must bring to his task

A knowledge of languages

Ability to sift evidence

Passion for accuracy

Complete integrity

Breadth of vision

Ability to bring to life, to create/re-create

Historians must have the trial lawyer’s flair for detecting bias, for unmasking the
elaborate fabrication or the simple lie.

but ONE CRITICAL DIFFERENCE between the lawyer and the historian — the
historian’s witnesses are ALL DEAD.

For this is what history must be, at its highest: it must be, in
the words of Michelet, a “RESURRECTION OF THE FLESH”

Very few historians have been able to bring to bear on their work both the
exactitude of science and the vitality of art.

Thucydides’ harrowing description — all the more harrowing because it was

so CLINICAL; the insight with which the Belgian medievalist Pirenne
perceived the effect upon Western Europe of the Muslim conquest of the
Mediterranan, and the skill with which he spelled out the details of that initial
intuition

The historian must be, at his highest and best, a creative artist.

II. DOES HISTORY TEACH ANYTHING?

❗ What is history for?

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 History teaches certain lessons, certain valuable lessons which will help us in the
conduct of our present life

We are confronted with certain problems today BUT these problems are not new

In either case, we learn something of great value

We learn how to deal with our present similar problems, or at least we learn how not
to deal with them

for example: Yield control of the army and you breed tyrants; breed tyrants and
you breed anarchy

That is why today, at least in democracies, a cardinal principle of

government is civilian control of the military

History is hindsight, and hindsight is always a useful thing.

History is not only hindsight, but it is also foresight

It enables us TO SOME EXTENT to foretell the future

If we read history aright, we shall perceive that it is governed by laws

These laws impose a pattern or rhythm on the birth, growth, decline, and fall of
nations, of civilizations, and even of mankind itself

What are these laws of history?

According to Auguste Comte, one of them is the Law of Indefinite Progress.

Comte belonged to the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, the age of
clear straight lines which gave way to the Era of Romanticism

Hegel saw what was wrong with Comte’s law; it was too simple

but human history is NOT simple

Hegel perceived a pattern; a process of expansion and contraction

How does this work?

Man finds out very early in his career that he cannot survive alone. Then forms
a community and under centralized direction, he can then successfully defend

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 himself from enemies (and grow more food, build better houses, and get more
out of life)

THIS IS THESIS. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians discovered

this and built up empires.

Greeks came along and found that there is a lot more to be got out of life
besides order. There is freedom.

THIS IS ANTITHESIS. Is this not an infintely more precious thing than order?
But if we choose freedom, must we not give up order?

THIS IS SYNTHESIS. They are reconciled in Rome; the Roman idea of ordered
freedom, of right under law.

BUT this is NOT the end of the process. A synthesis arrived at begins a new
cycle; becomes, in its turn, thesis.

The Roman thesis develops an antithesis in the barbarians of Western

Europe

The tension between them produces in time the synthesis of the medieval
world

Marx believed Hegel had something there, but it had to be brought down to earth

He started with the assumption that all of man’s activities, and all of his ideas,
are governed and controlled by the way he made his living

History is determined by economics.

Change the economy and you change everything else

Where does Hegelian dialectic come in?

Marx uses it to explain how the economy changes

The economy changes because men are by nature greedy and there is no
limit to their greed.

“Every economy generates an exploiting class: thesis. An exploiting class

implies an exploited class: antithesis.”

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 the cycle goes on and on — the exploitation of the exploited by the exploiters:
increasing tension between thesis and antithesis

The tension is resolved by the exploited class expropriating the exploiters

BUT the synthesis immediately becomes thesis.

Capitalism rears its ugly head, but also nurses in its bosom the antithesis that
will destroy it; the proletariat

The expropriators are expropriated. And here Marx stops.

But why stop there?

If Marx’s law of the class stuggle were a real law, should it not continue to
operate? Should not the dictatorship of the proletariat then produce a new class
of exploiters?

That it does produce such a class, a party, and bureaucracy more ruthless than
any feudal or capitalist class, is the embarrassing conclusion to which highly
orthodox Marxists are being led today.

Does not the history of these efforts to find iron laws of history suggest that
such a search is vain?

