History - What Is It? History has a common definition -- what happened before, a collection of unalterable facts.

But to the historian, history has a more narrow definition. To the historian, history is a term of art, defined as a study of written history. While historians make use of archeological or physical evidence, the study of history focuses on historical writings. History under the common definition can tell us what happened, but not why or how that is important to us today. History in the hands of the historian becomes a form of literature. That means history has an objective and a subjective element. In the hands of the historian, the study and recording of history is an attempt to give meaning to our past, present, and future. A good historian is one who gets the facts right and gives us guiding principles and universal concepts from the facts. The historian, in the details and through the universal concepts, gives us a sense of the people, places, and time. In this way, a good historian draws us into a personal relationship with the past, allowing us to grow and learn from it. History - Is It Important? History is important. In centuries past, this statement would have seemed self-evident. From the ancient Royal Library of Alexandria to the more modern Library of Congress, societies have devoted much time and effort to the preservation of mans written history. It was understood that the past held valuable lessons of how to succeed and how to avoid costly mistakes. History gave us insight into who we are, who we can be, and a sense of our identity. But in the 18th and 19th century, change was in the wind and history seemed not to be important. First, American rugged individualism, which sought independence from England and pushed westward across the continent, stressed human independence and self-reliance. It rebelled against any constraint of the individual including history. Secondly, the Bible which had been a source of interpreting history for over 1,000 years in Europe was being rejected by skeptics during the age of enlightenment. By the time the 20 century rolls around, America is redefining itself with every new generation. Finally, technological changes and new scientific discoveries begin to occur at an alarming rate. We find ourselves living in a time of constant change. We define ourselves in terms of where we are going, not where we come from. Many in society say that history holds little importance for us because we believe we live in a time so different from our ancestors. Their experiences could not shed light on our circumstances. They say that mans intelligence has evolved and that anything from the past is outdated and irrelevant to us. Therefore the past is worthless in the minds of many people. Our ignorance of the past is not the result of a lack of information, but of our choice. History does matter. George Orwell wrote, He who controls the past, controls the future. Our view of the past affects how we respond to our present circumstances. If our view of history is wrong, we are likely to make wrong choices today. These wrong choices will lead to further conflicts and a waste of resources that can eventually lead to the fall of an entire civilization. History - What To Look For History is generally written by following a few common approaches. Here are some common approaches used by historians as they try to understand the meaning of what has happened before. The Great Man Theory - This theory is often associated with the nineteenth-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. He declared, The history of the world is but the biography of great men. Carlyle argued that great men shape history through their vision. Other Factors - Today many historians look at other factors such as economic, societal, environmental, and technological which they claim is just as significant to historical change as any one persons vision. The Peoples History Approach This approach focuses on the story of mass movements or on those who were generally outside the accepted norm -- the poor, the

oppressed, and the otherwise forgotten people. The peoples history theory is used by many revisionist historians who serve to challenge our preconceived ideas. When you read history, look for the objective facts and the subjective conclusion the writer draws from these facts. Look for which approach the writer is employing in their history. Look for what universal truths the writer is presenting. Historians do not always write what we want to hear so resist judging the content based upon personal ideology. Finally, does the writer draw you into the time and place of his/her study? If the historian has done the job, what he/she has written will become a part of who you are.

http://www.allabouthistory.org/history.htm diachronic / synchronic. (Gk, chronos, time; dia-, through, across; syn-, with, together). A diachronic study or analysis concerns itself with the evolution and change over time of that which is studied; it is roughly equivalent to historical. Thus diachronic linguistics is also known as historical linguistics. A synchronic study or analysis, in contrast, limits its concern to a particular moment of time. Thus synchronic linguistics takes a language as a working system at a particular point in time without concern for how it has developed to its present state. The extent to which synchronic study really does as it were take a frozen slice of history for study is itself not absolute: to talk of a system necessarily implies movement and interaction, and movement and interaction take place in time. Thus the synchronic studies of complete cultures carried out by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss involved investigation of, for instance, symbolic exchanges which were consecutive rather than simultaneous, so that the element of temporal sequence is still present in such structuralist investigations. http://faculty.washington.edu/cbehler/glossary/diachron.html

INTRODUCTION Synchronic and diachronic are two concepts employed by Ferdinand De Saussure[1]to describe the way one studies the nature of languages. The prefix dia means through andchrono is time: a diachronic vision entails objects going through time. The prefix synimplies togetherness, and the objects of a synchronic discourse occur together at the same time. A synchronic vision takes into account the reciprocal positions of the objects at a certain moment without considering their movement. [2] The diachronic analysis of language dominated before De Saussure. After him, another approach was allowed whereby the hypothesis disregarded the formation processes of language, setting oneself the task of describing language structures only on the basis of the relationships active in a certain present time.[3] Diachrony is the flow of time like a film telling a story. Synchrony is reality captured by intuition like a still photograph.
http://en.manuelcappello.com/2012/07/synchronic-and-diachronic/

DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC. Contrasting terms in LINGUISTICS, which make a distinction between the study of the history of language (diachronic linguistics) and the study of a state of language at any given time (synchronic linguistics). Language study in the 19c was largely diachronic, but in the 20c emphasis has been on synchronic analysis. The terms were first employed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who used the analogy of a tree-trunk to describe them: a vertical cut was diachronic, a horizontal cut synchronic. TOM McARTHUR. "DIACHRONIC AND SYNCHRONIC." Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language. 1998. Retrieved September 10, 2013 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O29-DIACHRONICANDSYNCHRONIC.html