Major in Historical Reasoning at Ashland University
Monday, March 30th, 2009Historical reasoning is the ability to interpret human events that occurred in the past. Amid the variety and perplexity of past human life the historical thinker can evaluate the forces both of continuity and change in a given political and social order or in a succession of orders. The historical thinker both describes the past and attempts to explain historical causation. As such, the Historical Reasoning course in the Core should teach students how to follow, interpret, and compare major events in human history. To this end, the course should not simply be a given subject area arranged in chronological order. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for having courses on the History of Philosophy, the History of Economics, the History of Religion, and so on. But unless their primary purpose is to teach students to reason historically, unless the given subject matter is merely a means to the end of interpreting human events, such courses should be taught in their respective disciplines rather than in the Core under the rubric of Historical Reasoning.
History is a unique discipline in that it has no single text or type of text from which the student discovers meaning. Indeed, the greatest difficulty for a historical thinker is to collect, understand, and prioritize the multitude of sources from any given period. To interpret the past the historical thinker might have recourse to a political speech, a prayer, a play, a philosophical tract, a marriage vow, a diary, the population of a given city, statistics of industrial output, a painting. Anyone who approaches the past by using only one type of source has already decided, perhaps mistakenly, that the act or idea represented by that source caused events. For example, the student who reads only philosophy assumes that ideas invariably cause changes in history rather than interests, technological developments, aesthetic pursuits, or religious beliefs. Since “history” in its ultimate sense is a compelling, truthful, and integrated narrative of the human story, the academic discipline of history becomes the one which evaluates the competing claims that other disciplines naturally make about given moments in time. Insofar as the Historical Reasoning course will serve as students’ introduction to history, it is strongly urged therefore that they learn how to reason historically largely through the reading and discussion of primary sources and that these sources reflect the variety of past human experience.
This ability to reason historically is highly gratifying in itself since it follows the Greek command to “know thyself,” the essential pursuit of any humane individual. History specifically enables human beings to know themselves through the study of their political, cultural, and moral inheritances. The study of history enables people to understand fully their ideas and institutions by tracing them to their foundations and exploring their change over time. Furthermore, history challenges present assumptions by confronting students with forms of action and thought altogether different from those with which they are familiar. History is also useful since it trains the mind to interpret any human events, past or present. No promises can be made here. Yet it is no accident that some of the most prescient thinkers and statesmen in modern times have been historians or very close students of history: the American Founders, Tocqueville, Burckhardt, Churchill, George F. Kennan.