¶ … participants in that history, in order to understand what is valued by these participants. Also, what resources will be most helpful to you as a student of history?
One of the most common bits of advice given is the need to 'walk a mile in someone else's shoes.' This is no less true of the study of history. It is very easy to look at persons from another time with the judgmental gaze of someone living today. How could someone have owned slaves a hundred years ago? How could women have been denied the right to vote? If we look at historical subjects with this type of dismissive eye, we are less able to understand our own limited historical vision. We will similarly be viewed as strange by persons of the future. Appreciating how ideas have been socially constructed enables us to see how our own assumptions and worldviews are not necessarily universal.
Some of the most valuable resources for any historian are first-person accounts of historical events as they were happening 'in the moment.' It is almost...
We know who is going to win the American Revolution so we automatically look for the 'reasons' for the British defeat. However, for the actual colonists themselves (and the royalists) there was no assumption that the Patriot cause would be victorious. Reading the journals and letters of participants on both sides of the conflicts; newspaper accounts from the period; and documents of the era helps paint a more complete portrait of the times. It also illustrates events from different perspectives, versus the linear history that is often 'passed down' by the winners.
By reading accounts of the losing side; of participants with often-unheard voices such as African-Americans, Native Americans, women; and even residents European nations not directly involved in the conflict, historians may develop an alternative vision of historical truth that differs from the conventional 'party line' that is accepted. For example, although the Patriot cause is…
