Every teacher, professor, and mentor has phrases that have just become immersed in their lexicon for all time. Early in my tutoring career, I developed a simple rubric of three questions that helped expand concepts in history. This seemed to work and was more of a Eureka moment than anything of the sort of studying and testing that is usually associated with developing frameworks. Constantly, I would ask, “Who is, what did it do, and why is it significant?” Fun, catchy, and falls into the rule of three. It’s been with me for 15 years now and hasn’t let me down yet.
Another phrase that has seeped its way into my typings and utterances is, “So what? Go beyond what happened.” Some variation of this phrase shows up when talking to students, thinking about historical topics, or grading papers. This can sometimes be a place of confusion for students or even troublesome for the layperson studying history, as the common conception of the past is “what happened.” In some ways, this person is right. The past is a place where things happened. In fact, it’s where every single second is going that just ticked by. We live in a world of happening that all turns into the “happened,” but this doesn’t make history the record of “what happened.”
“So what? Go beyond what happened.”
History and the past are two separate entities that are often used interchangeably. John Fea, in his book Why Study History, notes that history is the interpretation of the past, while the past is the area in which the activity of the past occurs (a bit tautological, for sure). In this, we have a perspective that the work of a historian or history student is not to understand all the past, or simply retell it, but to use the elements of the documents, perspectives, analyses, and other data to paint a picture of the past that adds meaning to those events.
Consider this, if we just look at the past as it exists, there is not much that we can do with it other than to say it happened. Additionally, we run into the problem of understanding that “what happened” in itself is inherently subjective. A novice student of history could tell you that the perspective of someone largely dictates and is dictated by the environment around them. Understanding the story of the past contextually is balancing the views of different people seeing the same event.
While balancing perspectives is not always a quid pro quo balancing act, it helps ground perspectives and lived experiences into something that can paint a picture. For example, in a landscape painting, the mountains are no more important than the blades of grass in weight of importance, but both add color and texture to a scene. The mountains or trees may be a focal point, but without the grass, it is hard to tell what season or location it is.
Many consider that history is a discipline where the ultimate truth can be found out in the past. However, this is not often practical, or feasible. Just like we will never know the depths of the Almighty, we may never fully grasp the experience of all people in the past through all time and space. While some think of history as an art that is expressed through unchanging meta-events, it is much more useful to look at instead of factual information. This way, primary and secondary sources as data in you are not so hung up on being the arbiter of truth and you can present an argument based on the collected information through a clear interpretation colored by your own biases and social context.
This takes an enormous amount of pressure for the student who is worried they may not know everything, but it helps to set a healthy understanding of the work of history. The next time you think about producing a work of historical analysis, remember your goal isn’t to tell what happened, but to present an interpretation of evidence to answer a line of historical inquiry.