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IntroductionUNDERSTANDING HISTORYWHAT IS HISTORY?OBJECTIVES:To identify the importance of studying history.Distinguish critically facts from opinions in reading historical accounts.To many students, history may not be as interesting as other curricular subjects. All too often, students say that history is boring! Yet, others argue that learning history is fun and enlightening. The last statement points to the fact that the importance of history cannot be underestimated. The article that follows, which is an excerpt from B.H. Liddell Hart’s (1972) “Why don’t we learn from history,” explains the value of history.Why study history? “What is the object of history? I would answer, quite simply—“truth.” It is a word and an idea that has gone out of fashion. The object might be more cautiously expressed thus: to find out what happened while trying to find out why it happened. In other words, to seek the causal relations between events. “History has limitations as guiding signpost, however, for although it can show us the right direction, it does not give detailed information about the road conditions. But its negative value as a warning sign is more definite. History can show us what to avoid, even if it does not teach us what to do—by showing the most common mistakes that mankind is apt to make and to repeat. “A second object lies in the practical value of history… The knowledge gained from the study of true history is the best of all educations for practical life… Viewed aright, it is the broadest of studies, embracing every aspect of life. It lays the foundation of education by showing how mankind repeats its errors and what those errors are. “Uses of historyIn addition to B.H. Liddell Hart’s elucidation of history’s value, Foray and Salevouris (1988) enumerated uses of history, to wit:History provides a source of personal and social identity.History helps us understand the problems of the present.History—good history—is a corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past.History can help one develop tolerance and open-mindedness.History helps us better understand all human behaviors and all aspects of the human condition.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.History can be entertainment.History, when studied, can teach many critical skills.Perhaps, history is best valued if it is understood in one’s own cultural context as emphasized by the historian Zeus Salazar (2006) in his view of Kasaysayan:Ang KASAYSAYAN ay SALAYSAY hinggil sa nakaraan o nakalipas na may SAYSAY—kahulugan, katuturan, at kabuluhan—sa SARILING LIPUNAN at KULTURA o kabuuang kinabibilangan. Ito ay iniuulat gamit ang mga konsepto at kategorya ng sariling kultura. [Literal Translation: History is a narrative about the past, which has value—meaning and importance—in one’s own society and culture. It is expressed based on one’s own cultural concepts and categories.] Theories of HistoryThroughout the ages, thinkers [philosophers] expressed their perspectives about how historical events happen. Adam (1862) expounded that some people thought that history happens by chance, in that events have no connection with or relation to each other as causes and effects; no designed antecedence or consequence. He (Adam) further explains that other people believe that history unfolds following a Law—an order, in which events are not loosely disconnected, but are intimately related to each other, inseparably interwoven, and mutually dependent.Patterns of history are said to be discernible according to some thinkers. These may be classified into: (a) pendular; (b) cyclical; (c) linear; and, (d) spiral. Pendular history posits that historical events are swinging between extremes: “war versus peace, times of plenty versus scarcity.” Cyclical history sees “history as traveling through repeated stages in never-ending cycles” in which “everything repeats and comes around again.” Linear history viewed history as the story of ever-mounting progress down through the ages, generally in a straight line. The spiral perspective of history suggests history as having overall progress, which comes in cycles alternating with periods of regression. This last theory is a “dialectical synthesis of the pendular and cyclical theories” culminating into the “optimistic linear theory”. (Busky, 2002)Other thinkers argue that history is not meant to arrive at some universal law; history does not predict. Agoncillo (1977, in Churchill, 2003), for example, claims that: In history, prediction is anathema, for it deals with what had passed, not with what the future will bring. [History] is not objective, [but] it is this subjectivity that characterizes all great historians, a subjectivity that makes for divergences in interpretation.So what is history?History is the past, that is, the actual past. Studying this past is recreating it, and in so doing, a historian’s interpretations and biases become part of the narrated stories [written or oral] that we call today history [textbook]. History’s meaning and value are contextual, that is, it becomes important and useful to a society that cherishes its past. Hence, while history is viewed differently by different people, the more that history becomes worthy of consideration for diverse purposes.Name: _____________________________________ Score: ______________Course/Year/Section: ______________________ Date: _______________Exercise 1.1Multiple Choice: Below are reasons for studying history quoted from different historians/writers. Selected uses of history from Foray and Salevouris’s list are used as option for each number. Encircle the letter of your answer. “History is who we are and why we are the way we are.” - David C. McCulloughHistory provides a source of personal and social identity.History can help one develop tolerance and open-mindedness.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.History, when studied, can teach many critical skills.“A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.” -Walter Scott History can help one develop tolerance and open-mindedness.History is a corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past.History, when studied, can teach many critical skills.History can be entertainment.“I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you must go to war for this or that reason.”- Howard ZinnHistory provides a source of personal and social identity.History is a corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.History can be entertainment.“History can help us shake off the shackles of ethnocentrism and the debilitating bias of cultural and racial purity…History helps us to illuminate the human condition.” - Lester Stephens History, when studied, can teach many critical skills.History helps us understand the problems of the present.History can help one develop tolerance and open-mindedness.History provides a source of personal and social identity."Histories make men wise; poets, witty; the mathematics, subtle; natural philosophy, deep; moral, grave; logic and rhetoric, able to contend." - Sir Francis Bacon History is a corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past.History helps us understand the problems of the present.History helps us better understand all aspects of the human behavior and condition.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.History, we can confidently assert, is useful…Without it…, life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those… experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.” - Henry Steele Commager History is a corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past.History helps us understand the problems of the present.History helps us better understand all aspects of the human behavior and condition.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.“History is a means of access to ourselves.” -Lynn White, Jr. History provides a source of personal and social identity.History can help one develop tolerance and open-mindedness.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.History, when studied, can teach many critical skills.“The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.” - Gerda Lerner History provides a source of personal and social identity.History helps us understand the problems of the present.History can be entertainment.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.“There are two roads to the reformation for mankind—one through misfortunes of their own, the other through the misfortunes of others; the former is the most unmistakable, the latter the less painful…the knowledge gained from the study of true history is the best of all educations for practical life.” - PolybiusHistory helps us better understand all aspects of the human behavior and condition.History helps us understand the problems of the present.History can help one develop tolerance and open-mindedness.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.10. “An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.” - Ambrose BierceHistory provides a source of personal and social identity.History is a corrective for misleading analogies and “lessons” of the past.History provides the basic background for many other disciplines.History can be entertainment.Name: _____________________________________ Score: ______________Course/Year/Section: ______________________ Date: _______________Exercise 1.2As a student of history, reading a historical account is not simply like reading a novel or a comic book. A learner should also know how to distinguish which of those sentences or paragraphs that make up the narrative are facts or opinions. Although, a historian attempts to present a history free from biases, it cannot be avoided that personal opinions or interpretations of people, places, or events are integrated in a particular historical account. FACT OR OPINION: Below are excerpts from books, and newspapers. Label each passage either as FACT (F) or OPINION (O). If a passage combines fact and opinion, write “FO” and underline that part of the passage that you think is an opinion or judgment. _____1. “His [Apolinario Mabini] writings, his behavior throughout his life, short as it was, demonstrated extraordinary moral integrity, intense and uncompromising patriotism.” (Roxas-Lim, 2000)_____2. “Defender Juan Luis Guirado fired two goals as Global climbed to top spot with a 5-3 victory over Air Force yesterday in the United Football League at the University of Makati field.” (Tupas, 2012)_____3. “President Marcos, an unscrupulous politician, craftily planned KBL strategy before, during, and after the elections, if need be to steal the results in his favor. No effort was spared in the use of “guns, goons and gold” to intimidate or entice voters to support the Marcos-Tolentino ticket.” (Zaide, 1999)_____4. “One who has visited Jolo can see that beyond the town looms a dominating peak, Mt. Tumatangis, a place held sacred by the Tausugs as the burial grounds of its sultans. The busy pier is called the “Chinese Pier”, obviously used in early times by Chinese trading vessels.” (Patan?e, 1996)_____5. “Yay Panlilio [was] a pre-war newspaperwoman. As early as April 1942, she began serving as G-2 agent in Manila for the USAFFE headquarters. [A military citation to her credit reads]: ‘Through her untiring efforts and selflessness…in supplying…information concerning Japanese…activities…many American lives were saved.’” (Baclagon, 1968)_____6. “Despite what others may say to the contrary, Baguio is still the undisputed “summer capital” of our lovely archipelago of delicious coconuts, smiling carabaos and several wine-loving Padre Damasos.” (Keith, 2012)_____7. “Returning to the Philippines early in 1901, [Isabelo] de los Reyes…founded the first labor union in the Philippines: Union Obrera Democratica…[In]1902, [he] called a meeting of his Democratic Labor Union…and delivered a[n] anti-friar speech…and proposed the establishment of a Filipino Church independent of Rome…” (Agoncillo, 1990)_____8. “Young, enthusiastic, and fired with a Messianic fervor, Magsaysay enlisted the help not only of the governmental agencies, but also of the civic organizations in the vast undertaking of ‘bringing freedom and progress to the barrios.’” (Agoncillo, 1990)_____9. “On December 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed. It provided that Spain would cede the Philippines to the United States in return for which she [Spain] would receive $20,000,000 from the United States…” (Agoncillo, 1990)_____10. “The Islamized ethnic communities in the southern Philippines, collectively called Moros by the Spaniards, were the first communities in the Philippines to be united by a world religion with a distinct political system, the sultanate.” (Evangelista, 2002)_____________________________________________________________________________________References for Chapter 1:Adam, W. 1862. An inquiry into the theories of history with special reference to the principles of the positive philosophy. Retrieved from , T.A. 1990. History of the Filipino people. 8th edition. Quezon City: GAROTECH Publishing. Churchill, B. (ed.). 2003. History and Culture, Language and Literature: Selected Essays of Teodoro A. Agoncillo. Manila: UST Publishing House, 2003. Article retrieved from , U.S. 1968. They served with honor: Filipino war heroes of World War II Quezon City: DM Press, Inc., p. 195.BrainyQuote. 2012. David McCullough quotes. Retrieved from . 2012. Walter Scoot quotes. Retrieved from , D.F. 2002. Communism in history and theory: The European experience. Retrieved from , O.L. 2002. Building the national community. Quezon City: New day Publishers.Furay, C. and Salevouris, M. 1988. The methods and skills of history: A practical guide Illinois: Harlan Davidson, Inc.Keith, G. (2012, March 18). G-String: Respite from the summer heat. Baguio Midland Courier. Retrieved from Khalid, H.R. Book of famous quotes. Retrieved from Hart, B.H.1971. Why don’t we learn from history? Retrieved from , E.P. 1996. The Philippines in the 6th to the 16th centuries. Metro Manila: LSA Press, Inc., p. 75. QuoteWorld. 2012. Sir Francis Bacon. Retrieved from , A. 2000. Apolinario Mabini and the National Church. In National Commission for Culture and the Arts’ The Philippines after the Revolution: 1898-1945 Philippines: National Commission for Culture and the Arts, p. 49.Salazar, Z. 2006. Bagong Kasaysayan. Speech delivered at the 4th National BAKAS Seminar at Colegio de San Juan de Letran, Intramuros, Manila.Tupas, C.P. (2012, March 25). Global grounds Air Force, grabs lead. Philippine Daily Inquirer. Retrieved from Quotes. 2012. Gerda Lerner quotes. Retrieved from Quotes. 2012. Henry Steele Commager quotes. Retrieved from Wisdom Quotes. 2012. Howard Zinn quotes. Retrieved from , S.M. 1999. The Philippines: A unique nation. 2nd ed. Quezon City: All-Nations Publishing Co., Inc., p. 397. ................
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