CHANGE

So much is history is concerned with change that historians sometimes try to study change itself, as well what is changing. They distinguish between a change, where something new happens, and a development, where something that existed before has been modified. They are careful to notice where change and development are not necessarily the same as progress( where things get better) and may sometimes be regress(where things get worse) They also look for the examples of continuity, the things which don’t change over a long period of times. They are also concerned with the rate of change, noticing that in some periods that changes happens so fast and in others very slow. Finally they are interested in the factors which influence change. Things like religion, war, government policy, change, brilliant individuals, levels of education, technology and jealousy etc. The first activity looks at smallpox, a killer disease which the World Health Organization said had been stamped out in the year 1980! In 1978, Edward Jenner, a country doctor from Berkeley suggested a way of preventing people from catching the disease. He noticed that milkmaids, who usually caught cowpox from cows didn’t caught smallpox. He deliberately infecting a child with cowpox and then later deliberately infecting the same child with smallpox, the child didn’t caught the smallpox because the cowpox had given him an immunity. This is the process that Jenner called vaccination claiming that this treatment could end smallpox. SMALLPOX KILLED SOME PEOPLE EVERY YEAR SEVENTEENTH –CENTURY LONDON. HOWEVER IT WAS WORSE IN SOME YEARS THAN OTHERS. IN 1659, SMALLPOX KILLED 1523 PEOPLE, WHILE IN 1660, IT KILLED 354,. ….. LUCINDA Mac CRAY BEIER,’ SUFFERERS AND HEALERS,; 1987

CAUSATION OF WORLD WARS

On this day the thirteenth day of June, 2013, I stumbled on a book that caught my attention, I was so carried away that my friend whom we went together the bookshop to buy used books, said “did you find dollars inside any of those books?” the title of the book was so captioned that that I decided to find time to read through this book with all the time needed to do so! This book is about the history of the world wars, segregations, and racial abuse in the highest order, the rise of the United States of America, Russia, Germany, China, Britain and the Atomic Eras, Apartheid in South Africa And the Jet Age. It’s about the history of the world since 1914 world wars. This book is written by a man called JOE SCOTT, interestingly I am going to restrict myself to the undiluted content of this book in the very best possible way. Here we go,,,,,, The first question that came to my mind was, why was the world of those days so much heated with flames of wars and disaster? CAUSATION In the words of Joe Scott I quote “ one day a boy came home from school. He tried to creep up to his bedroom without his farther noticing it, but t his didn’t work. The farther noticed him and invited him to the kitchen, ‘John, ‘his father said, I can see why you are creeping upstairs like that, and he questioned, what happened to your trousers? John’s father had seen that his trousers were covered with mud. There was a pause, and then John explain what had happened” in three boxes I am going to dissect the way the young man’s answered his father. Explanation One Explanation Three Explanation Two [Enter Post Title Here] EXPLANATION ONE,’ mud, as I am sure you know, dad is a rather sticky mixture and dirt. My trousers are made from fairly coarse cloth which is very good base for mud and stick on. Also, I am considerably taller than I am wide, which means under certain condition I am unstable and likely to fall. What happened was that I was crossing some mud, which is rather slippery, and thus I was more likely to fall. I fell, and the adhesive qualities of the mud means that some of it stuck to my trousers.’ EXPLANATION TWO,’ I was going through a field and I slipped and I fell into a puddle.’ EXPLANATION THREE,’ I had to stay late at school because I had not done my homework. Because I was late, I thought I should take the short cut over the field. There were some big kids on the field who said they were going to beat me up unless I give them all my money. They were still chasing after me when I tried to jump over a muddy patch but I slipped and fell right into it. They all just laughed at me.’ Adapted from J.H H

exter ‘the history primer’, 1971. Here are my questions going by the young boys answer, 1. Can all three explanations cover the same incident and still be true? 2. If you were the boy’s father which explanation would you think was the best? 3. Which of these explanations do you think is the most scientific? 4. Which of these explanations do you think is a better piece of history?

THE EVIDENCE OF HISTORY

THE EVIDENCE HISTORIANS have to work out what they think happened in the past from their sources. This means things that have survived from the past. These sources are not always easy to use. So before a historian can use them as evidence to answer a particular question about the past, the sources must be tested to a certain degree. First the sources provenance- how and when it was created, and how it was handed down to us. Second its reliability- whether the sources or part of it, is accurate or not. Third its utility- how useful it will be. The answers to these questions are usually linked, as you will see from other sources that we will treat later. The picture attached is a picture of a working class family in London just before the First World War. Invariably a historian might still decide a source could be used as useful evidence even if it was not reliable. Conclusively on evidence, 1. It is important for historians to know the source or provenance of their sources. 2. There are many reasons why all or part of a source might not be reliable. 3. Historians can only decide about the reliability of a source when they know what they want to find. 4. Historians may sometimes find sources useful even they don’t think they are reliable. If we are to write good history, then we have to make sure that we understand not only what people in the past did but also what they thought about things. History is not only what happened but also why it happened. To understand this, we have to remember what or the ideas that people had in those days or times, because this helps understand why they did things. Historians sometimes called this the EMPATHY