Links, Bibliographies, and Histories
History’s Nature, Object, Method, and Value
I shall therefore propound answers to my four questions such as I think any present-day historian would accept.
Here they will be rough and ready answers, but they will serve for a provisional definition of our subject matter and they will be defended and elaborated as the argument proceeds.
(a) The definition of history. Every historian would agree, I think, that history is a kind of search or inquiry.
What kind of inquiry it is I do not yet ask. The point is that generically it belongs to what we call the sciences:
that is, the forms of thought whereby we ask questions and try to answer them. Science in general, it is important to realize, does not exist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in this or that kind of pattern. It consists fastening upon something we do not know, and trying to discover it. Playing patience with things we already know may be a useful means towards this end, but it is not the end in itself. It is at best only a means. It is scientifically valuable only in so far as the new arrangement gives us the answer to a question we have already decided to ask. That is why all science begins from knowledge of our own ignorance: not our ignorance of everything, but our ignorance of some definite thing- the origin of parliament, the cause of cancer, the chemical composition of the sun, the way to make a pump work without muscular exertion on the part of a man or a horse or some other docile animal. Science is finding things out: and in that sense history is science.
(b) The object of history. One science differs from another in that it finds out things of a different kind. What kinds of things does history find out?
I answer, res gestae: actions of human beings that have been done in the past. Although this answer raises all kinds of further questions many of which are controversial, still, however they may be answered, the answers do not discredit the proposition that history is the science of res gestae, the attempt to answer questions about human actions done in the past.
(c) How does history proceed? History proceeds by the interpretation of evidence:
where evidence is a collective name for things which singly are called documents, and a document is a thing existing here and now, of such a kind that the historian, by thinking about it, can get answers to the questions he asks about past events. Here again there are plenty of difficult questions to ask as to what characteristics of evidence are and how it is interpreted. But there is no need for us to raise them at this stage. However they are answered, historians will agree that historical procedure, or method, consists essentially of interpreting evidence.
(d) Lastly, what is history for?
This is perhaps a harder question than the others; a man who answers it will have to reflect rather more widely than a man who answers the three we have answered already. He must reflect not only on historical thinking but on other things as well, because to say that something is ‘for’ something implies a distinction between A and B, where A is good for something and B is that for which something is good. But I will suggest an answer, and express the opinion that no historian would reject it, although the further questions to which it gives rise are numerous and difficult.
My answer is that history is ‘for’ human self knowledge.
It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a man; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the kind of man you are and nobody else is. 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 is.
From: The Idea of History by R. G. Collingwood, 1946/94 Revised Edition
Links
Bibliography
"The task of understanding the past is never ending."
Susanna Moore
From:
Paradise of the Pacific: Approaching Hawaii
"History as Narrative" by A. R. Louch
in History and Theory volume 8 number 1, 1969
On History
by Immanuel Kant, 1784/1963
Edited by Lewis White Beck.
Reason in History
by Hegel, 1873/1953
Translated with an Introduction, by Robert S. Hartman.
The Uses of the Past
by Herbert Muller, 1952
Theories of History
Edited by Patrick Gardiner, 1959
What is History?
by E. H. Carr, 1961
The Historian's Craft
by Marc Block, 1964
The Historian and History
by Page Smith, 1964
The Idea of History
Revised Edition by R. G. Collingwood
with Lectures 1926-1928
Edited with Introduction
by Jan Van Der Dussen, 1946/1993
Essays in the Philosophy of History
by R. G. Collingwood
Edited with an Introduction and Commentary
by Lionel Rubinoff, 1965.
The Presuppositions of Critical History
by F. H. Bradley
Edited by William Debbins, 1968
The Writing of History:
Literary Form and Historical Understanding
by Robert H. Canary and Henery Kozicki, 1978
(See Chapter 9: Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument)
Historical Understanding
by Louis O. Mink
Edited By: Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob and Richard T. Vann, 1987
In Defense of History
by Richard Evans, 1999
The Purpose of the Past:
Reflections on the Uses of History
by Gordon S. Wood, 2008
"Just tell the story"
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Inventing American History
by William Hogeland, 2009
Philosophy of History
The Philosophy of History
G. W. F. Hegel, 1956
Essays in the Philosophy of History
by R. G. Collingwood
Edited with an Introduction and Commentary
by Lionel Rubinoff, 1965
The Philosophy of History in our Time
An Anthology Selected and Edited
by Han Meyerhoff, 1959.
Philosophy of History
by William H. Dray, 1964
Laws and Explanation in History
by William Dray, 1966
Philosophical Analysis and History
Edited by William H. Dray, 1970.
Reason, Truth and History
by Hilary Putnam, 1981
Some Histories
You will always Remember Your First:
George Washington A Bbiography
by Alexis Coe, 2020
A History of Western Philosophy
by Bertrand Russell, 1945
History Begins at Summer
by Samuel Noah Kramer, 1956
A Hundred Years of Philosophy
by John Passmore, 1957
A History of Western Morals
by Crane Brinton, 1959
The Western Intellectual Tradition:
From Leonardo To Hegel
by J. Bronowski & Bruce Mazlish, 1960
The New World of Philosophy
by Abraham Kaplan, 1961
Miracle at Philadelphia:
The Story of the Constitutional Convention
May to September 1787
by Catherine Drinker Bowen, 1966
Freedom In The Modern World
by Herbert J. Muller, 1966
History of Philosophy
by Julian Marias, 1966
American Epoch:
A History of the United Stated Since the 1890's
by Arthur S. Link, 1967
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches:
The Riddles of Culture
by Marvin Harris, 1974
The Seven Sisters:
The Great Oil Companies and The World They Shaped
Update: The New Crisis
by Anthony Sampson, 1975
The Rise of the West:
A History of the Human Community
by William McNeill, 1975
Against The Current:
Essays in the History of Ideas
by Isaiah Berlin, 1979
Recent Philosophers
by John Passmore, 1985
The Discoverers:
A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself
by Daniel J. Boorstin, 1985
The Chalice and the Blade:
Our History, Our Future
by Riane Eisler, 1987
A History Of Knowledge:
Past, Present, Future
by Charles Van Doren, 1991
Native Roots:
How the Indians Enriched America
by Jack Weatherford, 1991
The Great Human Diasporas:
The History of Diversity and Evolution
by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Francesco Cavalli-Sforza, 1995
A History of Western Philosophy
by W. T. Jones and Robert J. Fogelin, 1997
America's Constitution:
A Biography
by Akhil Reed Amar, 2005
Western Philosophy:
An Anthology
By John Cottingham, 2008
The Story of American Freedom
by Eric Foner, 1999
Voices of Freedom
A Documentary History
edited by Eric Foner, 2005
Volume One
(A companon volume to Give Me Liberty!)
A survey textbook of the history of the United States
centered on the theme of freedom.
The Oxford History of Western Philosophy
Edited by Anthony Kenny, 2000
A Brief History of Everything
by Ken Wilber, 2000
A Brief History of the Paradox:
Philosophy and the Labyrinths of the Mind
by Roy Sorensen, 2003
The People:
A History of Native America
by R. David Edmunds, Ferderick E. Hoxie, Neal Salisbury, 2007
The U. S. War with Mexico:
A Brief History with Documents
by Ernesto Chavez, 2008
A Brief History of Thought:
A Philosophical Guide To Living
by Luc Ferry, Translated by Theo Cuffe, 2011
Our America:
A Hispanic History of the United States
by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, 2014
A Brief History of Type Theory
| Last Updated: 10/19/22 |