The IB Review recently had an article on Knowledge Questions that links to the next AOK of knowledge we will look at, History. The following is suggested as an exemplar Knowledge Question: “What are the consequences for historical knowledge when trying to apply a scientific method in justifying historical claims?’
One of the current Grade 12’s Assessed Presentation was on the Afghan war, its aftermath, and whether history can provide an adequate understanding of this troubling series of events. The student quoted the historian Carl Becker;
“The value of history is, indeed, not scientific but moral: by liberalizing the mind, by deepening the sympathies, by fortifying the will, it enables us to control, not society, but ourselves – a much more important thing; it prepares us to live more humanely in the present and to meet rather than to foretell the future”.
Becker was the President of the US Historical Society. Here is some background. “In 1931, Carl Becker delivered what remains the single most famous Presidential Address in the history of the American Historical Association. Entitled “Everyman His Own Historian,” Becker’s speech continued his, by then, decades-old assault on the “scientific school” of history, which believed that the historian’s task was simply to correctly assemble the facts of the past, which would, in turn, interpret themselves. In its place Becker proposed a vision of history that was both more relativistic and more populist. His address was greeted with a standing ovation and has been celebrated in the ensuing decades as both laying the foundations for, and anticipating, many of the changes in history writing that would take place over the course of the next several decades.” Society for US Intellectual History
From Becker’s speech itself:
“History as the artificial extension of the social memory (and I willingly concede that there are other appropriate ways of apprehending human experience) is an art of long standing, necessarily so since it springs instinctively from the impulse to enlarge the range of immediate experience; and however camouflaged by the disfiguring jargon of science, it is still in essence what it has always been. History in this sense is story, in aim always a true story; a story that employs all the devices of literary art (statement and generalization, narration and description, comparison and comment and analogy) to present the succession of events in the life of man, and from the succession of events thus presented to derive a satisfactory meaning. The history written by historians, like the history informally fashioned by Mr. Everyman, is thus a convenient blend of truth and fancy, of what we commonly distinguish as “fact” and “interpretation.” ” Everyman his own Historian
