The study of history depends heavily on the way it is written. Events in history have been conveyed in many different forms, some being more factual, while others contain a story within the facts in order to spark an interest for the reader. The different styles of writing and the way you retain the information can facilitate or debilitate the quality of the information remembered and the quantity of information remembered.
The opening lines of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City create a picture of the era. "How easy it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago...The women walked to work on streets that angles past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos... But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading (Larson 12)." Although the minimal amount of pictures debilitates the visual development of readers, thorough descriptions of the setting prove to be a strong factor. Part of learning is visual and providing some figure display of information is extremely beneficial. Furthermore, by getting to know the characters, you begin to understand the lifestyle, thoughts, and feelings of the time period, which would allow you to comprehend the information as you were making analogies to connect the era together. Historical novels tend to teach more of the personal side of history. For instance, the tragedy of the Titanic sinking was revealed through the main character, David Burnham's experience. "That night, in the silence of Burnham's stateroom, as somewhere to the north, the body of his last good friend drifted frozen in the strangely peaceful seas of the North Atlantic, Burnham opened his diary and began to write. He felt an acute loneli...
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...on the American colonies, especially those in New England settled by English Puritans...(Adventure Tales 38)," can bring different aspects of history that may not be seen with just the facts. The connection between what happened in England with the outcome in America is visualized with maps, drawings, and diagrams (Adventure Tales 38) help to enforce the information stated in the short passages. Similar to the narratives, cartoons tell a story. "And so it was that England began founding North American colonies in 1607. A century later, in 1708, the English colonies became British colonies (Adventure Tales 33)." Relaying historical information in story format helps with the chronological information and cause and effect relationships. Therefore, despite sometimes only revealing main ideas and themes, cartoons still have a method of teaching important information.
In the late 1800’s America began to take on its own individual identity as a country. The Chicago World's Fair was a great influence for that notion. In Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City he tells a duel nonfictional storyline of one of the fair’s architects and a serial killer living just outside the fair. By using imagery, juxtaposition, and syntax Larson is able to enchant the reader and make the novel read like a fiction.
In pursuit of national glory, profit and religious mission, England started to explore and conquer the North America. Through the 1600s and the early 1700s, three major colonial regions, the New England colonies, the Middle colonies, and the Southern colonies, formed and developed, and the economic freedom from land owning drew people to the North America. However, during and after the French-Indian War, colonies cooperated to resist British policies and finally declared their independence in 1776.
To study history, the facts and information must be passed down. To do so, historians record the information in textbooks and other nonfiction works. Whether or not the historians retell facts or construct their own version of history is debatable. History can be percieved as being “constructed” by the historians due to their bias, elimination of controversy, strive for entertainment, and neglect to update the information.
The study of past events have been a common practice of mankind since the verbal telling of stories by our ancestors. William Cronon, in his article “Why the Past Matters,” asserts that the remembrance of the past “keeps us in place.” Our individual memories and experiences shape how we act in our daily lives. In addition to influencing us at an individual level, our collective history binds us together as a society. Without knowing where we have been or what we have experienced, it is nearly impossible to judge progress or know which courses of action to pursue. The goal of the historian is to analyze and explain past events, of which they rarely have firsthand memory of, and apply the gained knowledge to make connections with current and future events.
The British colonies of North America took their beginnings in the early part of the sixteen hundreds. At that time Virginia and New England became the first regions to be settled by the English. It was the birth of America as a whole, but it also was the beginnings of two distinct ways of life. The colonies were founded on Independence, but from the start there were two completely different ideas of what that Independence was and what it would mean over time.
Wineburg astutely notes that "History offers a storehouse of complex and rich problems, not unlike those that confront us daily in the real world. Examining these problems requires an interpretive acumen that extends beyond the 'locate information in the text ' skills that dominate many school tasks." (51) By being given the challenge of recognizing and combating natural psychological tendencies towards presentism and ethnocentrism, as well as the challenge of comprehending and analyzing complex and diverse historical sources, biased points of view, cultures, contexts, and historical ramifications, students are encouraged and supported in developing the reasoning skills and patience needed to accurately listen, analyze, empathize, interpret, make evidence-based
For the vast majority of people, reminders are necessary elements for advancement and learning. Likewise, the same can be said of history, which plays an important role in everyone’s lives. In the essay Why Study World History by Jerry Bentley, the author focuses on the intellectual benefits of studying history. However, the essay Why Study History (1998) by Peter N. Stearns discusses the effect of history in a personal and social sense. Though slightly different, the two articles suggest that history is a key factor for understanding, in some form.
