Major Approaches to Interpreting History

1. Major Approaches to Interpreting History Dr. John F. Chuchiak IV; rev. by Javier Ergueta December, 2013

2. Historians commonly recognize that, by themselves, individual historical facts are not particularly meaningful. Such facts will only become useful when assembled into an interpretive whole, and different approaches to assembling evidence are understood as particular historiographical schools.

3. Political History Diplomatic history “Whig” history “Great Man” theory

4. Political history is the narrative and analysis of political events, ideas, movements, and leaders. It is usually structured around the nation state.

5. Diplomatic history focuses on politics, politicians and other high rulers and views them as being the driving force of continuity and change in history. This type of political history is the study of the conduct of international relations between states or across state boundaries over time. This is the most common form of history and is often the classical and popular belief of what history should be.

6. Whig historiography perceives the past as a teleological progression toward the present. In general, Whig historians look for and favour the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress in any historical period. The term is often used pejoratively to denote any historian that adopts such positions, but it also connotes a specific set of British historians who embodied Whig ideals.

7. The Great man theory is a theory held by some that aims to explain history by the impact of "Great men", or heroes: highly influential individuals, either from personal charisma, genius intellects, or great political impact.

8. For example, a scholarly follower of the Great Man theory would be likely to study the Second World War by focusing on the big personalities of the conflict — Sir Winston Churchill, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Hideki Tojo, etc. — and view all of the historical events as being tied directly to their own individual decisions and orders.

9. It is often linked to 19th century commentator and historian Thomas Carlyle, who commented that "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." The Great Man approach to history was most popular with professional historians in the 19th century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911) This heroic view of history was also strongly endorsed by some philosophical figures such as Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, but it fell out of favor after World War II.

10. Social History Marxist/marxian Quantitative/Cliometrics

11. Social history is a area of historical study considered by some to be a social science that attempts to view historical evidence from the point of view of developing social trends. In this view, it may include areas of economic history, legal history and the analysis of other aspects of civil society that show the evolution of social norms, behaviors and more. It is distinguished from political history, military history and the so-called history of great men.

12. An example of social history can be seen in the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Typical history would focus on the who, what, when and where; whereas social history focuses on the causes of the movement itself. Social historians would pose such questions as, "Why did the movement come about when it did?” This approach is favored by some scholars because it allows for a discussion of sometimes less studied aspects.

13. Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes. Marxist historiography has made contributions to the methodology of “history from below”, and the history of the working class, and oppressed nationalities.

14. Strict Marxist history is teleological: it posits a direction of history, towards an end state of history as classless human society. Its aim is to bring those oppressed by history to self-consciousness, and to arm them with tactics and strategies from history: it is both a historical and a liberatory project.

15. Historians who use Marxist methodology, but disagree with the mainstream of Marxism, often describe themselves as marxist historians (with a lowercase M). Methods from Marxist historiography, such as class analysis, can be divorced from the liberatory intent of Marxist historiography; such practitioners often refer to their work as marxian or Marxian.

16. Quantitative History is an approach to historical research that makes use of quantitative, statistical and computer tools. It is considered a branch of social history and has favorite journals, such as Historical Methods,Social Science History, and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

17. Cliometrics refers to the systematic use of economic theory and econometric techniques to study economic history. • The term was originally coined by Jonathan R.T. Hughes and Stanley Reiter in 1960 and refers to Clio, who was the muse of history and heroic poetry in Greek mythology.

18. Cultural History Art history Annales School

19. Cultural history (from the German term Kulturgeschichte), at least in its common definition since the 1970s, often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.

20. Jacob Burckhardt (1818– 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture, fields which he helped found. "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well…” Burckhardt's best known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

21. Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with the French movements of histoire des mentalités and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it is closely associated with the field of American studies. Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by non-elite groups in a society, such as: carnival, festival, and public rituals; performance traditions; cultural evolutions in human relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques); and cultural expressions of social movements such as nationalism.

22. The Annales School • The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale where it was first expounded. • Annales school history incorporated social scientific methods into history.

23. The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were teaching at the University of Strasbourg, France. These authors quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th century historians.

24. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la longue durée) over events. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology of the epoch, are also typical. Georges Duby, wrote that the history he taught: “…was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary …to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilization."