Why_Has_Evidence_Formed_the_Basis_of_Research

Whyhas verifiable evidence formed the basis of genuine historical research since the nineteenth century' Verifiable evidence has undoubtedly formed the basis of genuine historical research since the nineteenth century. Verifiable evidence begins with sources, the material and textual traces of the past. Anything can be an historical source - letters, legal records, financial accounts, literary narratives, paintings, photographs, buildings, discarded rubbish, postcards, tombstones, stained-glass windows, graffiti, royal writs, rebellious pamphlets… anything, in fact, which offers the possibility of catching a small glimpse of the past. Richard Evans argues ‘’ historians amass facts from hard evidence and draw valid conclusions.’’ On the other hand some idealists stress that the incomplete and imperfect nature of the historical record obliges the historian to employ a considerable degree of human intuition and imagination. There are also people who simply argue that it is impossible to know what happened in the past, even through evidence. History is an intellectual discipline that goes back to the ancient Greeks. One of the first real historian, Thucydides, did a remarkable thing. He set out to distance himself from his own political system and to write a work that examined critically what happened to Greece in the Peloponnesian Wars. He not only told of his own side’s virtues and victories but of its mistakes and disasters. Thucydides also distanced himself from his own culture and religion. Instead of the mythical tales that all previous human societies had used to affirm their place in the cosmos, he faced the fact that the Greek oracles could not foretell their future and that the Greek gods could not ensure their fortunes. Thucydides decided that to learn about the course of human affairs, he would not consult sacred texts or prophets or the sanctioned scribes of the era. Rather, he would go out and either witness events himself or compile evidence only from those, he said, "of whom I made the most careful enquiry", and then draw conclusions that his evidence would support. In short, what was remarkable about Thucydides, and those who followed him, was that they made a clean break with myths and legends. Instead, they defined history as the pursuit of truth about the past on the basis of verifiable evidence. For most of the last two thousand years, the essence of history has continued to be that it should try to discover the truth. Over this time, of course, many historians have been exposed as mistaken, opinionated, and often completely wrong, but until comparatively recently their critics felt obliged to show they were wrong about real things, that their claims about the past were different to what had actually happened. In other words, the critics still operated on the assumption that the truth was within their grasp. Today, these assumptions are widely questioned, even among some people employed as historians themselves. Many theorists of postmodernism, or of cultural studies, assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past or to use history to produce knowledge of what really happened. One of the original gurus of the postmodernist movement, the American historical theorist, Hayden White, author of the book Metahistory, tells us we should "recognise historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are more invented than found". This idea is a big mistake. Historian Anne Curthoysand John Docker argue in their book what is history' that the ancient Greek author Herodotus was the first historian. Now, it is true that Herodotus wrote before my candidate for first real historian, Thucydides, and Herodotus did call his work “history”. However, the work of Herodotus was couched within an earlier story-telling tradition of battle narratives, travellers’ tales, myths, legends and fables about miracles and monsters in other lands, without any rigorous attempt to separate fact from fiction. Curthoys once justified this on the grounds that ‘’The pursuit of truth itself was an impossible dream’’ She moves on to write: ‘’Many academics in the humanities and social sciences now reject the notion that one can objectively know the facts. The processes of knowing, and the production of an object that is known, are seen as intertwined. Many take this even further, and argue that knowledge is entirely an effect of power, that we can no longer have any concept of truth at all.’’ There are two things wrong with this view. First, if we can no longer have any concept of truth, that is, if there are no truths, then the statement “there are no truths” cannot itself be true. It is an obvious self-contradiction. Second, this is a silly thing to say because we have very good knowledge not only about some things that happened in history but of tens of thousands, perhaps even millions of things. For instance, we know all the names of all the leaders of all the nations for at least the past two hundred years and most of the leaders for many centuries before that as well. We know for certain the historical fact that World War ll existed. That such facts exist is itself quite enough to dispel any attempt to impose a blanket scepticism on the whole of the field. The historian’s first duty is to accumalate factual knowledge about the past – facts that are verified by applying critical method to the primary sources; those facts in turn will determine how the past should be explained or interpreted. In this process the beliefs and values of historians are irrelevant; their sole concern is with the facts and the generalisations to which they logically lead. The practice of history begins with evidence and with sources - so much so that availability of sources is often the key determinant of what becomes popular with historians. The study of historical research has considerably changed over time. The way historians do their work, the assumptions they make about what's important and what not, and the research methods they use, have varied widely since the nineteenth century. The passage of time also impacts on our ability to check a historian's work. We can verify the accuracy of a 20th-century scholar's work by going back to the same sources - something that's just not possible with a Greek historian of the fifth century BCE. It was from the great revolutionary upheavals that the movement towards the establishment of history as an academic discipline emerged. