Historical Empathy
Historical empathy is a component of history pedagogy. It is the process of students’ cognitive and affective engagement with historical figures to better understand and contextualize their lived experiences, decisions, or actions. Historical empathy involves understanding how people from the past thought, felt, made decisions, acted, and faced consequences within a specific historical and social context.
Empathy in the study of history is the understanding of past institutions, social practices, or actions as making sense in light of the way people saw things. The central idea of historical empathy is that people in the past did not all share our way of looking at the world; and that when writing or reading history we must understand the ideas, beliefs, and values with which different groups of people in the past made sense of the world in which they lived and made decisions about what to do.
Historical empathy has a particular, discipline specific meaning that is different from the common understanding of empathy (which is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another"). Historical empathy is not a matter of having an emotional bond with historical figures. If understanding people in the past required shared feelings, history would be impossible. Understanding the hopes of the Pilgrims means entertaining their beliefs and values and knowing that they had those hopes. But we cannot now share the hopes—feel them ourselves—even if we want to, because to hope for something means to see it as a possible outcome. This distinction is important, as considering the context in which problematic historical figures (slave holding American presidents, Hitler, etc.) must be distinguishing from modern day sympathy for their views, decisions, values, etc.
Sources:
- Klein, A. (2020). Attaining post-conflict peace using the jus post bellum concept. Religions, 173(11).
- National Research Council. (2005). How students learn: History in the classroom. Washington, DC: National Academies Press.