Lesson One: Introduction to

History
Vocabulary
Words
History (noun): the study or description of past events

Historical (adjective): of or concerning history

Historic (adjective): famous important in history

Historian (noun): student of, or expert in, history

Temporal (adjective): of or limited by time

Narrative (noun): description of events

Framework (noun): set of principles or ideas

Interpretation (noun): explanation or understanding of something

Evidence (noun): facts, signs, or objects that make you believe something is true

Record (noun): written account of facts, events, etc

There is a slight difference between saying something is ‘historical’ and saying

something is ‘historic’:

Generally, when we say something is “historical”, we mean that it has a relation to

history.
Examples ➔ I like reading historical novels.
➔ We need to investigate the historical context of this phenomenon.
➔ Who is your favourite historical figure?

Generally, when we say something is “historic”, we are implying that it has a degree
of importance or that it is famous by virtue of its historical significance.
Examples ➔ The first moon landing was a historic moment for humanity.
➔ This country is home to many historic cities.
➔ Martin Luther King's historic speech was entitled “I have a Dream”.

Lesson One: Introduction to History 1

 📌 Anything related to history is historical, but only something that has a historical
significance (importance) is historic.

Expressions
the patterns in which historical events play out tend to happen time and
❝history repeats itself❞
time again in similar ways

when events, dates, or figures “go down in history”, it means that they
❝go down in history❞
are so important that they will be remembered

❝change the course of if a thing makes a deep impact on something or influences it in a

events❞ drastic way, that thing changes the initial trajectory of events

Grammar
Adjectives
Adjectives go before a noun.
➔This is a historical novel. (NOT This is a novel historical.)

Adjectives don't change before a plural noun.

➔These are historical novels. (NOT These are historicals novels.)

We also use adjectives after the verb ‘to be’.

➔This novel is historical.

Word Building
Notice how in the vocabulary section, you encountered the following words:

history historical historic historian

Let’s take the word ‘historian’ and see how it was built:

We started with the word ‘history’, we dropped the ‘y’, and we added ‘-ian’:
history→histor→historian.

🚩 We omitted the ‘y’ from ‘history’ to make ‘historian’ for the sake of spelling.

Lesson One: Introduction to History 2

 ‘Historian’ is the name of a profession. When we deal with professions:

We often add ‘-er’ / ‘-or’ to a verb.

➔ write : writer / act : actor

We often add ‘-ian’ / ‘-ist’ to a noun.

➔ music : musician / science : scientist

Text
History is a kind of research or inquiry concerned with the past. The delimitations of this
form of thought are set by people who have two main qualifications. They need to have
experience of said form of thought and they need to reflect on that experience, meaning they
must be both historians and philosophers. History deals with past events and what historians
seeks to do is to explain these events by reconstituting what happend in the past. In order to
do so, historians interpret evidence. In the interpretative process, they need to select certain
facts and reject others, and they must also fill in the gaps found in records by making
deductions of facts. The reason historians proceed by the interpretation of evidence is that,
from one hand, there are far too many historical facts to include in their explanations and
from the other hand, there are not enough facts to permit a plausible explanation of a given
event. All these efforts made by historians give history the value that it holds today which is
teaching us what man has done and thus what man is, in addition to contributing to other
sciences through its cataloguing operations.

Further Reading
Becker, Carl L.“What are Historical Facts?”. The Western Political Quarterly, vol. viii, no 3,
1955, pp. 327-340.

Sources
—Collingwood, Robin George. The Idea of History. Revised edition, Oxford University
Press, 1993.

—Latham-Koeing, Christina, et al. English File. Fourth edition, Oxford University Press,
2019.

—Oxford Learner’s Pocket Dictionary. Third edition, Oxford University Press, 2003.
—“What's the difference between 'historic' and 'historical'?”. Merriam-Webster,
https://merriam-webster.com.

—White, Hayden. “Interpretation in History”. New Literary History, vol. 4, no. 2, 1973, pp.
281-314.

Lesson One: Introduction to History 3