History and TOK

What value does History have in my life?

People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.  ~James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

Questions to be discussed

What is history as an area of knowledge?

What is the method we use to gain knowledge of history?

Why do we study history?

About whom is history written? (values)

What is History?

It’s not about the past but about how the past has been interpreted

It’s not just a bunch of names and dates.

It’s a lens

History and TOK

Choose and list 3 important events that happened this year

for the school?

What values do you base your selection on?

Is there a class consensus on the same set of values?

Why is it difficult?

History is the most difficult of all the

sciences.Fustel de Coulanges

Historiography NOT History

What is written about the past is influenced by what the writer thinks is meaningful to know and factors around him/her at the time.

Read the skit on two interpretations of Latin American colonization

What are the problems of knowing which truth?

Why do I need to know?

Everything has a history: ideas, wars, numbers, races, windsurfing, coal miners, pencils, motherhood and yes, even toilet-training

But why do I bother? What's the point? It’s a Socratic issue.

He had wisdom because he knew only one thing: that he knew nothing.

It was not enough to know something. You had to know why you knew it.

This is the greatest question of all: what is knowledge? What can we know?

For Socrates, perhaps the highest virtue can be summed up in the phrase, "Know thyself.”

To know yourself means to be aware of what it is that makes you who you are

Why do I need to know?

Go to the lyrics of STING’s “History teaches us nothing”

Listen to the following song

Do you agree history teaches us nothing?

From looking at the lyrics of the song, can you interpret what values and judgements STING makes about history?

Whose History?

History is written by the winners by Alex Haley

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.  ~African Proverb

Take the handout “How history happens”. In pairs read through the different ways individuals have done history.