GE2 ( READINGS IN PHILIPPINE HISTORY )

DEFINING HISTORY:
Positivism – the philosophy that a particular knowledge can only be true if it can be observed in a sensorial
manner.
Historiography – the study of history as a historical discipline.
Historicism – the belief that history should be studied only for its own sake.

Definition and Subject Matter:

 History was derived from the Greek word historia, which means knowledge acquired through inquiry
or investigation.
 History as a discipline has existed for 2,400 years and is as old as mathematics and philosophy.
This term was then adopted to classical Latin, where it acquired a new definition.
 Historia became known as the account of the past of a person or a group of people through written
documents and historical evidence.

HISTORY CAN REFER 2 THINGS:

1. First, history relates to everything that had happened in the past.
2. Second, history also refers to a kind of research or inquiry.

History is a discipline or a field of study and investigation that is primarily concerned with human activities done
in the past. This meaning can be broken down into three dimensions.

THE 3 DIMENSIONS OF HISTORY:

- History’s focus on human activities.
- This focus makes it different from, say, theology, because theology is concerned with the
divine and not with human beings.
- History, as a field of inquiry, generally falls in the sciences, particularly to the social sciences.
- It aims to find out and make sense of what is previously unknown.

- History is concerned with the past.

- This characteristic makes history different from other social science disciplines, which are
more concerned with the present, such as political science, economics, and sociology

“ HERODOTUS “
 He was pioneered by recording the past through historical sources.
 He is recognized as the Father of History because he was the one who established History as a science.
 Herodotus’ purpose in writing his work Histories was to describe the deeds of men in the past for posterity or
future use.

“ THUCYDIDES “
 Another Greek historian whose magnum opus was the History of the Peloponnesian War.
 He was known as the Father of Scientific History.
 He was the first one who highlighted the importance of the systematic and impartial collection of evidence as
an essential prerequisite in writing history.
 In his History of the Peloponnesian War, his method was what modern historians would call oral history.

ISSUES AND QUESTIONS:

By the nineteenth century, a particular school of thought would emerge and dominate various scientific
disciplines for many generations: positivism.
 Positivism is an essential philosophy that would serve as a vital anchor of the scientific method. It asserts that
real knowledge lies in the actual observation of facts.
 In history, positivism created the mantra of “no document, no history.”

HISTORIOGRAPHY
 It is the history of history.
 The former’s object of study is the past, the events that happened in the past, and the causes of such events.
 Examples of historiographical questions are:
1. How was a specific historical text written?
2. Who wrote it?
3. What was the context of its publication?
4. What was the particular historical method employed? What were the sources used?

MEDIEVAL PERIOD
 Christianity and the Church became the most powerful institutions, history ceased to be a record of man’s
deeds.
 It started to be a record of how man became instrumental in the fulfillment of the divine plan. In this sense,
history was no longer written to enable man to control his destiny because God already predetermined his
destiny.
 Instead, history became a crucial part of the endeavor to discover and expound on this divine plan.

HISTORICISM
 It is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices (including
ideas and beliefs), by studying their history.
 Leopold von Ranke, the leading positivist historian of the nineteenth century, was the primary advocate of
this idea.
 He argued that the task of the historian is neither to guard certain values nor to judge certain pasts

“ R.G. COLLINGWOOD “
-He elegantly put it, “ Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows
what he can do until he tries, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history,
then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man what is.”
HISTORY AND THE HISTORIAN:

• Historian. Primary responsible for the production of historical knowledge through continuous research and
rethinking of history.
• Historical interpretation. Making sense of given primary sources and historical documents through content
and contextual analysis.
• Bias/subjectivity. A disposition brought together by one’s context that influences a historian’s historical
interest and selection of sources and methodology.

WHO QUALIFIES AS A HISTORIAN?

• A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it .
Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to
the human race; as well as the study of all history in time.

• On the other hand, the historian produces historical knowledge through the continuous and constant pursuit
of historical knowledge by answering questions about the past through gathering and interpreting historical
evidence.

TASKS OF HISTORIANS:
• Obtaining historical data from libraries, archives, and artifacts.
• Determining the authenticity of historical data.
• Determining the significance of historical data.
• Teaching or researching at universities.
• Translating historical documents into a suitable language.
• Researching the historical development of empires, countries, cities, or tribes.
• Preserving artifacts and significant documents in museums or libraries.
• Contributing to academic journals and presenting at conferences.
• Studying history at the intersection of society, culture, and economics.
• Assisting and partaking in public exhibits.
• Obtaining extensive information on historical figures for biographies.
• Interviewing subject experts to gain a deeper understanding of historical events.

“ EDWARD HALLETT CARR “

• A British historian.
• He stated that a historical fact is something that is determined by the historian
THE OBJECTIVITY OF THE HISTORIAN:

• OBJECTIVITY in history is a basic theme which historians, researchers, students and everybody should be
careful about. This article endeavors to present a synoptic view about objectivity, subjectivity and bias, which
are interconnected and then go on to examine how a historian can be objective.

• EH Carr's book What is History? describes the influence of historical and social environment on the selection
and interpretation of facts by the historian. Therefore, he rejected absolute and timeless objectivity in history
because history requires the selection and ordering of facts about the past in the light of some principle or
norm of objectivity accepting by the historian which necessarily included elements of interpretation.

• Without this, the past dissolves into a jumble of innumerable isolated and insignificant incidents and history
cannot be written at all. Further, he explains the facts of history cannot be purely objective as they only
become facts of history by virtue of significance attached to them by the historian.

• Therefore, historian craft is all about getting the facts right and applying the right standard of significance to
the past.

Carr calls a historian objective based on two factors:

• Firstly, "he has the capacity to rise above the limited vision of his own situation in society and in history his
capacity to recognize the extent of his involvement in that situation, to recognize that is to say, the
impossibility of total objectivity“.

• Secondly, a historian "has the capacity to project his vision into the future in such a way as to give him a more
profound and more lasting insight into the past than can be attained by those historians whose outlook is
entirely bounded by their own immediate situation".

• Therefore, some historians write history which is more durable and has more of objective character than
others

• This historian, terms that historian objective who have a long-term vision over the past and over the future.

• As historians' endeavor to reconstruct or recreate history to reflect how life was experienced and how it may
be understood, as it requires an imaginative engagement with the mentality and environment of the past.
Thus, a historian cannot be objective as facts do not speak for themselves and no two historians will have
completely identical imaginative response to any hypothesis.

Historical Methodology
- It consists of certain techniques and rules that historians follow to properly collect and select sources
and historical evidence.
HISTORICAL SOURCES:

EXTERNAL CRITICISM OF PRIMARY SOURCES:

▪ EXTERNAL CRITICISM is the practice of verifying evidence’s authenticity by examining its physical
characteristics, consistency with the historical character of the time when it was supposedly produced, and the
historical source’s materials.
▪ EXTERNAL CRITICISM is an essential process that a historian should undertake; otherwise, he would commit
the mistake of using illegitimate or fake documents.Authorship and date of production should be established.

INTERNAL CRITICISM OF PRIMARY SOURCES:

▪ INTERNAL CRITICISM, on the other hand, is the examination of the content of a particular document.
▪ In the process of internal criticism, the historian ought to read the document meticulously and understand
the meaning that the document wanted to convey.
▪ INTERNAL CRITICISM entails looking at the content of the source and examining the circumstance of its
production.

VALIDATING HISTORICAL SOURCES:

-It is essential because the use of unverified, falsified, and untruthful sources and evidence can lead to
equally false conclusions.

DISTINCTION BETWEEN PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES:

PRIMARY SOURCES
➢ It provides direct or firsthand evidence about an event, object, person, or work of art.
➢ It contains “firsthand’ knowledge about historical events, figures, and people.
➢ It provides compelling and direct evidence of human activity.
➢ These are the things that were created or in use during the period which is being studied.
➢ These sources are actual records that have survived from the past.