History is repetitive and that requires our constant vigilance to thus pay attention (Stearns). It is proven that in history those who do not st...
In all areas of historical study, those who break new grounds of the past are responsible for the recording of events as they go. However, authors of historical scholarship are challenged with several disruptive factors which can inhibit their ability to effectively and accurately determine the most likely truth from t...
Experiences are a very important part in one’s life. They teach us a number of things in life. As we all are different human beings and are brought up in different atmosphere and environment we react in a very different way due to different personalities and perceptions. We as individuals have a very different style of learning things. Different individuals learn things differently some learn through observations, while some learn through personal experiences. In short, it can be said as that different person’s different natures and styles nothing can in common. Our cultural and social influences also vary which also have some impact over our learning styles. Doctors, psychologists have come up with number subjective theories which talk about different styles of learning that an individual can have. Studies have come up with conclusions that learning styles depend on the personality of the individual. Since personality traits of each individual is different the learning styles is also different due to different working patterns that they have. The theories talk about three different types of learning styles, they are activists and reflectors and pragmatists.
Knowledge is gained through a myriad of personal experiences through a variety of ways that shapes a person’s understanding. The knowledge we obtain is the culmination of our experiences as we learn what our brain interprets from our senses. Knowledge is the transmission of information that shapes a person’s understanding on a particular topic using a way of knowing. The language used by others to formulate our own ideas and thoughts produce knowledge. The knowledge obtained can either be objective and subjective. The two areas of knowledge, history and arts, are both typically at fault for being inaccurate or bias. The role of history is to study, interpret and analyse the events of the past and relay these findings through language. Language communicates thoughts and ideas through a verbal or written broadcast, thus allowing knowledge to be conveyed. The arts are a broad area of knowledge that communicate knowledge through the manipulation of our sense perceptions that allow us to experience sensations through any of our five senses. The inaccuracies and biases of these areas of knowledge and ways of knowing is due to the pre-set beliefs and values that affect how an artist or a historian chooses to express a particular message to others. Each historian belongs to a school of historiography that holds the belief that an event was due to a specific set of factors and the language used supports this claim. Similarly, artists utilize our sense perceptions to convey a message through a painting. Arts are a broad area of knowledge to i...
“What is so important about history? Why do we study it? History does not matter, the present is the most important time.” These statements are common among people in this day in age.We view history as obsolete and in the past.There really is no reason to invest in studying something we have already been through right? Well this is not true and I plan to break this stereotype and show why knowing our history and past can help in many areas of our lives and for the the advancement of our race and human beings.
However, it is important as a historian, to keep these mechanisms in check and maintain the tenants of historical writing. As evidenced in this analysis, centuries of historians have grappled with the treatment of these genres. Some argue that analysis is superior to narrative and others believe that narrative is the most important aspect of a successful composition. Similar dissent has taken place regarding the importance of biography in history. Whether the importance of the individual or a broader theme in history or a specific event, it seems as though historians should be left to form their own opinions as long as the necessary bones of historical writing
Thus, using oral traditions for writing history (if it is a possibility) can become very difficult and tricky; this difficulty mainly arises from the basic difference that the process of oral transmission and written transmission have between them. Written transmission has the tradition of keeping records which acts as data for the historians who can go back to those whenever required and write or re-write history accordingly. But the problem of oral transmission is that there is a continuous process of “selection” in practice, that is, only those aspects of the past which has relevance to the society are most likely to the passed down, and as the tradition is preserved because of its current relevance, it may be passed on in a form that upholds and conserves the significance of past events but not necessarily the actual narrative details (Harms,
Although learning style may be simply defined as the way people come to understand and remember information, the literature is filled with more complex variations on this theme. James and Gardner (1995), for example, define learning style as the "complex manner in which, and conditions under which, learners most efficiently and most effectively perceive, process, store, and recall what they are attempting to learn" (p. 20). Merriam and Caffarella (1991) present Smiths definition of learning style, which is popular in adult education, as the "individuals characteristic way of processing information, feeling, and behaving in learning situations" (p. 176). Swanson (1995) quotes Reichmann's reference to learning style as "a particular set of behaviors and attitudes related to the learning context" and also presents Keefe's definition of learning style as "the cognitive, affective, and physiological factors that serve as relatively stable indicators of how learners perceive, interact with, and respond to the learning environment" (p. 2). These definitions have understandable variations as they tend to reflect the perspectives of different learning styles inventories. For example, the Grasha-Reichmann Student Learning Style Scale distinguishes among social interaction preferences, which includes behavior and attitude tendencies (ibid.).