THE EPISTOMOLOGY OF

HISTORY
METHODOLOGY
STEPS 1 AND 2
METHODOLOGY
• Having established the need for history, how do we proceed with it?
•
• We need to know the elements of historical Methodology/ the Perspectives on Doing History:
1. The 3 Basic Concerns /Focus of History (this lecture) Epistomology
2. The Scope (this lecture) Epistomology
3. The Discipline of History (next lecture)
4. Sources and the Variety of Sources (later lecture)
5. Testing and Interpreting the Sources “
6. Synthesis/ presentation (no lecture)
7. The Rewriting of History (later lecture)
1. The 3 Basic Concerns /Focus of History
•Humans (not animals, not flaura or fauna, not geography).
•Change through time
•Uniqueness (of details)

Humans:
A. Exercise: which of the following topics are the subject of history?
a.The migration of people?
b.The history of the old mosque in South end?
c.The history of NASA space station
d.The history of Julius Malema
e.The history of geology?
f.The migration patterns of the SA leopard?
g. An analysis of the last ice age?
h.The history of the effect winter had on Napoleon’s forces in Russia?
 B. Exercise : - What sort of humans? Great men only?

READ THE POEM BY BRECHT,THEN AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS

QUESTIONS OF A WORKER READING HISTORY

•
• Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates?
• In the books stand the names, of Kings.
• Did they then drag up the rock–slabs?
• And Babylon, so often destroyed,
• Who kept, rebuilding it?
• In which houses did the builders live
• In gold-glittering Lima?
• Where did the bricklayers go
• The evening the Great Wall of China was finished?
• Great Rome is full of triumphal arches.
• Over whom did the Caesars triumph?

• Were there only palaces for the inhabitants of much-sung Byzantium’?

• Even in legendary Atlantis
• Didn’t the drowning shout for their slaves
• As the ocean engulfed it?
• The young Alexander conquered India.
• He alone’?
• Caesar beat the Gauls.
• Without even a cook?
• Philip of Spain wept when his fleet went down.
• Did no one else weep besides?
• Frederick the Great won the Seven Years’ War.
• Who won it with him’?
• A victory on every page
• Who cooked the victory feast?
• A great man every ten years.
• Who paid the costs?
• So many reports.
• So many questions. Bertolt Brecht
•
• Questions:
1. Does Brecht think that ‘great men’ are important in the past? Give reasons for your answer.
2. Brecht mentions a number of people who would not appear in most history books. Make a list of them.
3. Why do you think historians give a lot of space to ‘great men’ in their books?
Thus , Brecht is meaning that it is not only individual humans or the great
man syndrome, but ordinary humans that are impt.

Also SOCIETY is impt since it is Society that generated the great man and it
is on Society that he had an impact
Example: Hitler:

He was a product of many things:

Personal characteristics for the job:
•he was a fiery character
•he had leadership qualities
•he had great charisma and charm
•he was a great speaker

Personal background:
•he was a non achiever in his youth and had an inferiority complex, so did this spur him on to bigger things?
•His mother had been unsuccessfully operated on by a Jewish doctor, which some reckon caused his anti-
Semitism

Society’s creation of him:

•The Weimar republic in post war Germany was economically destroyed before it even began, by the Diktat
imposed on Germany by the Allies
Therefore: would he have risen to a position of such great power if the social circumstances had not
provided a vacuum for a ‘saviour’ to step into?
So, sayings: ‘COME THE MAN COME THE TIME’; ‘A CHILD OF HIS TIME’
B. Change through time and Causality

• But many other disciplines study ‘man’/humans, as does history:

- But Economics studies the laws of the method of production and income

- Psychology studies the mental processes common to all humans always

- Anthropology studies the physiology and the psychology of man in certain stage of development.

• So, although these sciences study humans, they look for the recurring habits of people in order to

understand humans as a phenomenon and can therefore predict what will happen given a particular

situation.
Change through time and Causality
•However, History searches out development in time.
•Time is a crucial part of history, and sometimes even historians forget this:
•Historical writing should always place events like links in a time chain, and then seek to explain their
development and their connection.
•Therefore, Time is 1-dimensional, ever-changing and ongoing:
•1 – Dimensional means each second or split second occurs AFTER the preceding one and not together.
[Compare the concepts of Time with that of Space: space is 3 dimensional all at once(ht, width and length) ]

•This therefore establishes the principle of ‘cause and effect.’

•No recurrence (of exactly the same thing) in History and therefore NO PREDICTION
Change through time and Causality
• Quotation: “Many people think of history as a lot of dates – someone
once complained that history was ‘one damned thing after another’.
But it is important to know about when things happened. Perhaps we
can cut down on the dates, but we still need to know the order in which
events occurred. In that way we can understand how change has taken
place. History is the study of what, why, how and WHEN things have
changed in the past.” (What is History?)
Change through time and Causality

Example: For a long time, European anthropologists,

economists and historians supposed that Africa only had a
history after the whites came. Whatever happened was a type of
stasis, ie always subsistence farming in small or large tribes
isolated from the outside world. It was always that ONE thing
But in the 1950s and 60s, such people began to realise that
the dimension of Time must be added because they realised that
Africa must have had her own internal dynamic of change
through Time.
Change through time and Causality
Looking at the actual historical data, they saw that:
• there were vast trading links between for example, the old Sudanic
Empires and North Africa via the Sahara
• and between the old Shona kingdoms in the present Zimbabwe area and
the coast.
• Agricultural products were being produced and exported to other areas.
• That small societies had grown over time into large kingdoms, and some
into empires
• Good historians have shown that generalizations that Africa only consisted
of a set system does not hold up.
• Therefore whenever we want to consider the connection between
developments in the past we use a Timeline.
Change through time and Causality
Length: Sometimes the time span is short and sometimes it is
long: ie the history of the ANC is 90 years old, the history of India
is 5000 years old and the history of the Northern Areas unrest
here in PE in 1990, was a few weeks long.

Whereas the India history will have a strong sense of

development through time, the Northern Areas history will have a
more sociological emphasis on the causes– but still a sense of
change through time.
C. The Unique and the Particular

• Thus our analysis of Time indicates to us that events, people and ideas, must be placed
SOMEWHERE in this one- dimensional stream of time.

• Therefore EACH historical event is UNIQUE, PARTICULAR and NON RECURRENT.

• Similar things can happen and echo others, but always at least a little different.

• So generalizations are not possible and that is why the historian is important

• So the historian can only explain what did happen.

2. THE SCOPE OF HISTORY

• So how long is our scope in history?

• The traditional view until about 50 years ago, was that history began with the advent of writing but the
modern view is that history can begin where humans began because writing only takes us up to 5 000 years
ago. Yet most of our time on earth has been up to 4 million years!

• SO Answer is: The scope of History is from the beginning of humans to a minute ago!

• How wide? Every subject that relates to humans ie the history of space travel is a valid history subject
because it relates to humans and what activities they did. Also space history will be as wide as it needs to be
depending on the title of the research project