What is history?

March 27, 2014 by hannagilley 2 Comments

Professor Bailyn claims that history has two definitions. “One is simply what happened, the events, developments, circumstances, and thoughts of the past as they actually occurred and history as knowledge of what happened, the record or expression of what occurred” (pg.7). These two definitions of history reveal a very good point: we don’t really know exactly what happened. Sure, “things happened” and sometimes, someone, either reliably or unreliably wrote down (in their own words, with their own prejudices and bias) what had happened. Can we ever really trust these sources, can we trust what “happened”? This being said, I think the past is constructed and reconstructed constantly and introduces the very intriguing question of “Whose history is it?”

I think History, as it is recorded, or the second definition of Bailyn’s, belongs to whomever wrote it because it is their personal experience and reaction to what happened. We can take all of the recorded history of the United States and call it “ours” because we are Americans, and in turn this is partly true, but can we really belong to that history since we did not experience it first hand? Saying this just makes me think of what our actual history will be, what our recorded experiences (in our minds, blogs, etc.) will be. How will we feel about our “history?” Are we all historians in this age of perpetual picture posting and sharing of every thought and feeling?

Which brings me to what a historian is, as defined by Professor Bailyn. He claims that a historian is “someone who develops, in one way or another,  “artificial extension of social memory” by recovering through the evidences of the past, aspects of what happened”(pg. 8). He  goes on to say that historians are not just one type of person. A historian could be a professor like himself teaching in college or universities, or a lover of history hired by a corporation to write histories or arrange archives and what he calls “non-academic historians” working in museums and local historical societies. With his definition of what a historian is and can be, can we accept the history they give us as our own? Can we take their interpretations of history and absorb them as our own?

When thinking about history, what it is, who it belongs to, who historians are, it has made me realize that the history that we know and have come to learn and in some cases memorize, were all at one point someone’s reaction to a significant event in their life. So maybe our constant online sharing is our way of sharing our “history” – or what will be our history (in the future).