History as an Area of Knowledge

1.Why does your past matter?2.How good is your memory? How reliable is

it?3.You take photos, you keep a diary; what do

you include, what do you omit?4.Would you be more inclined to trust an

autobiography or a biography of the same individual written by a historian?

5.To what extent do you think people learn from their mistakes, and to what extent do you think they keep making the same mistakes?

Your History

Two answers

What is History?

History is the study of ‘present traces’ of the past.

Evidence

1. The publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Speicies in 1859;

2. The birth of Bill Gates in 1955;3. The deposition of Muamar Gadaffi in 2011;4. England’s World Cup victory in 1966;5. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001;6. Bingu Mutharika becoming President of Malawi in 2005;7. The publication of US diplomatic despatches by Wikileaks in

2011.

Significance

Criteria?

Significance

“A page of history is worth a volume of logic”Oliver Wendell Holmes, 1841-1935

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”William Faulkner, 1897-1962

“Those who don’t study the past are condemned to repeat it”

George Santayana, 1863-1952

Why Study History?

1) It has created our reality and all the world’s identities.

“Who controls the

2) It is a defence against lies, propaganda and myth – ‘ignorance is strength’.

3) It tells us what to expect from human nature.