What are the core skills required to write good history today

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What are the core skills required to write good history today?

In order to identify what the core skills are required to write an example of good history today, first the concept of history itself must be examined, defined and placed in context. It is clear that history is not a strictly well-defined discipline, integrating a combination of sub-genres such as political, social, religious, gender, and imperial history, with various theories of meta-narrative history such as Marxism, Empiricism and, to an extent, Postmodernism. To further aid the confusion of a clear definition, the term history has its own social and cultural context within any given society. However, even amidst this, it appears that the main consensus, at least in the academic field, is that history can be defined as ‘the study and interpretation of the record of human people, families, and societies’.

Now that a definition has been identified, although it is albeit rather limited in terms of explaining the various theories and sub-categories of the historical discipline, what must be examined next are the skills required to write an example of such history. Essentially the origins of any piece of history stem from two main fundamental methods, research and writing, and thus by employing these two methods a text is created.

Research is the fundamental step towards writing history, for without it, there would be nothing to write about. To write good history the author must perform valid research and abide by certain rules. First and foremost, any historian should realise that ‘the study of history…amounts to a search for the truth’. Yet, while researching the facts and events on their chosen subject, historians must consider an important issue, that of the possibility of historical truth. The issue then becomes how one can know the truth, and to what extent is the reality that a historian writes ‘real’, or just a reconstruction of reality combined with the author’s inherent political, social, and cultural views. G.R. Elton argues that a ‘trust in the absoluteness of historical facts has now been replaced by a general supposition that the facts of history are only historian’s constructs’. Therefore before writing any form of historical text, the author (or author-to-be) must bear in mind that absolute historical truth is a hotly-debated subject.

In addition to the limitations of historical truth in performing research, further complications become apparent; the nature of objectivity in history and the validity of the sources used in research. A historian must become competent in understanding these in order to write good history.

In terms of sources, it is advisable for historians to realise that ‘historical research…consists of an exhaustive…review of everything that may conceivably be germane to a given investigation’. Sources however can come in all different formats, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and so it is up to the historian to sift through what is required, and what would provide the most insight. The answer to this, argues the Empiricists, lies in Rankean values, used to denote the process of carefully scrutinising original sources to find their value and usefulness.

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This it seems is one of the key concepts in using sources in historical research (the other being, faced with an abundance of choice, choosing which sources to select). One way of doing this is to asses their inherent strengths and weaknesses. For example, there is a clear contrast between public and private primary sources, being that public ones were intended to be read (even if it an image as all sources can be described as texts, which require ‘reading’), and private ones were not. Moreover, it is practically impossible to give higher authority over another based on their ...

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