History

An introduction for young learners

What is history?

History is a science

What is History?

What is History?

And, what does History study?

What does History study?

History studies ...

What does History study?

THE PAST OF HUMANITY

What doesn't History study?

History does not study the present...

What doesn't History study?

...or the future, which nobody can study, because it has never existed,

What doesn't History study?

or stories invented by human beings.

What does History study?

History studies ONLY real things that happened to humans in the past.

And, why do we study our past?

There are several reasons...

Why do we study our past?

1. Curiosity...

Why do we study our past?

2. Because we need to understand what happened in the past in order to know who we are.

Why do we study our past?

3. Because we want to preserve our knowledge about the past for the future generations, so that they also know who they are.

Why do we study our past?

4. Because we must know what happened in the past, so that we don't make the same mistakes again in the future

OK. But...

We can not travel back in time, so...

How can we know what happened in the past?

Nobody from the Roman times is alive to tell us!

Well, we need to study what humans left behind...

History studies things like...

Their mortal remains...

History study things like...

Their buildings...

History studies things like...

Their paintings...

History studies things like...

Their weapons...

History studies things like...

The things they used for everyday life, like pottery...

History studies things like...

The maps they made...

History studies things like...

Old photographs...

History studies things like...

Coins...

History studies things like...

Old movies...

And above all...

History studies TEXTS, that is, written documents

Written texts, like...

- Letters

- Constitutions

- Laws

- Newspapers

- Treaties between countries...

Any type of document, even not written on paper!

However...

The first modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared about 130,000 years ago, and they couldn't write!

Written texts only appeared 5,000 years BC, that is 5,000 years Before Jesus Christ was born.

So...

How do we know what happened between the appearance of Homo Sapiens and the moment when the first texts were written?

What happened before the first written texts appeared?

We can only try to guess according to the things humans left behind, like these misterious paintings...

How do we call a person who studies things that happened in the past before the first written texts appeared?

An archaeologist!

An archaeologist studies only the remains (artifacts)

He/she does not study texts, because there were not any!

Prehistory is the time that extends from the emergence of our first ancestors about 5 million years ago until the invention of writing (5,000 years BC)

There were no written texts during Prehistory.

And History is the period of time between 5,000 BC to the present, that is, the time when written texts have been available.

A person who is an expert in History is called a HISTORIAN