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it was no longer possible to believe in the unchanging character of human behaviour, nor in the unchallengeable nature of social institutions; as never before, historians became preoccupied with the carefully documented study of historical origins and historical change. This strand was notably represented by Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) and Leopold Von Ranke (1795-1886). Leopold von Ranke was a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern verifiable evidence based history. Ranke set the tone for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on primary sources and an emphasis on narrative history. His first book, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1824 written at Frankfort, included an appended section entitled Zur Kritik neuerer Geschictschreiber (critique of modern historical writing) that presented a convincing criticism of contemporary historiography condemning its reliance on tradition and proposed, instead, Ranke's own more objective method. Ranke's aim was to reconstruct the unique periods of the past as they actually were and to avoid injecting the history of former times with the spirit of the present. Ranke said ‘’ I see a time coming when we will base modern history no longer on second-hand reports or even contemporary historians, save where they had direct knowledge, and still less on works yet more distant from the period; but rather on eyewitness accounts and on the most genuine, the most immediate sources.’’ Ranke intended that his method would be applicable to modern history. Ranke distrusted historical textbooks and turned, at every convenient opportunity, to the study of more original sources. This method Ranke later developed to feature a primarily reliance on the "narratives of eye-witnesses and the most genuine immediate documents." He considered that "the strict presentation of the facts, contingent and unattractive though they may be, is undoubtedly the supreme law." Ranke attempted to put aside prevailing theories and prejudices and by the scrupulous use of verifiable sources to present an unvarnished picture of the facts. Ranke once said, "From the particular, one can carefully and boldly move up to the general; from general theories, there is no way of looking at the particular." Historians are concerned with finding out the past. For example, Burckhardt wanted to demonstrate the existence of something, which could legitimately be called a renaissance and its conclusive effects on the subsequent development of Western Europe; dozens of historians since have fretted over it, what it was, when it began. Namiet wanted to establish exactly how politics worked in the eighteenth century Britain. Historians have argued over the standard of living in the industrial revolution, over the motivations and interests behind British imperial expansion, values and attitudes in Eighteenth century France. Arthur Marwick argues ‘’with regards to these variegated topics, the historians involved were concerned to establish the facts. Critics would object to that formulation, preferring to speak of these historians as narrativising the fact to present a particular interpretation.’’ He goes on to argue that ‘’if we want to get to the bottom of what historians at work do, we should forget the simplistic phrase facts.’’ Historians do not go back to the primary sources to assure themselves that the First World War is a fact, or even to establish the different dates on which hostilities broke out between the different countries. ‘’The knowledge of a historian must ultimately be based on evidence.’’ When historians embark on a particular research topic, they will already have considerable knowledge, if not of that precise topic, certainly of matters surrounding and relating to it. To produce new knowledge they will, have to work with verifiable evidence through the archives and primary sources. Historians use verifiable sources to look for events, great and small, their dates and chronology, but they also look for interconnections between them, and between them and other facts, embedded in the verifiable evidence. More generally, historians are looking for material conditions, and changes in them; states of mind; the working of institutions; motivations, mentalities, values; the balances between intention and accomplishment – all of these things may eventually be worked out, not, of course, from single sources, but from the great range of sources historians analyse. Historians will go in to archives conscious of a great number of facts derived from the secondary sources: they will then be involved in processes of corroboration, qualification, correction; working in the verifiable evidence, they are continually accumulating details, refining nuances. It was a general belief that the dependence of the evidence on principles of inference should not be conceded, and it should enable others to examine the background beliefs or assumptions employed to determine if facts are relevant to the support of or falsification of a historian’s belief.