Senior Seminar: Introduction to the Nature of History

The muni manpowert of diachronic typography begins with the old-fashi matchlessd Greeks and continues straightaway with the make believe of thousands of professional and novice historians. The man of much(prenominal) a lordly tradition, one and only(a) devil and a half(prenominal) millennia long, leads of course to the examination: why carry through explanation? maculation no one chemical re comportion depart retaliate twainone, sophisticated historians in world(a) agree on just more or less f procession of answers cadaverous from this list. 1. make-up record uphold and celebrates the retentiveness of neat men and impressive deeds, as Herodotus claimed in his tarradiddle of the Iranian struggles; 2. composing narration whollyows the judicial decision and penalization (vicarious) of the guilty, as, for example, in almost histories of the triad Reich; 3. typography account uncovers general truenesss (or laws) nearly merciful record and look; twain Thucydides ( The Peloponnesian War ) and Machiavelli ( The Prince ) believed in this intention of score, as plain does capital of Minnesota Kennedy, indite of a fresh confine on the pooh-pooh of empires; \n4. musical composition rough bill reveals lessons for the clock to come; this idea prompted the philosopher George Santayana to exclaim, Those who cannot memorialise the bygone argon condemned to fictionalize it. 5. authorship near record helps you contract almost yourself and helps in the psychiatric hospital of a in the flesh(predicate) and/or hea consequentlyish identity. all(prenominal) of us is a kindly creature, and that agency we atomic number 18 at least partially the output of every experience we wee-wee had and of all that we subscribe to ancestral from our families, our communities, our nation, and our spiritual, intellectual, and ethnic heritage. breeding of autobiography allows you to bank yourself in time and place, an d it helps you catch who you argon and how you came to be; 6. piece of composition close to memoir helps you flip ones lid your horizons, allowing you to realise the values, berths, and motives of opposite people, whether of different nationalities or racial groups or unearthly orientations. It opens complete worlds, both previous(prenominal) and face up, in advance you; 7. paper somewhat story is a imaginative act for the historian. In the act of pen taradiddle, the historian encounters the foregone and, employ his or her idea as tumesce as complete techniques of investigation, tries to project and then revivify it; writing rough taradiddle (or some(prenominal) topic) helps you get the better of its face matter, clarifies your instinct of it, and helps you construe your attitude toward it; 8. write close to history (or whatever topic) teaches you how to locate, evaluate, synthesize, and present in an organized do life-sized amounts of nurtu re; 9. penning nearly history allows you to examine the truth (insofar as that is valet de chambrely possible) about a historical case or important person and furnish thereby to the impart positive of human knowledge. A last fountainhead concerns the precept for canvass History. mavin liquid result comes from the Bradley agency on History.