The study of history should be viewed in holistic terms.  A good quality course in terms of historiography  should reflect the following considerations:

         ~ The course should focus on developing a student’s interpretive, analytical and evaluative skills.

         ~ The course should  enrich a student’s understanding of how different value systems lead to different  historical conclusions when interpreting, analysing and/or evaluating a historical question.

         ~  The course should focus on reading beyond the historical accounts presented by historical writers and into the values, attitudes and beliefs that animate their written theories.

         ~ The course should cover a broad range of issues from a range of perspectives

         ~  The course should include a  biographical  study of historians so as to become familiar with the values, attitudes and beliefs that gave rise to their points-of-view

          ~  The course should attempt an appraisal of the relative worth of these ideological assumptions.  This includes strengths and weaknesses, insights and blind spots, of these value systems.

Whenever we reflect on the past we are constructing models of history.  We look back at our own lives, we don’t focus on everything that has taken place.  Rather, we focus on what we consider to be most relevant within our personal story.  As we grow older and our life perspectives change, our views of the past and what we consider most significant can also change.  In other words, our terms of reference have changed.  Not only has our experience of life expanded, but the values we use to evaluate our lives have also changed.

Like a person wearing rose coloured glasses, our values reflect what we see.  Change to green or yellow glasses and our view of reality changes with it.  

* It can be an interesting activity to draw a time line on a piece of paper and try to map out the major events of your life so far.  You will find that they reflect very much what you consider to be important in your life.  Once completed, it can be interesting to reflect on these events and plot in on a second time line events that occurred about the same time as these events that you have long forgotten about.  Does this tell you anything about yourself?

We tend to focus on the positive in life so that even when we remember negative experiences we try to look at them in a positive light, often as learning experiences.  What is true of us as individuals is true of  groups also.  Our sense of history helps to define us and helps us to define those around us.  From rhe time we are born we are brought up in the context of wider history.  We have history at a family level, at a community level and a national level.  Wider still is our understanding of international and world  history.  When we think of other peoples in various places around the world, we bring to mind stereotypes fashioned according to our historical imaginations.  As we grow in our understanding of history our views of others and the stereotypes on which we build change.

The dominant historical points-of-view in society reflect the prevailing cultural values that inspire them.  As society, culture and economic conditions change, so too does a society’s views on history.  The celebration of “Empire Day” during the 1930s  in Australia, would find little meaning in the twenty-first century as t the British Empire has long since disappeared.  Historical perspective reflects the vested interests of society.

Thus it is possible to speak of Christian history, Islamic history, Marxist history, Liberal-Democratic history etc.  The ancient Roman historian Plutarch introduced into historical literature the “power of one” theory of history -- namely, through tracing the lives of men of influence he demonstrated how each in tern left his mark on history.  More modern, western theories of history have reflected the dictates of Weberian sociology in which decision-makers are viewed as pawns that are manipulated by larger forces.  According to this view, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, is not about a man’s ambition, but a reflection of a man forced by necessity to act or walk into oblivion.  Marxist and Neo-Marxist historians focus on the importance of social class and class conflict in driving the forces of history.  Secular humanist historians look to the rise of secular humanism as the ultimate realization of cultural development, so that all events and social ideologies are viewed and assessed in terms of this goal.

The popular view that the convicts sent to Australia in the First Fleet were largely political prisoners and poor people transported for stealing a loaf of bread has its origin in the rise of the Australian Labor Party in Queensland during the 1890s and the desire to promote Australia as “The Working Man’s Paradise”.  The actual records of deportees shows that this stereotype was very  far from the truth -- Sydney Cove was bye-and-large the last stop for hardened criminals. Napoleon Bonaparte once said, “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.”  And on another occasion,”What is history but a fable agreed upon?”.  This is not to suggest that history is objectively totally relative, or should be abandoned as a waste of time.  Rather, it demonstrates that history must be firmly rooted in the epistemology of sound historiographical practice in which the values that animate a historical perspective are considered every  bit as important as the historical issue  being related.