Abel Chp. 13

1.) History is being constantly rewritten because our interests keep changing. At one time, we could focus on kings, and the next time on the peasants.
2.) A historian is influenced by changing interests, changing conceptual apparatus, changing historical segments, a personal equation or a change in audience.
3.) The "Baconian fallacy" is the statement that all history is nothing but facts. Carr would disagree completely arguing that history is more a record of certain perceptions of the historian.
4.) A historian infers meaning from his data, while a geologist does the opposite.
5.) I'd agree with the statement because it was left up to us to decide what was and wasn't important.
6.) Future historians will decide what happened in an event based on how they perceived an event to occur, just as historians have done in modern times.
7.) "The grand sweep of events which we call the historical process is made up of an indefinitely large number of components which do not form a completely inter-related set. A historical pluralism denies that every event is related to every other event."
8.) Columbus's discovery in America is something that has been argued over, along with the Russian winter of 1812, being a mild one.
9.) Neither physics nor history can have anything that can be considered "true". The object of both is to try to remove as many problems of perception.
10.)
     a) We may begin with Ecclesiastes
     b) A second group of philosophies of history may be called functional because of the way in which they isolate and stress certain factors.
     c.) The idea of progress as a philosophy of history is relatively new
     d.) History is a great drama of sin and redemption, according to the Christian view.
     e.) Organismic theories consider society to be a kind of living thing.
11.) On a small scale, historical inevitability is quite real, seeing as humans are prone to violence, but on a large scale, such as war, too many variables are left unchecked to blame historical inevitability only.
12.) It is impossible to prove if any historian is telling the truth.
13.) There is a distinct difference between literature and history, but at one point in the 18th century, the line was heavily blurred as novelists called their books "histories". Lepore would agree that even with the line blurred, there is a way to separate the two.
14.) The Shaper told stories that would change based on where he was. He would alter the story to best fit his location. The footnote also deals with the same topic, showing how stories can change based on location.