ToK Unit: History

History has always been my weak area. I remember telling one friend whose weak subject was also history, “I always struggle learning history because the question, ‘How do they know that they’re true and why do we need to know?’ always pops up in my head whenever I try.” Of course, I have no rights to doubt the historians’ skills, but I would always wonder how people could read and think about history believing that they actually happened.

To me, “history” is and will probably always be a big mystery. When Carl L. Becker stated that “the historian cannot eliminate the personal equation” (335), it made me even more sceptical about what people call historical “facts.” If historians interpret the events differently, then how can we know which ones to believe in? Will it depend on each reader's level of satisfaction when labelling historical facts as “facts”? I would argue that although there will be preferences within one person to another, there will always be a general idea for each history since in my opinion, one historical event leads to another and there is no single individual event. The statement that Becker had made would always be true since interpreting an event, or the act of interpreting itself would always involve a person’s experience and emotions. For this, perhaps it is a matter of how neutral a historian’s standing point can be in terms of emotions.

Additionally, Becker suggested that it is unlikely that no person knows zero history because whatever action a person makes is based on their past. (338) However, will the past necessarily be history? I believe that the definition of “history” depends on each individual. Some may study history merely for knowing what the human beings were like in the past, while some may study history to “learn from the past” so as to ultimately become a better person. Here, this sentence contained both “history” and “past” just like in many other sources that talk about history. I would claim that history will always be about the past, that is, the time before the present, but the past will not always be history. There is a connotation in the term “history” that in order to be able to label an event as history, it needs to be a prominent event that inevitably creates a remark, thus affecting many other events. A person’s one simple past event (e.g. buying an ordinary apple from a grocery store) may be long forgotten as it did not affect the person’s life or behaviours, but a major event (e.g. becoming the C.E.O of a company) can be considered as history since it is likely that it had affected not only one person but many other people and events.

In conclusion, the history will always be a big viscous subject or notion as it is difficult to completely solidify a historical fact, and some “facts” may be more real than the others. To actually believe whether it is true or not will always depend on each individual, but I believe that history is essential to everyone for building experiences and making actions each day.