Abel Chapter 15 Questions

1. Why is history being rewritten constantly?

-Because it is always written wrong. As human beings, we have a certain curiosity among us, and we want to be able get meaning out of the history that we study. Therefore, in order to please human beings, they need to keep the stories interesting in relation to the people who are reading them. Able believes that history is not rewritten simply because new facts are discovered, but rather because new people need to be pleased and informed.

2. What factors influence the process by which the historian picks and chooses his/her facts? Please provide specific examples for each factor.

-Our interests change- for example, people in the past may have been fascinated by the love affairs of kings, rather than how the king actually ruled, whereas now people may be more concerned with the way the kind ruled.

-Our conceptual apparatus changes- we are informed of the Marxist hypothesis that the American Civil War was a class conflict, where before we just knew that there was a Civil War that occurred, and Marx's view was not a part of this.

-Our view of the basic historical segment changes- I don't really understand this one, but the example we are given in the book talks about how "Toynobee builds the most intelligible unit to be not the nation but the "society."

-The personal equation of the historian changes- This shows that every historian has different views and personal ideals basically, which means that each historian may focus on a different aspect of history and have a different interpretation on it based upon their own ideals and beliefs.

-The audience for whom he writes changes- Historians write to please different people. For instance, one person could be writing the history of 9/11 for the Americans to read, and another person could be writing the history of 9/11 for the Iraqis to read. Both of these stories would be different, because their audience is different; it is sort of like the shaper in Grendel.

3. What is the "Baconian Fallacy?" What would the positivists think? Would Carr agree with Namier?

- The Baconian Fallacy is saying that all the historian has to do is collect the facts. I think that the positivists would agree with this, because the positivists are totally focussed on the idea that there are a ton of facts out there waiting to be discovered, and that is all that makes history. I think Carr would agree with Namier, because Namier believes that history is full of different opinions and interpretations, which is what Carr believes. Namier uses the comparison of a historian to a photographer, which is similar to the comparison that Carr uses of a architect to a historian. They both believe that historians' jobs are to find the facts that make the story work and they have to leave out the details that aren't important. If a historian were to just find all of these facts, it is the same thing as an architect trying to mix cement- it is nothing that takes effort, or makes them special. They have to actually create stories to please audiences, with different opinions and interpretations.

4. How does history differ from Geology?

-History finds meaning in the data that it collected, whereas a geologist just gathers the data. For instance, a historian will find some evidence of the past, and only write some of it down because he only sees some of it as important, whereas the geologist will write down any evidence found because it is all seen as important to them.

5. According to Abel: "The patterns to be found in part events are selected by the historian; like the hypothesis of the scientists, they may be suggested, but are neither imposed nor dictated, by "the facts (p 166-7)." Based on your experience with the Cheques Lab, how far do you agree with this explanation of history?

-I agree with this explanation to a pretty large extent. With the Cheques Lab experiment, we received some facts and drew conclusions about them which really may have had nothing to do with what happened. Because one check was made out to mothers against drunk driving, we immediately came to the conclusion that there was a drunk driving accident of some sort. This could have had nothing to do with what actually happened, because there are plenty of people who just donate to MADD for no personal reason. However, this fact seemed to make a good story so we used it. There were other facts that we left out though, that didn't fit with our story, that could have been important to what actually happened. Therefore, history is totally created by the historian, because it is never what it actually is.

6. In your opinion, "how will future historians so elect to describe what is going on now (p. 167)?"

- I think that it will pretty much be decided the same way that it is now. People will find a ton of facts about what is going on now, and they will try to pick out pieces of information that seem important and disregard the others. They will probably get the history of us completely wrong, but that is okay because it is totally based upon their newer developed systems of thinking. It is no different than the history we have gotten wrong in the past.

7. What is historical pluralism?

- The definition of historical pluralism as defined by Maurice Mandelbaum is "the grand sweep of events which we call the historical process is made up of an indefinitely large number of components which do not form a completely inter-related set. Historical pluralism denies that every event is related to every other event."

8. The list of events (or non-events) listed on p. 168 makes Abel ask the question: "Is there, then, no hard core or bed-rock of indisputable facts that the historian must recognize." Does it matter if there ever was a man named Trotsky?

- Well, for our own knowledge that we have today, Trotsky is important, and his existence does matter. However, if we never learned about Trotsky, we would be fine not knowing about him, because we would have learned about someone else in history class rather than Trotsky. I guess it doesn't matter who we learn about, as long as we learn about someone, because there are always going to be people from history left out. Maybe there were people who were way more important than Trotsky, but we just never got to learn about them because historians decided it wasn't important.

9. How is a historian like a physicist?

- Historians nor physicists never know all there is to be known about a particular situation. Both "go beyond the evidence," making their own conclusions about what they have found. They both select their facts, and leave out what they don't see to be important.

10. What are the Five Frameworks or Hypotheses of History?

-We may begin with Ecclesiastes.

-A second group of philosophies of history may be called functional because of the way in which they isolate and stress certain causative factors.

-The idea of progress as a philosophy of history is relatively new.

-History is a great drama of sin and redemption, according to the Christian view.

-Organismic theories consider society to be a kind of living organism.

11. Do you believe in Historical Inevitability?

-Not really. I think the idea that a war will happen regardless of if there is a cause to it isn't true. People don't just randomly go and kill other people without a reason for it. It is possible that the reason for a war isn't explicitly known, but there is still an underlying reason. Wars won't happen if people don't cause them to happen.

12. What does Abel mean when he says: "no crucial experiment can test the validity of a theory of history, any more than it can the truth of a metaphysical theory (p. 174)."?

- He basically means that there is no way of proving whether or not these stories that historians create about the past are actually true. For all we know, some of the things we were told by historians may have never even happened; they could have simply gathered some data and jumped to conclusions about it, making stories that seemed to fit. We will never know if the history we have is right or not, because we were never actually there when these things were happening.

13. Abel writes: "Macaulay regards history as a branch of literature (p. 174)." How would Jill Lepore of Just the Facts, Ma'am respond? Please provide a specific quote from the article to justify your claim.

- I'm not quite sure how she would respond. She totally sees a separation between literature and history though, because she says that "novels boast a certain truth that even the best history books can't claim." I suppose she feels as though novels have much more truth in them, because the author creates the story and therefore they cannot be wrong. However, there is no definite answer to history, which is what sort of separates history from literature- at least in Jill Lepore's mind.

14. How does the footnote at the bottom of page 175 relate to the Shaper from Grendel?

-In the footnote, there are different stories told about the Jewish history, and the stories are different based upon who was telling it. For instance, there is only one piece of information about Masada, because only one person ever bothered to share this information with people. In Grendel, the shaper goes around telling different stories to different people, depending upon who he is telling the story to. These two instances are similar, because the stories that are told change depending upon the person who is hearing the stories.