Notes

TEACHER: Hi and welcome. Today I want to talk about studying history. Our objectives today will be to explain why history is the study of the past. We're going to describe how we can improve our understanding of people's actions and beliefs through the study of history. And we're going to identify how historians use clues from
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various sources to learn about the past. First of all, I want you to remember that history is so much more than whats. When I say whats I mean things like dates, names. It's so much about the hows. The whys. How does this happen? Why did it happen?
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If this hadn't happened, what might have been? That's what history is about. Those are the questions I want you asking when you study history. Not what was his name, when did he die, when did that happen. That's the boring stuff and that's the easy stuff. That's what makes history mundane or boring.
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But we don't want to look at that. Those are the by the ways. We need to learn that stuff in order to explain the hows and the whys, but that's not really history is about. History is a wonderful story. So like I said, history. It's the story. And it's mainly about the people.
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And when it comes to the people, we're talking about culture. Culture is basically knowledge, beliefs, customs, values of a group of people. We want to look at those things, so knowledge, customs, values, and beliefs of a group of people. That's what's important. Not so much the hows, the whats, the exact things.
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We learn all those things. But we really, really want to focus on the people. Studying the past. So first of all, what is archaeology? Well, in order to learn about the past and learn about societies, we need to have archaeologists. And archaeologists or archaeology is basically the study of the past based on what people left behind.
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A lot of societies, as we go back thousands of years, did not leave behind great documentation or great writings of how their society was run. So we rely on archaeologists to dig and to find things. Not just things that people used but also the bones so we can test them to see how old people are, and how long different societies were around, and where they were exactly.
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Understanding history, or understanding through history. What we need to look at here is understanding yourself. Now, who you are has so much to do with what happened in the past. You may not think so. You may not think you have anything in common with people who lived thousands of years ago. But you do.
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You are all people. Now, everyone's belief system and everyone's value system is based on experience and based on what they're taught. These things go through and through generations. They may change and they may combine. Cultures change, they combine. But there are still parts that are left over through the years.
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And so we start to learn to understand ourselves. Also, by studying other people's thoughts we start to think about our own thoughts and our own beliefs. What do you believe? What do you not believe? All of those questions start to come to mind when we start looking at people and their actions and reactions. We also need to attempt to learn how
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to understand others. Often we have a really hard time in life, just period, actually looking beyond ourselves. We have an opinion and we don't understand why other people don't share it. And we've all been in that situation. But this is something, when we're studying history, we want to try very hard not to do.
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We want to try and understand things from many people's perspectives. For example, if we're looking at American history, we want to look at Native Americans' perceptions, European settlers, enslaved Africans, and Asian immigrants. All of those perceptions are important when we look at history. Especially when we apply what we're learning
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about history to today. Today our world is very global and what happens here in United States affects what happens in Europe. We are not an island, people. So what you need to remember is that it's so important to look from everyone's perspective. Another example would be if we took a major battle in the Civil War.
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If you took journal entries from a Union soldier, an African American soldier, a Native American soldier, a Confederate soldier. All of those could have very different perspectives of what happened. What we need to do is then take that information and think, what's important, what's not. And that's something
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archaeologists do all the time. They find things and they have to look at, is this an important part of history. Does this make a difference to what we already know. Does this change something we already think we know. So those are decision making skills that they use all the time and that you need to learn to use when studying history.
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Another thing. Knowledge of your world is gained through the study of history and develops your mental skills. Analytical skills, big part of your mental skills. It also helps you question and be open-minded. You will hear opinions in history, you will hear thoughts, and you need to decide for yourself, is that correct?
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We study things in history such as slavery. Do we agree with slavery? Do we not agree with slavery? Most people today would not agree with slavery. However, during that time period where slavery existed, most people did agree with it. And we need to think outside of ourselves and we need to think about why.
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Why did they think that was OK? So these are all analytical skills that we're developing. We also develop good decision making skills with analyzing, deciding what's important information, what's not. And this is something that we can carry over to any topic in our lives. Using clues. Archaeologists use a variety of clues.
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One thing they use is a fossil. And a fossil, the basic definition is a part or imprint of anything alive. So that could be a person or that could be an insect or a plant. Anything like that. That's a fossil. So it's either a part or an imprint.
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So something was left, maybe, in the land. An artifact is something that was used or created by humans. And that's something, again, that they left behind such as maybe a dish or something. In both of these, fossils we learn a lot about age and about evolution. From an artifact, we learn more about society and about the way things happen.
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We could learn a lot. Even something from a dinner plate. We can learn about the materials they had to use. We could learn about the skills they had in creating this. What kind of art or craftsmanship skills did they have? We might even learn something about their art.
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So something as simple as a dinner plate, which we might think nothing of, we can learn a lot from. We also have sources of information. Our first source of information would be a primary source. A primary source is written by someone who lived during the time period that we're looking at. So if we're looking at the Egyptian history, it would
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have to be written by someone who lived during that time period. Or we're looking at the Civil War, someone who actually was involved in the Civil War. A secondary source, on the other hand, is a piece of writing that is based on primary sources. So if I were to write a history book on ancient Egypt, I would take pieces of writing or documentation that was
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written during that time period. If I was to write a chronological story of the Civil War, I would need to take primary sources from that time period and use them. My book would then become a secondary source for other people to use to learn about the time period I had studied. And lastly, they look at clues for sources of change. Evolution, change in society, change in culture.
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So if you look at a bone, did it change over hundreds of years. Or even the artwork or anything like that that they would find. What technology changes do we see through the years? All right. Today, we looked at then. We explained why history is the study the past.
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We described how we can improve our understanding of people's actions and beliefs through the study of history. And we identified how historians use clues from various sources to learn about the past. Please remember, history is more than the whats, the dates, the names, the places. Those are all things you need to learn. But it is really a giant story.
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And it's about the hows, it's about the whys. It's the actions that the people take and what happens because of those actions. That's what makes history interesting and that's what makes it fun.