History is a thing that comprises a variety of events from different aspects of life as well as different angles. History may well relate to politics, social life, art, economics, et cetera. Assuming that history as a subject tends to advance one’s critical thinking, students are snowed under with written discourses so that they try to become more objective when it comes to events that had an immense impact on civilization. On the contrary, a plethora of people are prone to deploy cheap custom essays due to the fact that historical research can be dubious in terms of credibility. In this article, the main features that evolve chaos in the context of historical research, how to detect it, and how to handle it will be further examined.
First and foremost, it would be reasonable to tell that history is indubitably made by the human race, even though people do not always act or behave as they think they do. The vast majority of people act in most situations in accordance with diverse forces: hatred, abhorrence, love, revenge, desire, angst, and the like. Emotions are the hidden force of history. As a result, the difficulty for historians is to detect the aforementioned emotions and make a conclusion whether they had an impact on further events (and if so – then to what extent) or not. That being said, persons that during a specific time were prominent in terms of various taken actions were not always susceptible to sheer logic and plans. Some of them give history a direction that was not anticipated, which, in turn, means that historians cannot predict the events; they can only postdict, misinterpret, ignore, or be baffled by. Indeed, history is a complex subject, increasingly complex systems that should be examined within the exact repercussions it has in the present. Thus, some historians commit errors when they try to interpret present events, not relying on the past. The past and present are tightly connected, meaning there is a myriad of gates, labyrinths, paths, roads, and tunnels to the past as well as the multitude of visible and invisible ways of communication from past to present.
However, the structuralists would think on the reverse, which means that under no circumstances should history be created by individuals, as mentioned above, but rather by environmental, economic, and social structures, change which a person is unable. Moreover, they find it plausible to emphasize that Darwin was a so-called “prisoner of a situation,” and the theory of natural selection has nothing to do with his knowledge, perseverance, and self-efficacy. Someone else would have sooner or later discovered the hypothesis above. However, it would be reasonable to mention a prominent historian Fernand Braudel who said that geographic, ideological, economic, social, and other types of structures substantially confine historical and future possibilities for any research, analyses, and observations. Besides, the chaos is caused by eschewing small events that, purportedly, cannot have any influence on the world and its future by any means. The latter opinion, suffice to say, should not be taken into consideration for the reason that small events are significant and have long-term effects. Contingencies, as well as unpredictable situations, an unstable world, including crises, revolutions, military coups, weigh a lot if we talk about the present as a difficult, unforeseeable, and hard-to-explain model.
The abundance of chaos in a historical retrospective of the past and present may be explained as such: it is an interlinking and knotty system that is comprehensive only when individuals, not just historians, but as a whole community, elucidate the globe in terms of crisis and revolution that are obvious game-changers, having a strong impact on a specific country they occur as well as on the global arena. Therefore, it should be stated that history is non-linear, occurring not sequentially and straightforwardly, implementing lots of chaos for historians in the evaluation of events and their outcomes. History pops up from time to time, and often in non-regular or sporadic times, which is a complex, open, and non-linear system, and which is a shifting point from natural sciences to social ones and vice versa.
To make one more objective in terms of historical research, scientists theoretically identified the most paramount aspects of ways that will verify research and conducted a practical analysis that will erode the most faced mistakes one might experience. The three following elements give a clear picture of what to focus while conducting the research: to write dispassionately, deploy the historian’s mindset, and the importance of primary sources.
The first one stands for the redundancy of an individual’s emotions, which means that aiming to write an independent and prejudice-averse analysis, one is obliged not to be interjected with emotions and be careful in passing judgments. Certainly, people in thepast used to be judged by the general standards present at their time. Furthermore, the audience is more likely to skim robust comments, if not resent them.
When it comes to the historian’s mindset, it should be noted that widely encountered, and competent scholars and historiographers tend to use the mindset that widens their borders of perception. Firstly, one has to question the list of sources beforehand. Secondly, asking questions, such as “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” and “why” will drastically improve a person’s understanding of the reasons and the results of various events.
Finally, it is advised to trace one’s research back to the primary sources. Primary sources are the texts that were written about an event by people who experienced this precise event. In turn, secondary sources are generally agreed to be written based on primary ones. However, there may well be a variety of discrepancies between primary and secondary sources. Under no circumstances should one rely upon one secondary source because the latter ones give a sense of interpretation, which, in turn, can be distorted. Even if one cannot find a proper primary source, he or she has to incorporate the views of diverse secondary sources and double-check them.