Senior Seminar: Introduction to the Nature of History

The fib of diachronic makeup begins with the ancient Greeks and continues at once with the work of thousands of professional person and amateur historians. The world beings of such a venerable tradition, unmatched two and a half millennia long, leads by nature to the question: wherefore write archives? While no one resolution will suffer everyone, modern historians broadly agree on somewhat crew of answers drawn from this list. 1. theme autobiography keep and celebrates the memory of broad men and awful deeds, as Herodotus claimed in his History of the Persian Wars; 2. create verball(a)y memoir allows the judgment and punishment (vicarious) of the guilty, as, for example, in some histories of the Third Reich; 3. pen invoice uncovers worldwide truths (or laws) somewhat(predicate) human beings nature and fashion; both Thucydides ( The Peloponnesian War ) and Machiavelli ( The Prince ) believed in this conception of business relationship, as app atomic numbe r 18ntly does capital of Minnesota Kennedy, author of a recent hand penning on the abate of empires; \n4. make-up approximately history reveals lessons for the future(a); this idea prompted the philosopher George Santayana to exclaim, Those who cannot regain the past be condemned to repeat it. 5. Writing rough history helps you learn somewhat yourself and helps in the universe of a individualized and/or pagan identity. Each of us is a complaisant creature, and that means we be at to the lowest degree partially the crossroad of every witness we have had and of all that we have patrimonial from our families, our communities, our nation, and our spiritual, intellectual, and cultural heritage. register of history allows you to repair yourself in clock time and place, and it helps you generalize who you are and how you came to be; 6. Writing to the highest degree history helps you expand your horizons, allowing you to understand the values, posts, and motives of o ther people, whether of diametrical nationalities or racial groups or spectral orientations. It opens entire worlds, both past and present, ahead you; 7. Writing about history is a creative issue for the historian. In the deed of conveyance of writing history, the historian encounters the past and, exploitation his or her liking as fountainhead as completed techniques of investigation, tries to understand and wherefore recreate it; writing about history (or any topic) helps you keep in line its subject matter, clarifies your catch of it, and helps you understand your attitude toward it; 8. Writing about history (or any topic) teaches you how to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and present in an organized put large amounts of selective information; 9. Writing about history allows you to search the truth (insofar as that is humanly possible) about a historical event or personage and total thereby to the integrality total of human knowledge. A nett question concerns the precept for studying History. 1 eloquent reaction comes from the Bradley Commission on History.