hook for history essay

hook for history essay

Uncovering the Untold Stories: A Fresh Perspective on Historical Narratives

1. Introduction: The Power of Historical Narratives

Recently, however, there has been a growing interest in alternative perspectives on these monumental shifts in civilization. Social and cultural historians, anthropologists, literary theorists, and political scientists not only stress the importance of studying actors in a historically contingent way, but also focus more on ordinary people, gender aspects, or the voices of those who were underprivileged at that time. This paper joins such an alternative perspective on history. Instead of focusing on big, sweeping trends that shape broad beams of history, we dig down and uncover the stories of a few people in the past. With laser-beam precision, we illuminate ideas, experiences, and knowledge that not only inform us about lives in that particular context, but also help us to think more about our world today. After an introduction to the “discipline” and the method that we follow in the next section, we will illustrate how such stories can contribute to economic history using two examples from recent research.

Many people understand history as a grand plan unfolding itself through time, a series of great events occurring to profoundly shape human civilization. The stories told by people in the past, or by those in authority at the time who had the power to define history, would then describe those events and their meaning. In other words, the traditional understanding of history emphasizes the momentous lives of large numbers of people. The rise of colonialism, the impact of war, and the great success of technology are only stories about the lives of very special individuals and about the collective, almost blind pursuit for what appears to be an inevitable set of developments. This biased view minimizes our understanding of the large bulk of people who lived under such great transitions or of those who were used, even unwillingly, in the service of very powerful goals.

2. Revisiting Key Events Through Diverse Lenses

While a well-known event may traditionally be understood from a specific viewpoint, another historical approach may invite new interpretations. Events seen from alternative angles undermine the traditional single narrative perspective. Drawing upon a diverse range of distinct historical perspectives skirts (or avoids) the problem of knowledge fragmentation and establishes historically integrating and unifying narratives. A methodological disjuncture that emphasizes how knowledge is produced – not just information – permits a more comprehensive understanding of the mechanism by which historical narratives are generated. The diversity of perspectives emphasizes the ambiguity of the account, rather than untangling historical discrepancies (set into context with historical understanding). The sheer number of such stories provides an alternative account of the often-brutal world of modern history as we struggle to commemorate conflict.

Addressing historical events from a diverse range of perspectives allows us to illuminate hitherto unclarified aspects and reveal a depth of complexity previously unseen. A famous example of such perspectives is the so-called “blind men and the elephant” anecdote, a parable that explains how differences in perspective determined people’s understanding of a phenomenon. The story involves blind men who learn through their tactile senses the presence of an elephant. Each blind man touches a different part of the elephant – such as the body or the ear – and, based on their tactile experiences, each describes the elephant differently. Even with access to the same elephant, the different perspectives lead to the identification of varied elements. Similarly, events in history may seem different when viewed from different perspectives. Despite the same visual evidence, the conclusion is different when people focus on different aspects. Concentrating attention exclusively on a specific matter can also lead to differing descriptions of an event.

3. Challenging Traditional Narratives with New Research

Another promising strategy is simply to add new sources of evidence to historical debates. Big data techniques are facilitating this process, offering scholars the opportunity to explore a much larger and more diverse universe of documents than previous generations could manage. In combination with traditional research methods, these new database technologies uncover many examples of previously hidden behavior, highlight nuances and variation across historical contexts, and make it feasible to test different theories using empirical evidence. For instance, the Database of Historical Congressional Statistics, an experimental project to uncover roll call data from 1789-1946, extends and revises our understanding of early American politics. Large quantities of political speeches and legislative behavior stretch back even further. Such data, some more extensive than anyone ever imagined possible, serve to enrich our understanding of the early American republic in bold new ways.

One promising strategy to challenge traditional narratives is to take seriously the complexity and diversity of human motivations, emotions, and beliefs. A recent white paper from our lab reviews experimental studies showing that certain emotional states, cognitive structures, and social contexts make ordinary people vulnerable to anti-democratic messaging. These findings highlight the importance of understanding how psychological preconditions shape the reception of political communication. They also suggest the critical need for further research on the determinants of political ideology and voting decisions, examining the role of identity in democracy, and understanding the implications of partisan media for polarization.

4. The Impact of Untold Stories on Shaping Collective Memory

In this sense, “knowing involves a connection between discourse and social ‘transactions’ seen as situated actions.” Thus, as “communication, interaction, and other forms of social life are constituted in the back and forth, in the relations that exist between people… this form of relationship is not just an attribute of the ‘world’, … debating and narrating will be seen to shape and guide society. Rather than representing a stage on which interaction happens, dialogue is the action itself and it is constitutive of the events, entities, and ideas which it also brings into being and associates. Consequently, examining the way historical interpretive events are shaped allows us to explore how to do social science, as well as the consequences of doing it in particular ways.”

In his research on the generational transmission of collective memory, Wertsch (2003) examines how “major historical events that are experienced by people who are interacting with one another in primary groups are stored and reformulated in the narratives that are constructed during discourse and communication among these people.” The discourse that takes place within primary groups thus plays an important role in shaping the personal and collective memories and future acts of individuals. This shows that “we cannot understand self-society-thought-in-action, without taking full account of discourse… whether we focus empirically on historical events, foreign policy, science, education, or any other sphere of human endeavor, we must attend to the ‘talk’, broadly defined in which the nature of the events, the policies, the knowledge, the pedagogical imperatives, and much else are played out in everyday life.”

5. Conclusion: Embracing Complexity in Historical Interpretation

A bottom-up approach guided the narrative experience and creation through cognitive, affective, behavioral, semantic, and internal productive corpora. It allowed for the gathering and classifying of the nature of causal relations and mental relationships between story characters and provided a story universe framework that models the interaction occurring during a story. It has allowed for the development of several narrative generation techniques and guided creative aspects by relying on it. Finally, it plays a watchdog role by offering how narrativity compliance can serve as a metric to assess the quality of generated stories. I started by adopting a holistic eolithic universe perspective on reality interpretation and was reaching completeness. Back to Earth, this perspective corresponded to the acceptance of the complexity of the ecological system required and its dynamics. But such openness to complexity soon turned out to also have its limitations when confronted with story perception and interpretation analyses. In these contexts, embracing the narrative experiences creates a whole new world inside our minds, permitting an enriching creation-to-consumer understanding, story creation, and more deeply allowing for an interesting people-machine interaction task.

The journey to uncovering untold stories and narratives has been rich and fascinating. In pioneering narrative methodologies on story perception, I realized that embracing complexity was a significant approach to understanding and interpreting stories. Story characters do not exist in isolation; they live within stories, and stories live within them. What reinvigorated the rich textual world of stories and characters was the embrace of narrative universes. This was represented as Connett’s conceptualization of an “infinity of overlapping mental parties” around characters as they interact with others, creating an infinity of possible stories. But further extending the dynamics of fictional reality in response to characters and a deeper understanding of virtual universes within minds meant embracing the Narrative Cosmos.