Understanding History: Sources and Significance

1. History is our knowledge of the past and involves the study of its records or sources of information.

2. Why Study History? • Place names • Personal names • Language origins • Values & Beliefs • Institutions • kisiskâciwani-sîpiy, “swift flowing river,” is Saskatchewan • Johannson “son of Johann” • “Politics” from Greek, “algebra” from Arabic, “restaurant” from French • Ideas such as “democracy” from Greece • The speaker in parliament

3. Memory • Gives us a personal past • History preserves memories • Provide a shared sense of identity • Is unreliable • May create a false version of events (deliberate or unintentional)

4. Historical Thinking • Never-ending debate about why something happened, its results and its importance • Can’t know the past directly; only indirectly through evidence (words, thoughts, records of people who experienced it) • Lots we can’t know because no records or incomplete • Need to understand the difference between facts & interpretations • Need to be skeptical

5. Archives • Archives are collections of visual, written and oral records kept in special building or rooms • May be used to research family history, land claims, property titles

6. Museums • Are places where objects of permanent interest are preserved, studied & exhibited • May specialize in one aspect such as natural history, war, transportation • Living museums allow visitors to travel back to the past and see what life was like Western Development Museum, Saskatoon

7. Primary Sources • Anything that existed at the time being researched • Examples: diary, photograph, map, census, letter, church records

8. Secondary Sources • Anything that was created or written after an event occurred

9. Historians & History • sources may be incomplete, biased or inaccurate • Sources need to be organized to make a point • History combines description, explanation, and interpretation but interpretation must be based on the evidence • History is both a science and an art • Science because historians find evidence, test it, and provide theories • Art because sources must tell a story

10. His story or Her story? • Most history written by men, about men & their activities • Women only remembered if important in men’s lives such as Elizabeth I, Joan of Arc • Women’s movement of 1960’s changed things • Now looking at women’s work, marriage, childbirth & rearing (women’s place in society

11. Social History • Most history written to remember & praise famous people • Used to make people proud of their tribe, religion, & country • Used as way to prove one group superior over the other • Social history is story of everyone & everything: crime, family, work, institutions

12. Oral history • Gained by interviewing people with personal knowledge/experience • Another type of evidence • Primary source of First Nations people of Canada • Passed on from generation to generation • Interview famous & common people • Disadvantage: people forget, may not remember accurately, not tell truth

13. Visual History • Objects & representations such as building, clothing, pottery, paintings, cartoons, maps, photographs, posters, • Reveal things about ideas and beliefs of people who created them • Painting often done to make a point, flatter the subject • How reliable is the source of information? Why was it created?

14. How reliable is this for 2010 fashion?

15. 1950’s 1930’s 1980’s

16. Visual history