Historiography Final Review
Explain the difference between a necessary and a sufficient cause of an historical event. Also, explain how the classic "horseshoe nail" example illustrates the fallacy discussed here.
A common form of the reductive fallacy is the confusion of necessary with sufficient cause, which is the confusion of a casual component without which an effect will not occur, with all the other casual components which are required to make it occur. This error occurs in causal explanations that are constructed like a single chain and stretched taut across a vast chasm of complexity. The example of the horseshoe nail is that the shoe was lost because it needed a nail but didn't have one, and this built up until the regiment and the battle were lost. This confuses a necessary with a sufficient cause of a historical event.
Explain the basic difference between a cause and a correlation in the study of history, and how this distinction applies in the 2005 study of Pennsylvania soldiers during the Civil War.
A necessary condition/cause is something that must be present for an event to occur. A sufficient cause is a condition that will provide the event. A necessary condition must be there, but it alone doesn't provide sufficient cause for the occurence of the event. Correlation cannot prove causation. A correlation between two variables does not necessarily indicate a causal relation between them. Need to rule out irrelevant correlations and also antecedents from our search for real historical causes. (Antecedents = such as the region of Pennsylvania: prior things.) Correlations and antecedents are often only "silent partners" that accompany a genuine causal variable but are not causal themselves. To be considered causal, an event (i.e., some event that really happened) must have made a "counterfactual difference." To demonstrate that A caused B, one must also argue: "If A had not happened, then B would not have happened either." In other words, consider the hypothetical case in which your proposed causal factor is removed from the picture. For any affirmation of a cause (i.e., "this caused that") also implies a counterfactual claim of a non-cause (i.e., "without this, there would be no that"). Cuff (2005): study of tallness of 20,000 Pennsylvania soldiers during the American Civil War. This study looked at tallness statistics for soldiers from various parts of the state. I.e., correlated tallness with each soldier's region of origin. Result: Found a positive correlation between tallness and those originating from a region that was less developed economically. This shows the need to hypothesize, as it is possible that both factors (tallness and economic under-development) were caused by some unknown third factor.
Know this useful list of topics that have attracted particular attention from global history writers.
A variety of topics have been encompassed by global history, and the areas that have attracted the most attention from scholars have been trade and other large-scale economic developments, biological processes such as disease and environmental change, cultural interactions and exchanges, imperialism and colonialism, and migrations and diasporas. The rise of global history has thus shed light on topics that have long been studied by historians, such as imperialism, while also stimulating interest in fields like environmental history that have emerged more recently.
the study of mentalités: what is this, why study it, how can it be studied?
Developed by Lucien Febvre. This is the study of collective psychology of past society, part of the cultural side of history/historiography. It is the study of the mentalities of groups of people not individuals. This was an effort to recover the emotional worldview/life. The emphasis is on the unconscious assumptions rather than articulated theories. Febvre rejected the assumption that the mental framework of the people of the past is the same as that of the people of today. This can be done by looking at the collective behavior of groups of people, which is often reflected in public rituals and celebrations, which often include symbols. By studying these symbols used in these occasions, these shared symbols, can learn about their worldviews and values. Emphasis was on the symbolic rituals of behavior often seen in public events, and they were trying to read the non-verbal cues as if they were texts
Know the basic characteristics of the American "Consensus history" outlook of the 1950s.
Even while drawing on their earlier 20th century predecessors, the new social historians were at the same time reacting against the establishment of consensus history in the 1950s. It was called this because of its emphasis on the unified and homogenous character of American history, consensus history was not itself as unified as its name implied. While the practitioners agreed in minimizing the role of conflict in American history , they disagreed over whether this quality was the cause for celebration or criticism. And so, even as the new social historians directly repudiated what they believed was the homogenized vision of American history given by the consensus historians, they were actually following the lead of some of the consensus historians in using history as a vehicle for social criticism.
What do you make of the critique leveled by Andre Grunden Frank? How much are we blinded by the big facts of recent (1800-2000) history, thus distorting our picture of world history?
