Credit: The Homeschool Historian (Facebook)
"Five Things You Should Know About History
(If you’re new here)
1. “The past” and “history” are NOT the same thing. The past is what actually happened and can be confirmed by historical fact (records, archeological evidence, etc.) In my classes I mention the example of a receipt from a grocery store: the receipt proves what the person buys, what time, from which store, and for how much.
“History” is the story that a historian writes using historical fact as his/her source: history is someone else’s interpretation of historical fact. It’s HOW we tell the story (because we weren’t there when it happened and we aren’t omniscient, we have to piece together historical facts to come up with a theory of things we can’t prove). Using the receipt example, history is how we try to answer:
-Who went to the store
-Why the price of X might have been inflated that year compared with other receipts found in earlier and later periods
-What historical events were happening around the time of the purchase which would help identify the use of the items on the list
-The ways in which spending habits that particular year might have changed based on economical conditions brought on by famine, war, political policies, etc.
History is our attempt to explain the past: it’s the story we tell in order to make sense of historical fact. Historical fact doesn’t change (unless new facts are found): historical interpretation changes ALL THE TIME.
2. There’s no such thing as “real history” or “true history” (see 1). If history is how we tell the story, then the story (narrative) WILL CHANGE depending upon who is telling the story. Sometimes whole groups of historians for a certain period of time will always (or generally) interpret historical events the same (ish) way—and that’s why there are generations of Americans who have one version of the past, and the next generation has a different one. The word for this is “historiography”—the history of how historians have interpreted historical facts. That leads me to:
3. When a group of historians generally agree upon a certain form of “story telling” (historical interpretation), this is called a “historiographical school”. There have been several major historiographical schools in the past century:
Progressive School
Consensus School
New Left School
Neo-Consensus School
(And now currently? We’re not sure because more time has to pass. Time will tell.)
If you’re a Millennial or GenX, you probably were taught from a mixture of New Left and Neo-Consensus. If you’re a Boomer (which obviously covers a huge time frame), the older of you probably learned from the Consensus school while the younger Boomers learned from the New Left school. This is exactly why you hear (and probably have said) “They don’t teach history like they used to!”…..because yeah. They don’t.
4. You will never, ever find a historian who will interpret the exact way you want them to: as a result, you will never find a curriculum which meets all of your personal beliefs (religious, social, political, etc.). What I have found as a homeschool parent for ten years with two history degrees is that most people refuse to look at ANY interpretations which differ from their personal beliefs. Guess what that leaves? Propaganda. Propaganda is the opposite of good scholarship, and a large number of the homeschool curriculum flagship companies sell a Christianized version of Consensus historiography. Furthermore, several well-known Christian companies produce history material written by people with zero history education (how do I know? I’ve contracted for them before).
In short, we CANNOT be spoon fed someone else’s interpretation. Americans have some of the lowest and most abysmal historical literacy scores in the developed world, thanks to decades of social studies (shudder), top-down one-sided interpretations, and poor research education. The answer to this? Read it here: https://thehomeschoolhistorian.com/howithappened/ (or just read my posts over the past year!)
5. Historical literacy is built by learning about the past in context, chronologically, and with historical empathy. I wrote Chronos with this exact goal in mind. But whatever you do, whatever you read, PLEASE study it in context.
What happened before?
What happened as a result?
What consequences did it have? How did they produce other consequences?
What did people believe about X during this point in history?
How did their beliefs influence their actions? How might their actions have been interpreted at that point in the past versus by our own perspective?
Lastly: pursue the truth even if it’s uncomfortable.
It usually is." #homeschool #history
