ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR

   My name is Javier R. Aguirre. I received my B.A., and M.A. in History from the University of Texas at San Antonio. This is not my first career, for I have done many other things in the past, but I was never satisfied, and so I kept searching until I got to where I am today. And so the question becomes .... why history?

    It is said that historians must serve two masters, the past and the present. Why would they say this?  You know a historian's obligation is to the past, and his first loyalty must be to the facts of the historical past, but he must also be aware that the choices he makes as a historian are not of consequence to him alone, but will affect the moral sense, perhaps the wisdom, of his generation.

    Tell me....why would anyone want to become a historian? What did they find out when they asked historians why they did what they did? They do it because they enjoy it! It brings them a sense of satisfaction.....of pleasure. One of the things that I often say in my history classes is....if it is not fun it is not worth doing.

Why did I become a historian? Because I had a desire to know why....why certain things happened as they did....why people felt or thought as they did....why society or life had developed as it had.

    To me history held the answer. At first history just told the story, but later as I truly developed into an historian there was much more to it. The important thing became a fundamental commitment to the truth, and the weighing of evidence....the application of the critical method.

    But this was not enough! Just interpreting the facts to tell the story was not enough. You are still left with so what! So what is the purpose of all this if you are just going to regurgitate the facts and figures. Of what good is all this data if you are not going to do anything else with it. Why put all this effort into it if you are not going to gain in some way from it? And this is where the next jump is made.

    The study of history must have some constructive purpose. It must be of some use to me and to you. Just interpreting the facts was not going to give me what I wanted. I wanted I needed some higher purpose in what I was doing and eventually I got it.

    The key lay in the interpretation of the evidence and facts. You have to look behind, beyond the facts and get to the causes, the material conditions, the mood, the human motives and ambitions of a particular epoch. Why did they do what they did? Why did they feel as they did? What were they thinking? Now this is a lot harder to get at. And to get to this you have to interpret the facts and you have to go beyond the facts.

    This is where history deviates from a pure science. Is history a pure science? No! Because all evidence is subject to different interpretation. How can this be? Because you and I can look at he same facts and figures and come up with a different interpretation. Our cultural baggage will tend to make us see things differently. An historian from the early 20th century will see things differently from a contemporary historian. A woman will see things differently from a man.  This is referred to as the time-bound elements embodied in the historian. We can not help it.

    History springs from a live concern, deals with life, serves life. I look at and interpret history from a certain perspective----my perspective. The way that I examine history to obtain an objective knowledge of the past can only be attained through the subjective experiences which I have encountered in my life. I can not extinguish the self.

So is this wrong?
No!

    The essential matter of history is not what happened, but what people thought and said about it, and why? By attempting to understand why they felt as they did or why they thought how they did then we begin to understand the forces which have shaped modern times and by implication the forces which have shaped us. What I look at as a historian is the conflict between change and continuity. What changed and what continued the same. In the struggles to adjust or to resists the changes which occur in life are the answers to our philosophical views and believes today.

    The study of history is both an art and a science, and for the historian to be at his best he must be artist,
philosopher, and scientist. Quite a tall order! So let me tell you how I approach the study of History.

    In graduate school I was exposed to several methods, ideologies, concepts which can be applied to the study of History. The one which I became the most attached to was ...

    This is the mechanism which I use to gauge history by. Change as it applies to how people coped with the changes that took place around them. Change as it applies to how society dealt with the changes which occurred in their life time, and change as it applies to how the country changed from one period in history to another.

    What was it that changed? How did they deal with it? What was the result of what changed? And this is how we, in this class, are going to study, analyze history.

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