SECONDARY SOURCES
➢It is something that was not made by someone or by a group of people who participated in the historical era
which is being studied.
➢These are usually created by historians and scholastic writers based on their interpretation of the primary
sources.
➢These are sources of historical data which are created later or after the historical event which is being
studied and provided by the people who were not present in that event.
➢It describes, discuss, interpret, comment upon, analyze, evaluate, summarize, and process sources.
Examples of Primary and Secondary Sources:

PRIMARY SOURCES:
Autobiography, Memoirs, Eyewitness Accounts, Diary, Fossils, Relics, Letters, Photographs, Speeches,
Videos, Legal Documents, Ornaments, Clothing, and Tools.

SECONDARY SOURCES:
Biography, Encyclopedia, Textbooks, Thesis, Dissertations, News, Reports, Movies, New articles,
Scholarly Journals, Transcriptions, Almanacs, and Dictionaries.

Therefore, primary and secondary sources should be evaluated. Most scholars use the following questions in
evaluating the validity and credibility of sources of historical accounts:

1. How did the author know about the given details? Was the author present at the event? How soon
was the author able to gather the details of the event?
2. Where did the information come from? Is it a personal experience, an eyewitness account, or a
report made by another person?
3. Did the author conclude based on a single source, or on many sources of evidence?

If the evaluation of an available source shows any indication that it is an interpretative work rather
than a factual firsthand account, it is considered as many a secondary source. Thus, in conducting historical
research, it is important to identify first whether the available sources are primary or secondary sources. This is
to determine how reliable and helpful these sources are.

EVALUATION of PRIMARY and SECONDARY SOURCES:

“ Garraghan (1950) “ identified six points of inquiries to evaluate the authenticity of a primary source:
DATE – When was it produced?
LOCALIZATION – Where did it originate?
AUTHORSHIP – Who wrote it?
ANALYSIS – What pre-existing material served as the basis for its production?
INTEGRITY – What was its original form?
CREDIBILITY – What is the evidential value of its content?

“ LOUIS GOTTSCHALK (1969) “

- He emphasized that it is impossible for historians to avoid using secondary sources due to difficulty in
accessing primary sources.
- Most often, historians depend on secondary sources to improve their background knowledge of
contemporary documents and detect any errors they may contain.
Gottschalk suggested that secondary sources must only be used for :
1. Deriving the setting wherein the contemporary evidence will dit in the grand narrative of history;
2. Getting leads to other bibliographic data;
3. Acquiring quotations or citations from contemporary or other sources; and
4. Deriving interpretations with a view of testing and improving them but not accepting them as outright truth.

“ MARTHA HOWELL and WALTER PREVENIER (2001) ”

- Stated that before any source can be considered as evidence in a historical argument, it must satisfy
three preconditions.

THE THREE PRECONDITIONS OF MARTHA and WALTER:

FIRST, it must be comprehensible at the most basic level of vocabulary, language, and handwriting.
SECOND, the source must be carefully located in accordance with place and time.
THIRD, through the first two preconditions, the authenticity of the source must always be checked and
counterchecked before being accepted as a credible source in any historical findings.

SEVEN FACTORS identified by HOWELL and PREVENIER (2001) which evaluate in terms of internal criteria are
the following:
1. THE GENEALOGY OF THE DOCUMENT
-refers to the development of the document. The document may be original, a copy, or a copy
of the copy;
2. THE GENESIS OF THE DOCUMENT
- includes the situations and the authorities during the document’s production;
3. THE ORIGINALITY OF THE DOCUMENT
- includes the nature of the document whether it is an eye/earwitness account ore merely
passing of existing information;
4. THE INTERPRETATION OF THE DOCUMENT
- pertains to deducing meaning from the document.
5. THE AUTHORIAL AUTHORITY OF THE DOCUMENT
- refers to the author’s capabilities and qualifications to critically comprehend and report
information; and
6. THE TRUSTWORTHINESS OF THE OBSERVER
- refers to the author’s integrity-whether he or she fabricates or reports truthfully.