ABSTRACT
Being able to recognize the perspective of people in the past is a requirement for meaningful historical understanding. To understand why people acted as they did, it’s necessary to be familiar with the cultural context that shaped their thoughts. Without examining the ideas, attitudes, values, and beliefs of people in history, their actions have no meaning. The development of racial slavery in British North America, for example, can only be understood with reference to Englishmen’s ideas about the differences between themselves and Africans; the conquest of Native Americans by reference to ideas about what constituted civilization. Although advocates of a purely “factual” approach to the teaching of history sometimes claim that getting into the minds of people in the past is impossible-and therefore has no place in schools-nothing could be further from the truth. Most historical interpretations take into account people’s
motivations, and historians are careful to distinguish between those ideas that are based on contemporary attitudes and those that may have influenced people in the past. “Reading the present into the past”—explaining historic events by referring to contemporary standards-is a cardinal sin among historians; one cannot explain the actions of a medieval serf or lord, an eighteenth-century Japanese merchant, or a Texas farm woman in 1890 by pretending that they’re all middle-class European Americans of the late twentieth century. Their worldviews, mentalities, and ideologies were different than those of people today, and those differences have to be taken into account-otherwise their actions may just seem stupid. Without understanding Salem villagers’ attitudes toward God, the Devil, work, and community, for example, the practice of dunking someone in water to determine whether he or she was a witch looks like a flaw in logic. Most of us agree that there are no witches, and that even if there were, dunking them in water wouldn’t prove much; if we apply our standards to Salem villagers, then, they all appear to be mentally defective.
