THE NATURE OBJECT AND, PURPOSE OF HISTORY
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) What is history? Every historian. Would agree I think,,That history is a kind of research 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, consist in collecting what we already know and arranging it in. This or that kind of pattern.It consists in 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 itself. It is at best only the 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 the 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 a science.
(b) What is 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 documentsAnd 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 the 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 answeredHistorians 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 wellBecause 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, thirdlyKnowing what it is to be the 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.)
.In the physiographic features of the settled part of America there was a certain uniformity. The coast-line was low and. Un-inviting except in, northern, New England where it had something of the rugged picturesqueness of the western coast of. Britain. South of New York stretched a long succession of barrier beaches in, flattish curvesParting at the entrances of the great bays of Chesapeake and Delaware and enclosing, the shallow lagoons of Albemarle and. Pamlico. A vast forest of conifers and hardwood swept up from the coast over the crest of the Appalachians and down, to. The, Great Lakes the prairies of Illinois the savannahs, of the lower Mississippi and the, Gulf of Mexico. Except for natural. Meadows along, the riversOpen country did not exist in the land that the English colonists wrested from the Indians. Their farms had been cleared. From the forest; and it was still too early to aver that the colonists had conquered the forest. Volney wrote that during. His journey in 1796 through the length and breadth of the United States he scarcely travelled for more than three miles. Together on open and cleared land.'Compared with France the entire, country is one vast wood.' Only in southern New England and the, eastern portion of the. Middle States did the, cultivated area exceed the woodland; and the clearings became less frequent as one approached the. Appalachians.
Like, Western Europe the United States lies wholly within the northern, temperate zone and the belt of prevailing. Westerly winds.The earliest European explorers had passed it by for the Caribbean and the St. Lawrence because they were seeking tropical. Plantations fur - trading, posts and fishing, stations. Their successors in search, of farm-lands found the, greater part. Of the Thirteen Colonies suitable for life and labour as are few portions of the non-European world.Yet the climate of the area settled by 1790 is in many respects unlike that of Europe.
Westerly winds reach it across. A continent without the, moisture and the tempering of the Atlantic. North-west is the prevailing wind in winter and south-west,, In summer. Consequently the summers are everywhere hotter than in the British Isles and the, winters north of Virginia,,, Colder;The extremes of heat and cold in the same season are greater; the, rainfall less although adequate for animal and plant. Life. Near the sea-coast a sea-turn in the wind may, soften outlines but inland the dry air clear sky and brilliant sunlight,,, Foreshorten distant prospects and make, the landscape sharp and hard.
In most parts of the United States the weather is. Either fair or foul.It rains or shines with a businesslike intensity; in comparison the weather, of the British Isles is perpetually, unsettled. In the coastal plain of the Carolinas and, the Gulf there is a soft gradation between, the seasons and a Languor in the. Air; else-where the transition, from a winter of ice and snow to a summer of almost tropical heat is abrupt.
Our spring. GITS everythin 'in tune
.An 'gives one leap from April into June
wrote Lowell. Except where the boreal forest of conifers maintains its sombre. Green the sharp, dry frosts of October turn the forest to a tapestry of scarlet, and gold crimson and russet. High winds. Strip the leaves in November and by, New Year 's day the country north of Baltimore along the, Appalachians and East, of. The, SierrasShould be tucked into a blanket of snow.
(From History of the United States by S. E. Morison)
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