TRADITIONAL HISTORY VS NEW HISTORY

Hello everyone.

Today session was about different ways of understanding and learning, or even just reading, History.

During several years we´ve understood History as something related with kingdoms, wars, conquests, kings and queens, princes and princesses, even weddings… Or laws, governs, wars again… This list will never end. If we open our minds, making an effort, we could include Economy in this list, because of it role related with people. You know, thanks to Economy we have social stages during History and social stages are guilty of a lot of very big events through years. So, yes, Economy could be a main role in this list. But, if we make a bigger effort, we could include Church in this list too. Why Church? Well, during History, in Middle Age for example, Church was the real power over the Earth. Church had a high social recognition in that ages and although was respected by people. So, now, we have a more or less complete list of main roles in History. On the first hand we have General History (remember: wars, kingdoms etc…), on a second hand we have Economy (social stages and company) and on a imaginary third hand we have Church. Well that´s History… But, where is Art? Where is Science? Education?... These are not History? Here´s the piece of debate: the concept of History that we have, it´s wrong, so clear out your mind and go on reading.

As we said before Traditional History is essentially about politics, economy and far below Church. Then Science, Art and Education are “other History”. It´s History but not History, they are another thing, we can´t name them but they are there so… Wrong. New History is about human activity. Everything is History. The first space travel, is History (and science), Da Vinci is History (and art even science too), how first human beings learnt about everything and then, taught the same, is History (and Education). So, History is all about humans do, or have done, or will do. History is everything that makes something a turning point, that charges the clock, that spin the world. It´s everything that tell something about us, no matter with discipline: History is just, History.

- Now we are going to present some ways to follow for understanding differences between Traditional History (T.H.) and New History (N.H.):

First of all, T.H. is a tale of things, facts that are told for sorting years in to Ages. N.H. is about analysis of structures. Not enough with memorising a list of years and kings, is about understanding the social and universal moment. Why is happening that and why now. That are the study scopes. And this move us to the next point…

Here we have the classic view of things from above. The facts we were talking before are great deeds of kings, governs… etc. N.H. is about people views, how society evolve, and about experiences and thoughts of ordinary people.

On the third place we have that T.H. is based on documents. It says, we have and official point from authorities. On Middle Age, kingdoms wrote about all. That´s the problem, only kingdoms wrote about that, and obviously, any type of revolution is something that confronts with another thing. So, for kingdoms, revolutions are the bad of the story. If we go on on these revolutions will be always the bad guy of the story, because revolution means to go against the system. And usually in History revolutions started turning points or new ages, it is not the bad guy and are not less official than kingdoms essays. We must change our point of view about this, is just more History not better or worster than.

Finally, T.H. is objective. Main concerned about is to give facts to the readers. N.H. is about approaches, an explanation for things, for good things and bad things,

but the concern is to give reasons, not facts.

Well, we hope that presentation will help to understand about importance of evolve our way of understanding History. History is needed to be understood as a whole and not as a collection of things. That’s a new turning point. See you on my next post! Thanks for read it.