What is History?

What is History?

Read through the following information and then complete the comprehension questions that follow.

• Investigating the past introduces you to how people lived in earlier societies and how their ideas, values, actions and relationships have shaped the world in which we live now. It is an opportunity to understand our world, how it has changed over time, and what it can become, for better or worse, in the years to come.

• We investigate the past through the study of both history and archaeology and through trying to solve the mysteries they present to us. This often means investigating a mystery for which the trail has ‘gone cold’, evidence has disappeared or is hard to find, and witnesses are dead, unavailable or unreliable.

• Our word history comes from the Greek word historia, which means ‘learning by inquiry’. History is what we learn from our inquiry into the lives, activities, beliefs and values of people who lived in the past. While we cannot fully recover the past, we can, through the work of historians, keep on discovering and understanding more about it. History, like detective work, is about:

- asking questions

- collecting information

- searching for clues that may produce evidence

- developing theories

TASK 2: Comprehension

1. What does investigating the past introduce us to?

2. What does archaeology mean? (You might want to research this if you're not sure)

3. Where does the word history come from? What does it mean?

4. List the four things history is about.