Historical Perspective.

Each an every historian will have a conflicting self-value belief when looking into history and this can hinder their research. Historical perspective is understanding the differences in the past that separate us from our research and becoming the research, in other words putting ourselves in their shoes. According to The Historical Thinking Project taking historical perspectives means “understanding the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional settings that shaped people’s lives and actions in the past.” This is a challenge for many historians for the reasons of having history bias. For example a scholar could look at the examples left behind by earlier humans and come up with different conclusions based on their own values. Understanding the faith or practice that the people had in that time is important to understanding history. It is important to take everything into consideration first before looking at other people’s theories and opinions. If a historian fails at ridding of their bias their perspective can be spewed. This could lead to hearing only things that match up with what you want to hear. The Cascajal Block has been a controversial topic among researchers. Due to it being found by a bull dozer and that it doesn’t match up with the design of other writing surrounding areas they aren’t sure that it is valid proof. However some researchers believe that this is valid and shows insects, corn, houses and other symbols that could symbolize civilizations. Historical empathy is also known as historical perspective it is understanding the lives of the people living in the past. How is historical empathy different than emotional empathy? Historical empathy is more broad focusing on the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional aspects that shaped people’s lives in the past.

Things that the first civilizations had in common dating back to 3000 B.C.E. were that these civilizations had Influence of culture, religion, hierarchy, and location. These civilizations build and change of each other’s ideas which we can see to this day with the culture that we have. We can see that each web of civilizations contain hierarchy where ordinary civilians get taxed and give resources to their social superiors which is where we get the ideas we have today. Another thing that all these civilizations have in common is trading. They traded food, knowledge, culture, and beliefs. In Module three we see the importance of written records and how it shows the resemblance of culture and beliefs between neighboring civilizations. Things that our present civilizations had with those in the past is location, culture, social, political. We still have a hierarchy but now we refer to it as Capitalism. The majority of cities in the world are predominately next to rivers or water mass just as in ancient times. And we have taken ALL of our culture from history. We have more in common to past civilizations than I ever knew. However things that are different are that we have a more structured hierarchy. Most of our political ideas have derived from the Romans and Greeks but has changed a tremendous amount.

Historical perspective brings researchers into a more depth understanding of what they are studying and maybe why they are studying it. Historical perspective makes history not only mere dates and events, but a 3D dive into intellectual behavior, social class, politics, and culture helping us to have empathy and to take on values that they carried.