Understanding Historical Disciplines and Causality
Historical Concepts and Disciplines
History Defined
History relates to past events, as well as the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about these events. The term includes cosmic, geologic, and organic history, but it often generically implies human history. History can also refer to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyze a sequence of past events, and objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them.
Historiography
Historiography is the writing of history, especially the writing of history based on the critical examination of sources, the selection of particular details from authentic materials in those sources, and the synthesis of those details into a narrative that stands the test of critical examination. The term historiography also refers to the theory and history of historical writing.
Marxist Historiography
Marxist historiography, 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. It has made contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below. It is generally deterministic, in that it posits a direction of history towards an end state of classless human society.
Social History
Social history is a broad branch of history that studies the experiences of ordinary people in the past. In its golden age, it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s.
Economic History
Economic history is the study of economic phenomena in the past. Analysis in economic history is undertaken using a combination of history methods, statistical methods, and by applying economic theory to historical situations and institutions. The topic includes business history, financial history, and overlaps with areas of social history such as demographic history and labor history.
Relationship Between Causes and Consequences of Historical Events
The development sequence often follows:
- Human beings become cultivators.
- First settlements were created.
- Increased amount of food → improvement of diet → improvement of health → increased life expectancy → population growth.
- Urban world developed social stratification → first civilization (Mesopotamia).
- Improvement of diet → appearance of surplus → pottery was created (for preservation/transportation) → development of commerce/trading → urban world developed social stratification → first civilization (Mesopotamia).
Levels of Causal Analysis (Implied Primary Education Levels)
Level 1: Simple Causality
Focuses on shorter routines and fewer events, often only one line of events. The main purpose is to discover and understand the relationship between one cause and one consequence in a historical event.
Level 2: Multiple Causality
Involves more events and more than one line of events, but without explicit relationships between them initially. Purposes include discovering and understanding that two causes can lead to either one consequence or more than one consequence, or that two consequences can stem from either one cause or more than one cause.
Level 3: Complex Interconnectedness
Involves more events and more than two lines of events, focusing on reciprocal relationships among different events from different lines.