ABSTRACT
There have been many attempts to define ‘history’. We can begin this particular discussion by making a distinction between (i) history as what actually happened in the past; (2) history as our inevitably imperfect understanding of what happened in the past and (3) history as the continuing attempt by professional historians to extend our know ledge and improve our understanding of what happened in the past (Marwick, 1970, p. 17). If we look carefully at these three statements, it is evident that none of them imply that history has an existence in itself, as a corpus of knowledge and opinion embodied in books and evidence. History is being defined in dynamic terms, in (1) as a series of occurrences, in (2) as a state of understanding, and in (3) as a process of research. We are thus taking an interactionist view: that history cannot exist as a book on a shelf, but only as a process of interaction between his torical material and the people involved with it (Watts, 1969, p. 21 sq.; Dewey, 1916, p. 158 sq.; Collingwood, 1946, p. 248).
