What is History?
When we say history, what do we mean? In other words, what is ‘history’? It is a word that we use every day, and yet it is hard to define.
We often use the term ‘history’ interchangeably with ‘the past’ to mean ‘things that have happened.’ On the one hand, this overlap is perfectly workable in everyday conversation. We can discuss events from our own experiences or events that we have studied about by labeling them as either ‘history’ or ‘the past,’ and no one get s very confused.
History, on the other hand, also means something more than just a sum total of events that have happened before the present. History is also a discipline and—most importantly to our work at the Circa Project—it provides a means of critical thinking.
Take, for instance, the case of the US Revolutionary War. In school, we all learn about the things that happened during the Revolutionary War: the Boston Tea Party, the difficult winter at Valley Forge, and the British surrender at Yorktown. These are the events that have been well documented; we can easily look up the specifics about them, such as their dates, the major figures involved, or even what people wrote about them at the time.
But history goes further than these events to ask deeper questions: what were the causes of the American Revolutionary War? How did everyday colonists react to growing tensions with Britain? And where did these ideas about liberty and freedom originate? Questions like these are critical—they inform us about the past in ways that a timeline never could. Moreover, questions of this kind shed light on the ideas and forces that caused events in the past. And these ideas are crucial for us living today—if we traces the twists and turns of these ideas from the past through today, we can better illuminate what is going on in our own present.
The toolkit of history also helps us find the answers to these crucial questions. To ask about the causes of the Revolutionary War, for instance, we would first have to start by reading primary sources, with an eye toward textual analysis: what did the leaders of the revolution say were the causes pushing them toward war? And more importantly, do we believe them? If not, what causes were they trying to downplay? And from this list of causes, how do we assign relative importance to the various factors so that we know which causes really led to war and which would not have caused such consequences on their own?
For the Circa Project, then, this is what history is: the tools that give us the ability to analyze the world around us. These tools were first developed to look at the past, but in fact, these skills are equally important for assessing the world around us today. How do we place events in their wider context? How do we analyze rhetoric? How do we assess motivations? These skills apply just as well to 1776 as they do to 2021.
Learn to Research History
Circa’s PhD history experts work with high school students to teach them the research and writing skills needed to make their own history projects.