He relegates the West's political and economic dominance to a brief, two century anomaly that began around 1800. He declared that European dominance in world history was a myth, and Europeans were latecomers who bullied and brought their way into the already existing Asian-centered world economy with precious metals robbed from the Americas. Frank believes that any talk of European dominance or hegemony prior to 1800 is an egregious error. Europe was only of peripheral importance economically and even militarily prior to 1800. The world economy prior was dominated by India and China. He also says that we are misguided to think that the world is just now undergoing a process of globalization. Globalization has been with us since 1500, and the Afro-Eurasian "world system" dates all the way back to 3000 BC. Frank's brand of macrohistory obviously places far more stress on long duration continuities than passing discontinuities (ex the Industrial Revolution). His effort would have been more effective if he had not dismissed and devalued the West so systematically.
What key difference did the philosopher Hegel point to in his explanation for why there a revolution in France rather than in Prussia in 1789? I.e., what was a major element that made these two societies different? How might this line of reasoning point toward a causal hypothesis for explaining the 1789 French Revolution?
Hegel's hypothesis was that Prussia had gone through the Reformation (it had become Protestant) while France had not (it remained Catholic). This difference gives us a possible causal variable. Contrastive questioning like this helps us to narrow down the huge mass of potentially relevant information and helps us find the more likely explanatory factors by focusing on a specific contrast between the target case and the contrastive case. Hence a hypothesis like Hegel's focus on Protestantism v. Catholicism.
Big Question: Sum up/explain the basic argument (from the description here plus class lecture) of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997). (See also 10. Philosophy of History Part I.)
His main questions were How to explain the different degrees of wealth and power that various parts of the world had attained by the start of the modern era? Specifically, how to explain Europe's relative dominance of the world? The "proximate" causes are fairly easy to see: Europe's early development of military technology (invented guns),Europe's early colonizing of other continents (spread germs), Europe's early industrialization (invented steel) I.e., Europe accomplished these things before the non-European world did, hence Europe took the lead in development and dominance. Are there "ultimate" causes that explain these proximate causes? This is the deeper question that Diamond wants to pursue. How to account for Europe's out-front position in guns, germs, and steel? His answer had several components as Europe had a large stock of wild fauna and flora (animals and plants), a relatively contiguous continental area, a degree of internal "fragmentation" (e.g., from mountain ranges within that continent), and an east-west direction of continental axis. We will focus on this final item, the claim about Europe's continental axis. Diamond argues:A nation's development depends on the axis of the continent on which it's located and there are greater advantages from an east-west axis, as in Eurasia, than from a north-south axis, as in the Americas. He makes 4 big claims: 1. A continent with east-west axis has a more homogeneous environment (including climate) than does a continent with a north-south axis: its axis runs along same latitude zone, hence the landmass has the same average temperature. These conditions aid agricultural innovations.2. Agricultural innovations have a greater impact on civilizational development than do other innovations. 3: Transmission of technological innovation (including agricultural) is vital for development, because a number of groups sharing technology will develop quicker than isolated groups each forced to innovate all alone. 4. Transmission of innovations occurs more quickly across relatively similar environments.
According to Novick, what is the usual definition of "historical objectivity"? (Know at least five of the characteristics given here, on pp. 1-2.)
Historical objectivity is not just one idea but a sprawling collection of assumptions, attitudes, aspirations, and antipathies. At best it is an "essentially contested assumptions on which it rests include a commitment to the reality of the past, and to truth as correspondence to that reality; a sharp separation between knower and known, between fact and value, and between history and function. The objective historians role is that of a neutral, or disinterest judge.
Discuss the writings and the special features of the second-generation Annales leader Ferdinand Braudel.
