What is history, what is its purpose and how do historians achieve it? History is an interpretation of the past, shaped into a story or narrative that uses verifiable data or information, primarily taken from the time period being studied. Most students mistakenly assume that the facts such as names, dates, places and events play a singular role in the writing of history. Data, facts and information play an essential role, but taken alone, these items are not history. Rather, they are the ingredients of history. History requires authorship, the writing of the story and the interpretation of information. Imagine a kitchen with five ingredients on the counter. We cannot determine the recipe or the dish that will be prepared until the chef puts the ingredients together in a specific way and not until we can test the final outcome to determine if the ingredients really do work together in the way the chef intended. Using this same analogy, we know that twenty different chefs could take the same five ingredients and create twenty distinct recipes.
Authorship in the writing of history follows these same patterns of methodology, interpretation and perspective. The study of history is malleable and flexible because authorship, i.e. the historian's methodology, interpretation and perspective, changes the ways a society views and understands events. It is also flexible because research may reveal new facts. If we use our analogy of the kitchen with five ingredients, we know that the recipe and the outcome must change if we add new ingredients. Historical interpretation therefore shifts as researchers dig for new facts that change the entire story.
Authorship of the research and writing of history requires the student of history, the reader, to ask these essential questions:
Starting in the 1950s, historians began to change their interpretations of United States history. First, they recognized that all people in the nation had played significant roles in the formation of the nation, including its government, culture, economy, physical environment, values and beliefs. Second, they used new methods to pose questions to and about people who had not left many or obvious written records, the most common source of historical information. Third, they began to look at new areas of life as worthy of research and interpretation: private life and the domestic sphere; material culture (the items people use in daily living: clothing, food, architecture, art and artifacts); and oral history. Fourth, historians began to reject the way historical interpretation accepted and used social and political norms as truth. Let's examine each of these major shifts and the ways that the Amistad curriculum reflects these changes.