Historical Perspectives and Empathy

Historical perspectives are a key element in understanding history. According to Historical Thinking, “Taking historical perspective means understanding the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional settings that shaped people’s lives and actions in the past.” And without it, what do we have? We have opinions. We can not base history on our own theories, but instead, use facts and evidence to interpret realistic scenarios. These perspectives allow for a common consensus, otherwise historians would have different, conflicting ideas. However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It is common to have different theories while discussion a certain topic but if facts are present, there is no reason for leading people on with ideas that may not be accurate.

Along with that, historical empathy allows us to understand emotions and how people felt during different periods in time. We can take the historical perspective with those factors to find out more about the historical empathy. We can come up with potential answers to questions like, “why did they do what they did?” and so on. This is different from emotional empathy which relates to our emotions as the reader. Where we can literally feel the other person’s emotions as if we could relate. Our findings can not be be driven through emotional empathy. Yes, it can be useful but do we really learn anything from it besides the obvious fact that they had emotions just like us? Having a mix of historical perspectives and historical empathy is the proper way to determine what really happened in any particular time or situation. all of the social, intellectual, cultural, and emotional settings bring us closer to understanding our history and the decisions that followed.