The Depth of History

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In this week’s reading, From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography, Popkin explains the importance and difficulties of historiography. Historiography is evaluating the past through primary sources, and coming to a conclusion of what, how, and why events may have occurred. The outlook may differ from other historians, but that’s okay! History is flexible in the sense that we are always finding new ways to define the past. Growing up, history has been a rather passive subject, where being good was determined by how well a student could memorize a set of facts that is conveyed authoritative and beyond question (Popkin, 5). I’ve learned by just the first chapter that there is more depth to history than high school ever showed. As a historian, the objective is evaluating causation and result in depth to determine what truly happened in the past. This includes knowing different perspectives and accounts from different people who experienced the event, because no one experiences the same thing. In @Daisysolorio’s post, they talk about how “disaster in modern times was really validated when media did a coverage on the event if not then it was not a real disaster and did not really happen.” I never really thought about it until now, but I find it fascinating to think that history is truly man made. Events may have happen, but what is recorded is chosen by who decides to record them, and even then what is recorded is never truly unbiased. History has constructed us to think how we do today. Historiography focuses on the analyzing how and why something happened rather than as a set of informative details ready to be consumed and unquestioned.