World History I

Narative in History
Timelines

5: Wed, Sep 17, 2025

Please read the discussion of narrative and analytical history. We will go over it in class.

In order to answer the question “what happened?” in the past, we look at different kinds of information:

• Physical evidence, such as buildiings, artifacts and tools, jewelry or money, city layouts, personal belongings, even human remains.
• Written or graphical evidence, such as inventories of goods, records of laws, treaties between countries, paintings or drawings meant to record events.
• Consciously historical evidence, such as personal records of events in diaries, letters, or works meant for publication.

Each period and culture has its own challenges where some evidence exists but other evidence is missing, problematic, or contradictory. The current topic is a case in point. How, then, do we know about prehistory? Consider the following points:

• What kinds of evidence are available?
• How reliable is the evidence?
• How do we assess it responsibly — neither exaggerating the importance of what we do know or ignoring the implications of our ignorance?

Consider for today:

• What is narrative history?
• What tools do we use to analyze or (in the absence of existing stories) create narrative history?
• What kinds of evidence can we use to support our narrative?
• How do we evaluate this evidence?
• How might a change in an accepted narrative cause us to change our own behavior or thinking?
• How does this affect our willingness to accept or promote a given historical theory?



Contents of this page © Copyright 2020-2024 by Christe A. McMenomy, Bruce A. McMenomy, Sarah Miller Esposito, and Richard M. Esposito.
Permission to download or print this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.