History: Perspective | Quomodo Scimus : IBTOK

areas of knowledge - history

Perspective in History

Who makes history?

You are not a historian

THE PROVOCATION

Begin by watching this short extract from my 2019 film:

History is made by historians

History is made by historians, not simply by anyone interested in the past. Students, teachers, documentary makers and museum curators may all work with history, but their purposes differ. A history teacher’s main job is to educate students and prepare them for exams, not to produce original historical research. Professional historians, usually based in universities, are trained to investigate evidence, build interpretations and contribute to scholarly debate. History, therefore, is a specialised practice, not just knowledge of the past.

The Scope page established a fundamental distinction: history is not the past. The past is everything that has ever happened - it is gone, inaccessible, beyond recovery. History is what historians construct from the traces that remain. That distinction matters here, because it means the knowledge we call history is not discovered but made. It is made by what the IB TOK likes to label a 'community of knowers'.

In TOK terms, every area of knowledge raises the question of whether the identity of the knower affects what is known. In Mathematics, the ideal is that it does not - a proof is valid regardless of who produces it. In Natural Sciences, the experiment should yield the same result whoever runs it. History cannot make that claim. The historian's position - their nationality, their moment in time, the questions their culture has taught them to ask - is not incidental to the knowledge they produce. It is partly constitutive of it. Remember Rouse's white, patriotic sexism in the previous lesson?

That makes the question of who the historians have been an epistemological question, not just a sociological one. If history is what historians make, and historians have historically been a particular kind of person, then the history we have is not a neutral record of the past. It is the record that those particular knowers chose to construct.

The big ideas on this page pursue three related questions. Who has produced historical knowledge - and what did the profile of the historical profession mean for what got written? Whose lives have been considered historically significant - and what has it taken to change that? And who has historical knowledge served - how has the production of history been shaped by the power structures within which historians work? Each question points to a different way in which the position of the knower shapes the knowledge produced.

Big idea 1 - Who gets invited to dinner matters.

When the American Historical Association was founded in 1884, women could join but were excluded from the annual dinner until 1929. That detail stands for something larger. The historical profession as it took its modern form in the nineteenth century was not only male. It was overwhelmingly Western European and North American, drawn from elite universities, writing in a handful of languages. Historians from colonised countries, historians of colour, historians working outside the metropolitan academic centres were as absent from the discipline's self-definition as women were - present occasionally at its margins, absent from the institutions that set its standards.

Bonnie Smith's The Gender of History (1998) documents this for gender in the most sustained way available. The professionalisation of history happened alongside the doctrine of separate spheres. The markers of professional excellence that emerged - archival research, scientific objectivity, detachment from the subject - were built in male institutions, by male historians, at a time when women's participation was institutionally impossible. Women who did write history were classified as amateur by criteria they had no part in setting. The same structural logic applied to historians from the colonised world writing about their own histories: the standards of the discipline were set elsewhere, by people whose relationship to those histories was external.

The feminist response developed in stages. Women's history, emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, added women to existing frameworks, measuring their contribution against male-defined standards of historical significance. Feminist history in the following decade examined women's experience on its own terms, drawing on diaries, oral testimony, and domestic records that conventional archives had ignored.

Joan Scott's 1986 essay "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" made the claim that extends beyond feminist historiography. Gender, Scott argued, functions as an analytical category - a tool for understanding how power operates across all of history. Her definition is precise: gender is "a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and a primary way of signifying relationships of power." The same logic applies to other categories that shaped what the profession could see: colonial position, race, nationality. The historical profession's exclusion of certain knowers from its dinner tables was a symptom of something structural - a set of standards that made certain questions invisible by defining who was qualified to ask them.

Big idea 2 - The enormous condescension of posterity.

For most of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the mainstream of historical writing concerned itself with politics, war, diplomacy, and the decisions of rulers. The question of whose lives deserved serious historical attention had a clear, if unspoken, answer: those who held power, commanded armies, or shaped states. Everyone else - the poor, the colonised, the enslaved, women as historical subjects rather than historical actors in the conventional sense - fell outside what the profession considered historically significant.