In his book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II transcended nation and civilizational boundaries, as he took the entire region of the Mediterranean as his subject, showing how its distinctive climate and geography had shaped the history of all the peoples living around it, compelling them to develop systems of agriculture and settlement patterns adapted to their natural environment. Braudel claimed these fundamental features of life in the past did change, but at a glacially slow pace that required historians to take the perspective of the long term to recognize that for those living at the time, these constraints would have seemed permanent or structural. Interacting with this level of slow-motion developments were events that moved at a somewhat faster pace, such as economic cycles of prosperity and decline and cultural movements, which might unfold over a period of a human generation or more. He said that faster paced events such as war and politics should not preoccupy historians because they do not last. His vast panorama, integrating history with economies, demography, and geography and sweeping across centuries and the frontiers between civilizations had an undeniable power to it. His second major work was even broader in scope and provided an interdisciplinary account of the economic and social history of the world over a period of some three centuries.
What was the big conclusion/message of Herbert Gutman's Black Family (1976) book? Note: This was a response to the controversial "Moynihan Report" (1966).
It argued that blacks had been able to form family units even under slavery and that the breakdown of the family in impoverished urban ghettoes was a recent development, not the inevitable consequence of slavery.
Re-summarize the argument of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which is nicely summarized here. (See lecture 11. Philosophy of History Part II also.)
Kuhn's work challenged the fundamental notion that scientific knowledge increased gradually but steadily overtime, through the accumulation of new data. Instead, he argued that the history of science shows a succession of entirely different models about how the universe worked, and shifts were not responses to more accurate information but were rather reflections of sudden and somewhat inexplicable changes in ways in which scientists formulated problems. In his opinion new theories did not necessarily prevail because they were any truer that those they replaced, but because they were adopted by the majority of professionals in a given discipline. In historiographical terms, his theory suggested that knowledge about the past was not a matter of the steady perfection of research methods and the piling up of ever more information, instead new ways of thinking about the past resulted from changes in historians' notions of how individuals and societies worked, and there might not be any single criterion by which historical truth could be defined.
Know the basic Marxian definitions of "base/superstructure" and "ideology."
Marx said he wanted to "stand Hegel on his head, or rather turn him right side up": need to put his feet on the ground. Instead of idealism, embraced materialism: changes in material or economic life were the real engine that drove historical progress. The reality was not the consciousness of a given nation (their ideas) but the economic interests of a given class. Two parts to the base itself: mode of production, and relations of production. Superstructure is everything else in life: politics, law, religion, culture (high and popular), family and gender relations, etc. Mode of production means the main way that people make their living, there is always a mixture of these modes in any given time and country, yet one mode is dominant or characteristic for that stage. This is the driving force of all else. Relations of production are the corresponding social organization of work. i.e., the working arrangement between capital/management and labor, the wage system, etc. These relations change when the mode of production changes. Superstructure: Marx said that the mode changes first and relations later, so that the latter change lags behind the first. Why: some people (the ruling class) have a vested interest in the old, existing relationships of production. Those relations work to their advantage, and so they resist change to new arrangements. Marx said that tension builds up the longer this lag persists, until finally there is some kind of violent adjustment.
Big Question, p. 84: According to Karl Marx, what has been the role of ideas and ideology in the history of human societies? How was Marx's viewpoint both similar to and different from that of the philosopher Hegel?
Marx, unlike Hegel, believed material forces and not ideas drove historical conflict and change, and ideas just reflected these forces and served as tools used by those who controlled the means of production to maintain their control over those who did not. They both believed history was derived from a conflict of opposing forces, but while Hegel assumed these forces were ideas, but Marx believed they were material forces. Hegel believed in ideologies, but Marx said there were not real and had no effect on history, as they have no history or development unlike material production and development that alters history. Hegel was an idealist and was trying to infuse this with history, wanted to put the focus not on being but on becoming, being implies eternal but becoming is how things are developing overtime. Marx borrows from Hegel but also criticizes him for having his head in the clouds. Hegel has his own version of historical stages theory, and emphasized how different nations carry or manifest the main movement of the world spirit at different times. Marx borrows this idea, but says instead of a nation controlling this it is a socioeconomic class. Marx argued that the real driver of progress were changes in material/economic life. Hegel had an idea about the dialectic that history was driven by the dialectic and the way it moves forward is through the conflict of ideas. Marx also used this idea, but he said progress comes from the dialectic between classes, which will bring greater rights for humans as a whole
Describe the Annales School's innovative analysis of historical time. (Fold this question in with 11/1 material above.)