FACT: Those who claim to have discovered iron laws of history, that is,
universal and necessary laws, are almost always NOT historians.

Historians are known to be more cautious.

Every historian is full of admiration for Mr. Toynbee’s laws, until they are applied to
his particular area of specialization

The historian must stick to the facts; his whole endeavor is to find out what really
happened; to reconstruct a concrete event

Such and such a development occurred at this particular time and place — this is
the fact

It occurred because such and such factors were present and

operating —— these are the causes of the fact.

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 The more the historian knows about it, the less willing he will be to go out on such a
limb

Of all the kinds of the books that are written, the most ephemeral, the
quickest to go out of date, is the history book?

For the very week in which it is published some new document, some hitherto
undiscovered or neglected detail, may change the whole picture and render its
interpretation valueless

How can we ever be sure that we are dealing with the same or similar causes?

We classify historical causes and paste abstract labels on them;

We must talk this way about them if we are to talk about them at all

But we cannot afford to forget that these ARE abstractions; they are
CONSTRUCTS OF THE MIND

In the real, extramental order human history is caused by men.

MEN ARE FREE; AND THEREFORE, MEN ARE UNPREDICTABLE.

HISTORY, THEN, CANNOT GIVE FORESIGHT.

Those who say that we cannot; theirs is the cynical principle that all we can ever
learn from history is that we never learn from history

If history does teach lessons, we cannot apply them in any mechanical or automatic
sense.

But if history can give us no foresight whatever, and precious little hindsight,
what CAN it give us?

History gives us a knowledge of men. A concrete existential knowledge

A knowledge of men acting;

Men suffering;

Men in every conceivable circumstance of life and death

This historical knowledge of men cannot of course take the place of the direct
and immediate experience we must acquire of living men.

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 But it may possibly broaden and enrich that experience.

From such experiences, what may we expect to gain?

The courage to face the facts

The humility to learn from them

The intelligence to act upon them

The faith to believe that if we do what in us lies, God will do the rest

III. TEACHING HISTORY

How history can be or should be taught.

Teaching of history ought not to be different from that of any other subject involving
a text

The Jesuit Educational Code

1. The student is asked to read over the text himself

a. See what he can make out of it himself; this is the “prelection”

2. The teacher goes over the text and explains it

a. This is the “lesson”

3. The teacher checks on whether the students have really learned the lesson

a. This is the “recitation”

These fundamental operations should be the main work of the history class; there is
NO subsititute for them

To supplement and enrich them, visual aids are used.

The task of history is to reconstruct, to recall, to bring back to life, a community

of men now vanished

Pictures and maps are often used to visually show what happened

Physical maps are useful for showing the influence of geography upon
history

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 With a map before us, the opposing strategies in a war becomes much
easier to grasp

There is always the blackboard if pictures and maps are lacking.

A blackboard drawing or diagram has the advantge that it is dynamic —— it

moves, it develops

There are as many ways of teaching history as there are history teachers.
Everyone develops his own particular style of teaching.

Some teachers don’t give a great deal of importance to memorizing a lot of details
and dates

Rather it would be more sensible to remember where you can look them up

For Dela Costa, he would have his students of history develop a sense of
duration

This helps us to understand the nature of that process

Even more important than a sense of duration is the ability to perceive casual
relationships

In high school history course the emphasis is mainly on what happened. While in
college history course the emphasis is mainly on why it happened and what
resulted because it happened.

Historical cause and effect.

A third objective of college history might be to develop the ability to classify; to

sort out a multiplicity of facts and fit them into a rational pattern of
coordinates and subordinates

(Supposedly) The supreme ambition of the history teacher is to communicate to

someone else not so much a set of facts as something of the overpowering
excitement which he himself has experienced at the thought that the realm of the
mind is full of problems, and that somewhere out there, the answers wait for
whoever is venturesome and mettlesome enough to go and look for them.

It is said that there are TWO ways of teaching:

Dogmatic

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 Based on the principle “To teach is to affirm”

Problematic

Based on the principle “To teach is to put problems”

These methods are not mutually exclusive. Rather they are complementary.

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