E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) made the challenge explicit. Thompson set out to recover the lived experience of working people in early industrial England, treating their lives as the central subject of historical inquiry rather than as background to political events. The sources required were different - trade union records, Methodist meeting minutes, radical pamphlets, the testimony of ordinary men and women before parliamentary committees. The questions were different. And the conception of what mattered historically was different. The moral charge is stated directly in his preface:

"I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity."

The argument extends well beyond the English working class. The subaltern studies school, emerging in the 1980s around the work of Ranajit Guha, asked the same question about colonial India: whose consciousness had been recorded, and whose had been structured out of the archive by colonial rule itself? The problem was compounded there - not just the poor leaving fewer documents, but the colonial apparatus actively shaping what could be known about the colonised. Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (1980) applied the same logic to American history, recovering the perspective of the Arawaks, the enslaved, the dispossessed alongside every major event in the conventional national narrative.

What unites these interventions is an epistemological claim, not just a moral one. What counts as historically significant is not a neutral question. It encodes values about whose agency matters, whose suffering deserves explanation, whose defeat is worth understanding rather than simply recording. The criteria the profession used to determine historical significance were built by a particular kind of person, writing about a particular kind of past - and the consequences of that extended far beyond Europe and far beyond class.

Oral history offered social and feminist historians a way around the archive's built-in exclusions: if the written record preserved the voices of the literate and the powerful, testimony from those who were there could recover what the documents missed. The psychologist Elizabeth Loftus complicates this (core lesson 3) . Her decades of research on eyewitness testimony showed that memory is not a recording but a reconstruction: each time a memory is recalled it is rebuilt, shaped by subsequent events, the accounts of others and the pressures of the moment. False memories can be implanted by a single leading question, and people hold them with the same confidence as genuine ones. This does not invalidate oral history as a method - the voices it recovers remain inaccessible through any other route - but it means that memory as a way of knowing carries its own distortions, distinct from the silences Trouillot identifies. The archive excludes. Memory reconstructs. Both problems require the historian to work with evidence that has already been shaped before it arrives.

E. P. Thompson, key thinker on history perspectives.

Big idea 3 - History is always for someone

The exclusions documented above are consistent enough to require a structural explanation. Jenkins provides one: "History is never for itself; it is always for someone. Accordingly it seems plausible to say that particular social formations want their historians to deliver particular things. It also seems plausible to say that the predominantly delivered positions will be in the interests of those stronger ruling blocs within social formations." Gramsci's concept of hegemony names the mechanism: dominant groups maintain cultural power through the institutions that make certain versions of the past feel natural, and through the educational institutions that determine which version of the past the next generation receives.

Those institutions, on Jenkins' account, are doing exactly what they are designed to do. Universities, as "multi-million pound institutional investments," are "integral to the reproduction of the ongoing social formation and are thus at the forefront of cultural guardianship (academic standards) and ideological control; it would be somewhat careless if they were not." LGBTQ+ history makes this argument concrete. When homosexuality was a criminal offence the state had an active interest in suppressing that history. The clearest instance is the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin in May 1933, the first systematic archive of LGBTQ+ life, over twenty thousand volumes, burned by Nazi students. In England, Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 prohibited schools from presenting LGBTQ+ relationships as anything other than a "pretended family relationship." Teachers like me who entered the profession in the 1990s began their careers under that statutory prohibition; the law remained in force until 2003. Historians such as George Chauncey, Lillian Faderman, and Susan Stryker built the field by recovering what those structures had suppressed and destroyed.

Trouillot - whose argument about power and silence you encountered in the core lesson 4 on perspectives - shows in Silencing the Past (1995) that these silences are produced across the entire process of historical production: in what gets written down, what gets preserved, what gets used, and what becomes the accepted account. His central example is the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804, the first successful slave revolution in history and the foundation of the first Black republic in the Western hemisphere. It remained largely absent from European historical accounts for over a century. The conceptual frameworks available to Western historians had no category for a successful slave revolution; the event was, in Trouillot's word, unthinkable. The silence was a structural property of those frameworks, reproduced at every stage of the process.

Infographic on Silencing the Past and history perspectives.

The perspective of History compared

A knowledge built from traces

The question of knower-dependence looks different depending on which AOK you examine. In Mathematics, the ideal is that the identity of the knower is irrelevant: a proof is valid or invalid regardless of who produces it or what interests they serve. In History, the position of the historian shapes the knowledge they produce. Their moment in time, professional formation, and the questions their society has taught them to ask are all constitutive of what gets written.