One of the most important innovations of the Annales school was its challenge to the conventional view of time as a unified, linear process. Instead it emphasized the multiplicity of time, and they divided historical time into three levels, arguing that it was necessary for historians to examine all three levels to comprehend the past in all its complexity. The short term level included rapid change in the form of military and political events such as wars or revolutions. The intermediate level, also called the history of conjunctures, covered a more gradual change that took place over a longer span of time, such as economic or demographic changes. The last level expanded over long periods of time, and included structure that where very little change if any took place at all, and by structures he means deeply rooted patterns resistant to change, which could include habits of behavior or thought. Rather than following a chronological linear narrative, he divided his study into three sections that corresponded to each of these levels of historical time. (he refers to Fernand Braudel who was one of the most important figures in propagating the influence of the Annales school).
What's the fundamental weakness of cultural history discussed here?
Some historians complained that the adoption of a cultural perspective meant abandoning historical scholarship's most distinctive feature. Political historians warned that the cultural turn was leading historians to neglect the impact of governments, leaders, and ideologies. Other historians noted that an excessive emphasis on the power of discourse to shape human lives could wind up generating a vision of history just as impersonal as the structural social history that some of the cultural historians were revolting against.
What does Fisher say about the kind of history writing that seeks to locate "underlying conditions"?
Some historians have assumed that a causal explanation is one that identifies underlying conditions which were of such a nature that they rendered the effect probable. Is the most common of all forms of causal explanation in historical scholarship, commonly condemned in professional journals, for superficiality.
Describe the pros/cons of "cliometrics" discussed here. Why did many find this approach to history ultimately frustrating? Include the general response to the book Time on the Cross (1974).
The flourishing of statistically based demographic history and the study of the movement of population in the past demonstrates both the important contributions made by what came to be known as "cliometrics" and the reasons why most historians eventually turned away from this approach. Studying such basic features of life in the past as life expectancy, birth rates, and the impact of disease was clearly one way of probing the experience of ordinary people in the past.Some of the pros include that from the patterns that emerged from this painstakingly acquired statistical data emerged a new picture of the harshness of ordinary people's lives in the early modern period, one that contrasted strongly with a vision of the period derived from documents about rulers, artists, and religious leaders. However, there were cons too, as even scholars who had initially turned to quantification to elucidate the experience of the masses often became frustrated that their own methods reduced the people, they wanted to study a collection of numbers. Quantitative history required a tremendous commitment of effort and, frequently, money, to piece together data from sources that were often not, in themselves, especially interested to work with. There were also problems with presenting this research as most readers did not have the patience to wade through detailed discussions of the probs of source interpretation that beset cliometricians, whereas other specialists in the field were quick to pounce on arcane methodological shortcomings.
Sum up the brief but thoughtful discussion here of the interrelationship between "global history" and globalization, including the interaction between the two phenomena.
The growing interest in global history has been partly a product of the rise of globalization from the 1990s to the present. As globalization has contributed to an increased awareness of the global interconnections linking together different regions of the world, (such as trade or networks of communication like the internet) historians have taken this awareness and applied it to their understanding of the past. Some critics have feared the danger that global history could serve to legitimize and sanction globalization as the natural outcome of the historical process. For this reason, critics have cautioned that in privileging a global or transnational perspective as somehow more read or comprehensive than a national one, global history runs the risk of replacing the sanctification of the nation with the sanctification of a global viewpoint, a viewpoint that for some scholars is not less Eurocentric than a nationalistic one.
Sum up the characteristics and special contributions of the "microhistory" genre.
