Great IdeasStories, art and words
Telling the past
How historians find out what happened and why.
The question
How do we find out what happened in the past, and why? Can history teach us anything?
How the books answer
Oldest first. Each stop is our own short summary of what the author argued; follow the link to the rung for the whole lesson.
c. 430 BC
Herodotus, The History (the Persian Wars)
Herodotus is called the father of history. His word for his work, historiē, means inquiry. He traveled, asked questions and told what different peoples said, sometimes adding that he didn't believe a story himself. He wanted great deeds not to be forgotten.
after 431 BC; unfinished
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides tried to be more exact than Herodotus. He checked eyewitness accounts against each other and left out stories he thought were fables. He wrote, he said, a possession for all time, hoping it would help future readers understand events like these.
c. AD 100–120
Plutarch, The Lives: Theseus, Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander and the other Greeks
Plutarch says he writes lives, not histories. A small saying or a joke may show character better than a great battle. History, for him, is a gallery of examples to learn from.
“It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives.”
c. AD 100–117
Tacitus, The Annals and The Histories
Tacitus promises to write without anger or bias, though he lived under the emperors he describes. He shows how fear bent the truth and how a few honest people held to their principles. His sharp, short sentences are famous.
“Hence my purpose is to relate a few facts about Augustus—more particularly his last acts, then the reign of Tiberius, and all which follows, without either bitterness or partiality, from any motives to which I am far removed.”
AD 413–426
Augustine of Hippo, The City of God
Augustine reads all of history as the story of two cities, the earthly and the heavenly, mixed together until the end of time. History, for him, has a direction and a meaning given by God. It was one of the first full philosophies of history.
1776–1781
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (first half)
Gibbon writes the history of Rome's long fall, based on careful reading of ancient sources. He blames many causes: overgrown size, armies that made emperors, and, controversially, changes in religion. His elegant style made history a great work of literature.
“But the decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.”
lectures 1822–1831; published 1837
G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History
Hegel argues that history is not random but the unfolding of freedom through the rise and fall of peoples. Yet he also says peoples and governments rarely learn anything from history. Each age faces its own situation.
“But what experience and history teach is this,—that peoples and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
1848
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
Marx and Engels read history as a series of struggles between economic classes, each era shaped by how people produce goods. Their view has influenced many historians, and many others have challenged it.
1865–1869
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Tolstoy breaks off his novel to argue with historians. They say great men make history, he complains, but history comes from the actions of countless ordinary people. No single cause can explain a war.
1919 (English 1924)
Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (in the set: The Autumn of the Middle Ages)
Huizinga tries to recover how people of the late Middle Ages felt: their colors, sounds, ceremonies and moods. History, for him, includes the feel of an age, not just its wars and kings.
“To the world when it was half a thousand years younger, the outlines of all things seemed more clearly marked than to us.”
For young readers
History is the story of what happened in the past. Historians are like detectives: they look for clues, like old letters, buildings and objects, and ask people what they remember.
Not every story about the past is true, so historians check their clues carefully. Try being a historian: ask a grandparent about when they were your age, and write down what they say.
Talk about it
- Why is it important to remember the past?
- Herodotus wrote down stories even when he wasn't sure they were true. Was that a good idea?
- Can history teach us lessons? Hegel had doubts. What do you think?
- Tolstoy thought ordinary people shape history. How do you shape your family's history?
- What clues would a future historian find about your life?
Where else on the site
- Primary and Secondary Sources
- Judging Sources
- Causes, Effects and Change Over Time
- Sources for Egyptian History
- Reading a Source: HIPP
Every rung tagged with this idea:
- Herodotus: The Histories
- Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War
- Plutarch: Lives of the Greeks
- Plutarch: Lives of the Romans
- Tacitus: The Annals and The Histories
- Augustine: The City of God
- Shakespeare: The History Plays
- Gibbon: The Decline and Fall, I
- Gibbon: The Decline and Fall, II
- Hegel: The Philosophy of History
- Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto
- Tolstoy: War and Peace
- Whitehead: Science and the Modern World
- Frazer: The Golden Bough
- Huizinga: The Waning of the Middle Ages
These pages are our own short synthesis, written for families. They were inspired by Mortimer J. Adler's Syntopicon, the index of great ideas in volumes 1 and 2 of Great Books of the Western World, but the questions, summaries and groupings are ours, not the Syntopicon's. Short excerpts come from public-domain translations, credited where they appear.