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At first, I thought it would be about some definition or information about the subject history but after reading E.H Carr’s book, I realized there’s more to us than meets the eye. I now found that history isn’t just a mere subject of the past; it’s more than that. I got the image of history, not just being a record of dates but how historians arrange the facts by looking through the evidence and influencing them with their own knowledge of context so that they can get the historical meaning. This has changed my sense of history from being an obsolete subject to a more sophisticated one. One’s perspective is the major factor governing the meaning of history. The book mainly deals with E.H Carr’s perception of history as subjective and stresses his core ideas according to E.H Carr,” how history is written depends on when its written and who writes it and that narratives created aren’t objective as they evolve from a selection of evidence”. And after experiencing this, it has given me the idea or impression that history merely depends on the historian and his facts; history mainly is an interpretation, and it differs from one's perspective.
To begin with, Karl Marx stated that history is “the study of effects of mankind to control nature and sources of production.” Well for me this isn’t meant as history isn’t just about the production of goods and services in the past. It’s more related to the historian and his facts in finding the meaning of history. According to E.H Carr,” historical judgments include persons and the person’s point of view”, basically what one thinks about an object or an event and how one looks at it. I learned that historians and facts are important sources for writing history. Both of them are correlated as if one doesn’t exist, the other can’t exist. I have known that there is a never-ending relation between the historian and the facts; the historian is from the present and the evidence is from the past, so it is a continuous connection between the past and the present. In this context, facts refer to the raw materials and evidence for writing history. This information could be important to me as a student of history as having analyzed, I have now known that history is written through the selection of these data and facts as a core of information and then it is interpreted by the historian or the person trying to find meaning in history
In addition, I found that history isn’t just a social subject on production but deals more with one's understanding and what one gets from a certain topic through his or her interpretation. I have significantly improved my understanding of history through the idea of interpretation; one cannot change the past but one can interpret the past in his or her words in history so this was the thought that made sense to me about what history actually meant and how it works. Most of the information about the past that we know today is written through the historian’s interpretation and understanding. For example, the idea of revolution in the past is quite different from the idea in today’s context. This might be because of different interpretations given by different writers and this reveals that history isn’t just a road-learning subject, it also deals with one’s own idea about that particular topic or event and how one understands it through his or her view. So it has developed my ability to understand history through my own opinion and made me realize that there is a difference in the way one sees things because at the end, it all depends on one's perspective.
And lastly, the major comparison is in one's perspective or how one looks at a thing. According to E.H Carr, “the facts are available to historians in documents, inscriptions and so on, like fish on the fish monger’s slabs. The historian collects them, takes them home, and cooks and serves them in whatever style appeals to him.” From this, I got the significance of the role of perspective in history. It isn’t just how one writes about the past but how one sees the past from his or her own point of view and interprets it. So I basically got the knowledge that it’s not all about detailing the information and facts but about what one gets from this evidence, and how one makes it in his or her own variation and explaining ideas in a way that’s different from others' view, like making your own creation out of obsolete material and using it to create a more easy and understandable pattern for oneself.
So therefore, after having read this book I now got an idea of what is history and how its definition and understanding defers from one person to another, that it is mainly the perspective of the person that influences the meaning of the subject. I also got an idea that it’s not the objectivity but the subjectivity of the subject that’s more relaxed and gives more significance to history. Having experienced this assignment I now think that the subject of history isn’t just a school subject but it is practically a complex one that has a lot of steps, branches, and relations with other subjects. I also learned that one cannot be biased while writing history or interpreting it, one has to be open while doing this and cannot always be positive about it. One can explain or express his or her ideas in their own manner and or cannot be judged by others just because one's idea is not as similar to the other. So overall, I feel that one has to understand the facts before going any deeper within and that it is not what the reader thinks but how the writer expresses his or her ideas in a different and unique, and how these influence the people; making them have thought and analyzing it so that they can apply in reality.
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