Natural Sciences aspire to knower-independence: the experiment should yield the same result whoever runs it, and replication is the mechanism designed to enforce this. In applied science, however, knower-effects have had direct and measurable consequences. Perspectives in Technology covers this in more detail: Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women (2019) documents what she calls the gender data gap: most clinical research has been conducted on male subjects, most safety equipment designed around male bodies, most diagnostic criteria calibrated to male symptom profiles. Women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in an equivalent car crash because crash test dummies were modelled on male physiology. Heart attack symptoms present differently in women - fatigue, nausea, jaw pain - but diagnostic criteria were established from studies that largely excluded female subjects. The knowledge produced was accurate for the population studied. That population was predominantly male because those designing the research were predominantly male, and because the male body was treated as the human default.

The comparison with History is instructive. Both AOKs show that who produces knowledge shapes what gets produced. The difference is in the mechanism of acknowledgement. History has debated this explicitly: the arguments on this page are central to the discipline's self-understanding. The applied sciences have been slower to name the same problem, in part because the commitment to objectivity has made the situated character of the knowledge harder to see. The productive question is what work that commitment is doing in each AOK, and what it costs when it goes unexamined.

Perspective in Human Science makes the same argument with data rather than archives. Henrich’s WEIRD acronym shows psychology built its picture of universal human nature almost entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic subjects, the same kind of exclusion History’s own record keeps producing about whose stories get archived and taught.

Perspective in the Arts pushes the same question furthest. In History, whose account gets told still answers, in principle, to what actually happened. In the Arts, perspective is not a distortion to correct for at all: the identity of the artist, the audience, and the institution that vouches for a work are part of what the work means, not obstacles standing between a viewer and some fact underneath.

Next: Methods and Tools of History

Think further: questions and resources

Thompson set out to rescue working people from "the enormous condescension of posterity" - the tendency of later generations to judge those who lived through historical change by what they failed to achieve. Can historians ever fully escape their own condescension toward the past?
Joan Scott argues that gender is not a topic to add to historical inquiry but "a useful category of historical analysis." If adopting a new analytical category changes what counts as historical evidence, does the category discover history or produce it?
Trouillot argues that the Haitian Revolution remained largely absent from European historical accounts because it was, in his word, "unthinkable" - the conceptual frameworks available had no category for a successful slave revolution. If the frameworks historians use determine what they can see, how can those frameworks ever be corrected from within?
Jenkins argues history is "never for itself; it is always for someone." Mathematicians make the opposite claim: that mathematical knowledge belongs to everyone, independent of the knower. Which position is more defensible? Does the answer change depending on which AOK you examine?
Criado Perez shows that the gender data gap in medicine has direct physical consequences: women are 47% more likely to be seriously injured in an equivalent car crash because crash test dummies were designed around male bodies. Does this make the situated knower a more serious problem in applied science than in history?

Films
For more see my 10 films for the TOK journey page.

🎬 WATCH — The Dig (2021)

Simon Stone

Dramatises the 1939 discovery of the Sutton Hoo ship burial. Basil Brown, a self-taught local archaeologist, does the critical excavation work - then the British Museum professionals arrive and attempt to claim the discovery. Edith Pretty, who commissioned and funded the dig, is consistently marginalised by the institutional apparatus that ultimately takes ownership of what she found on her own land. The film does not announce its argument about class and gender. It shows the professional establishment operating as it always has, treating knowledge produced outside its own ranks as raw material to be processed and credited elsewhere. Big Idea 1, dramatised. My students can see the film here.

🎬 WATCH — Hidden Figures (2016)

Theodore Melfi

Film about Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson - Black female mathematicians whose calculations were essential to NASA's early space programme. The film's central tension is not between competence and incompetence but between contribution and credit: the work is done, the knowledge is produced, the missions succeed - and the people who made it possible are largely invisible to the institution they serve. The parallel with Big Idea 1 is direct. The historical profession's exclusions were not always the result of deliberate policy. They were the ordinary workings of institutions that had decided, in advance, whose knowledge counted. My students can see the film here.