Aren’t “history” and “the past” the same thing?

The past is not the same as history. The past involves everything that ever happened since the beginning of time, every thought and action of each and every human being on the planet, every tree that fell in the forest, and every chemical transformation in this universe and others since the dawn of time. History, by contrast, is an interpretation, or rather a process by which people interpret records left over from the past. History is a process of interpreting evidence in a thoughtful and informed way. History is the narrative that gives meaning, sense and explanatory force to the past in the present.

While historians tend to use written documents to understand the past, they are not limited to those kinds of records. No statement can be made about the past without evidence that has lasted through time, whether that evidence is written, pictorial, archaeological or spoken. We simply cannot know about it if there is no trace left over.

Not only does a record of an event, or thought, or belief have to be created, but it has to be preserved if people are going to know about it later. A record about the past usually only exists because of a decision, conscious or not, that someone has made about what is important. Who determines what records are created and what records are preserved? And then who determines, and on what basis, what historians might be interested in?

Historians differ among themselves in terms of what is important when they come to write their histories.

You should consider the possibility that the truth is really NOT out there. The past really is gone; it simply does not exist anymore. The best that people can do is to make reasonable evaluations of the available evidence, examined in the context of what other people have thought about the event or behaviour or belief. Even the first act of critical inquiry that defines historical research, the decision about what to write about, is an act of interpretation.

The second act, that of selecting evidence about the topic, is also interpretive: why use official records? Why not personal diaries? Or census records? Why, maybe choose, gender and marital status records? Each of those will give the historian a slightly different interpretation of “what happened” in in the past.

Every decision about what to look at, and why, reflects the historian’s decision about what matters in society, past and present. One important note here, most people who are not historians still hold on to the belief that the only way that we can know about history is to read the eyewitness accounts of those who were there to experience events. They have little familiarity with reading primary sources “against the grain,” with finding more in a historical account than the author intended by reading the testimony for evidence. They also have little familiarity with the related idea that historians do more than simply list the facts delivered by these eyewitness accounts. Historians move beyond the testimony given by individuals, to interpret a broad range of documents within the context of meaningful questions that are asked about the past. The question “What were the long-term consequences of a National Policy?” for instance, could not be answered simply by eyewitness accounts. It requires the interpretation of a broad range of evidence on a variety of topics, maybe trade relations or standard of living and even, perhaps, morbidity rates.

In order to make a useful interpretive statement about the evidence from the past, historians need to incorporate their interpretations in a meaningful narrative, one that makes sense of the evidence they have examined in a number of contexts. Historians need to make sense, in other words, not only of other evidence from the past, but of what other historians have said about that evidence. They also often address the kinds of issues and questions in which people are interested in the present as well. The narrative, then, must demonstrate not only the reasonableness of the interpretation, but also its significance, past and present.

So, here are the five points that I have highlighted in the contingent and constructed nature of history-as-process:

1. a record must be created (if only a remembrance residing in someone’s memory);
2. the record has to be preserved over time;
3. the record has to be found by someone, and considered significant (i.e., at the time that it is found);
4. what is documented, preserved and considered significant has to be interpreted in the context of both primary and secondary sources; and
5. this evidence must be incorporated into a meaningful historical narrative.