The history of everyday life was closely linked to a new genre that developed out of the movement to cultural history and came to be known as microhistory. It was defined by a concentration on specific incidents, narrowly limited in time and space, and usually involving otherwise unknown minor figures. Micro historians use these small-scale stories to construct a kind of "total history" different from the social historians who brought together the different aspects of their subjects lives to show how a single incident can illuminate much broader aspects of the culture and society of the past. Microhistory has allowed historians to argue for the agency of ordinary people, rather than seeing them as prisoners of the large social structures that had figured in the work of other social historians.
Fascinating problem: Explain the tension between "witness" history (applied, for example, in "truth and reconciliation" commissions like in South Africa) and the work of professional historians.
The privilege of witness testimony has not always been happily accepted by historians. Witness' authority to speak about the past is based on what they remember having experienced; they are often reluctant to concede that individual memory can be fallible or confused. Historians, on the other hand, are usually writing about events they did not experience, and they are accustomed to comparing evidence and preferring documentation created at the time rather than formulated later. It is, however, difficult for them to confront trauma survivors and tell that that their recollections are inaccurate.
Does the story of Special Orders no. 191 work well as a grand explanation of the overall course of the American Civil War? What does Fisher conclude from this example?
The reductive fallacy might be redefined as the asking of one kind of causal question, and the answering of it with another and less comprehensive kind of causal explanation. I think that he is saying that we could maybe conclude that the cause of the Northern Victory in the Civil war was the loss of this Special Orders, if it uses the right causal model. I think that this is an example of the reductive fallacy because it is reducing complexity to simplicity, and the outcome of the war was not a direct result of the loss of this special order, and there are many other factors in between that played a large role in the outcome. He is saying that here is the kind of explanation this is, how is it structured, calls it a contingent-series model of causality. The term means/can be described by one chain, i.e. this leads to this and this, weakness is there are other outside factors outside of the chain that could be also explained by all kinds of other things. The chain is a series of events where each event is contingent on a specified prior event. This is the kind of causal model that he is saying is quite limited, has huge blind spots, screams out lots of extra possibilities. Is a kind of reductionism even though it has many steps to it.
Explain this critique given here of the "Plato to NATO" historical perspective.
This is another book that examines the "long sweep of history" and provides an excellent supplement to the macro historical literature treated in this essay, although it is not a universal or macro historical work in scope. Gress is especially critical of the traditional Whiggish "Grand Narrative" of the rise of the West. It is the story of European exceptionalism and progress, defined in terms of liberty, reason, and economic growth The Grand Narrative offered a flawed rendition of history that depicted an imaginary direct line connection the modern West to the ancient Greeks, an imaginary line from Plato to NATO, in which everything in between formed an orderly sequence culminating in liberal modernity. It distorted much of the history of the West by viewing it as a "long preamble to modernity".
Sum up in a few sentences the chief characteristics of the Annales School as described here.
This was a scholarly movement that took shape in interwar France, was the most significant effort to reinvigorate scholarly historical research during the interwar years, one that was eventually destined to have an impact on professional historians' work throughout the world. This new journal privileged economic and social history, instead of political history, and from the start its contributors strove to liberate themselves from the national framework in which most historical research remained confined. This set of historians was the most influential 20th century historical school as far as innovation. Was not a single school, more of a set on tendencies, only unified as trying to get away from elite political history.
How did experience in the First World War prompt new questioning among American thinkers about "objective" historical truth? What happened with Charles Beard in particular?
World War I was important in contributing to the growing acceptance of historical relativism. The war also undermined new historians' faith in objectivity in a number of ways. Beard was for American intervention, and tried to mobilize public support for the war. However, a few years after he denied his support for the war when the outcome of the war had not brought about the better world that he had hoped. The over partisanship of historians who had written propaganda in support of the war raised questions about their objectivity, while disputes among American historians over revisionist interpretations of the origins of the war made historians increasingly doubtful about whether they could ever agree on what objective truth was
