Historiography

1
Historiography

• EDCI658 History of Education
• Sept. 4, 2006

2
The Uses of History

• Sense of our own identity
• Better understand the present
• present-mindedness
• Corrective for misleading analogies and lessons
  of the past
• Tendencies of humankind, of social institutions,
  and other aspects of human condition
• Develop tolerance and open-mindedness
• The basic background for many other disciplines
• Entertainment
• Critical thinking skills

3
Continuity and Change The Stages of Historical
Consciousness

• History as Fact
• History as Casual Sequence
• History as Complexity
• History as Interpretation
• Moral certain and ambiguity
• Absolute truth and relativism

4
Context and Moral Judgment of History

• Disagreement among professional historians on
  passing moral judgment on past events and
• individuals using current standards
• Ranke
• Novick (1988) That Nobel Dream, Historicism
• Originated in an effort to criticize naturalism,
  historicism says that knowledge and understanding
  are inevitably interpretive, particular,
  perspectival, and contextual, which is consistent
  with the underlying philosophy and theory of
  qualitative inquiry (Schwandt, p. 117)

5
Objectivity of History

• The founding of American Historical profession in
  the 1880s-First World War
• Establishment of objectivity as the central norm
  of the profession
• World War I-World War II
• Historical relativism
• World War II-The End of Cold War
• Chastened objectivist synthesis, trivializing the
  relativist critique by partially incorporating it
• Mid-1960s-present
• Confusion, polarization, and uncertainty
• (Novick, 1988)

6
Ontology, Epistemology, and Methodology

• Ontology is the study of being or existence or
  to study conceptions of reality
• Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that
  studies the nature and scope of knowledge
• Methodology a body of methods, rules, and
  postulates employed by a discipline, a particular
  procedure or set of procedures, or the analysis
  of the principles or procedures of inquiry in a
  particular field
• Wikipedia

7
Positivist and Naturalist Axioms
8
Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

• Phenomenology rejects scientific realism and the
  accompanying view that the empirical sciences
  have a privileged position in identifying and
  explaining features of a mind-independent world
• Hermeneutics the notion refers to the nature and
  means of interpreting a test. Construing the
  meaning of the whole meant making sense of the
  parts, and grasping the meaning of the parts
  depended on having some sense of the whole

9
The Writing of History

• The Beginning
• Old Testament
• Herodotus The Histories, personal observations,
  surviving records, interviews of witnesses
• Thucydides The History of Peloponnesian Wars,
  verifiable, relevant facts only, explain events
  in a way that can be substantiated by evidence
• Roman Empire
• Renaissance
• Machiavelli The Prince
• Guicciardini History of Italy

10
The Writing of History Cont.

• Leopold Von Ranke and the rise of Modern History
• Establishing history as a respected discipline in
  the universities
• Firmly established the notion that all sound
  history must be based on primary courses and a
  rigorous methodology footnotes and bibliography,
  scientific
• Historical-mindedness

11
The Writing of History Cont.

• The nineteenth-century history
• Political, legal, or diplomatic
• Ethnocentric, nationalistic
• Karl Marx
• Progressive Theory
• Economics interpretation of history, economic
  determinism
• Example. Charles A. Beard
• Sigmund Freud Psychoanalysis
• The twentieth-century history
• Social history average men and women,
  marginalized groups
• Women history
• Psychohistory
• The Impact of IT, computers, statistical packages

12
References

• Furary, C., Salevouris, M. (2000).The Methods
  and Skills of History A Practical Guide. (2nd
  ed.). Wheeling,IL Harlan Davidson, Inc.
• Lincoln, Y. S., Guba, E. G. (1985).
  Naturalistic inquiry. Newbury Park, CA Sage
  Publications.
• Novick, P. (1988). That Noble Dream The
  objectivity question and the American
  historical profession. New York University of
  Cambridge Press.
• Schwandt, T. A. (2001). Dictionary of qualitative
  inquiry (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA Sage
  Publications.
• Wikipedia http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki