University Of The Witwatersrand History Department, The Department wishes to welcome you, and hopes that you will enjoy the History courses you have signed up for. We are confident that you will find them useful. History courses help prepare you for careers in many fields. They teach specific skills of immediate and obvious relevance to work in Education, Archives, the Media, Museums, Government Service, and Libraries. Particular courses are relevant to careers in what might, at first glance, seem like alien disciplines: for instance Law, Engineering and Medicine. And all our courses offer training in the assessment of evidence, on how to draw on relevant evidence to construct a clear and orderly argument: how, in short, to deal with problems, and to communicate answers to others. These are skills that are relevant to any career.
Through History we come to understand not simply how we got to where we are, but also how we now operate and how we might operate in the future. Theoretical models are all very well in their own way: but how much better to have working models based on long-term experience of how human beings combine and co-operate. A final word about the advantages of History – it offers an interest, even personal resource, to people who otherwise might become too dependent upon the material aspects of life which all too often are fickle friends. It perhaps would not be too facile to argue that History – and also other disciplines in the Humanities – offer intellectual alternative interest, even a spiritual cushion, in what is an increasingly single-minded and secular age. To put the matter at its most brutal, when the Stock Market crashes, it is good to have something to turn to, apart from a high window.
The courses offered by the Department are varied in the area and period covered. Among the subjects are: Edwardian Britain, South African Urban History, the Italian Renaissance, American History, Educational Methodology, European Urban History, War and Society, the Social History of Medicine and Diseases, and History in Southeast Asia. Some of these courses are inter-disciplinary, and are given not just by the History Department, but by other departments as well, including Politics and Economics. Even courses ostensibly purely historical will occasionally draw on specialists from outside the Department to give lectures.
Almost all the members of staff of the Department are experts in their own fields; they publish in international journals, give papers at conferences both in South Africa and overseas, and have more than a purely local reputation. We are proud of the Department’s publishing record, and should like particularly to point to the books for which we are responsible, scholarly works each based on thorough research and covering a wide field of inquiry. Details of these volumes can be found elsewhere on this site
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Why do History
For the first time, it is now intellectually respectable to know nothing about the past.
Does that matter?
We have the marvellous present, an unprecedented access to information and fast communications, and the developing ‘global village’.
What could the past ever teach us?
Yet the only way to begin to understand the present and to anticipate the future is by understanding the past. Where else can we look, to hope to grasp how and why some things change and why others do not, even despite technology?
Without the past we are doomed forever to be lost in the present.
Irrelevant, you might say. What use is History in a career? A great deal. The WITS History department wants to teach you how to process information, to throw away meaningless jargon, to discern patterns and not chaos. We offer training in assessing evidence, in writing accurately and economically, in constructing an argument, and in approaching a subject from you own angle. This will give you an advantage in any profession, particularly now: the ‘information age’ makes the discipline of History more useful, not less.
And don’t forget the more personal benefits. A knowledge of History is a lifelong interest. To many, an understanding of human society is even a spiritual resource: that sounds pretentious, but there are very few other things that remain constant in all the turbulence of life.
We give courses and programmes for the undergraduate, whether majoring in History or just wanting an odd filler, and for postgraduates of all ages and levels. History graduates routinely go on to careers in teaching, journalism, government, social research, writing, and publishing, librarianship, museum work and tourism.
We deal with South African, African, European, American, Russian and Far Eastern History, offering as much choice as possible to those who wish to deal with what interests them, rather than just the things that were shoved down their throats t school. The historians in the department are experts in their own fields, not history hacks: almost all are researchers and writers with international reputations.
If you wish to take up our offer, welcome, and we think you will profit. Perhaps, though, you have other things to do at the moment; but we shall still be here when you need us – when you need your past.
Academically I was well prepared for the challenges of Oxford with my BA (honours) in History from Wits. The way in which Wits taught me to think critically and to question assumptions in the literature has formed the bases of my learning here. Wits students are certainly superbly prepared when it comes to research skills! – Simonne Horwiz (BA Hons)
The practical experience of learning to do historical research has been fundamental to my personal development and career path. The rigour and discipline you learn from history is critical for anyone who is concerned to engage in processes of social change and policy development. – Graeme Simpson (History MA, 1986).
The skills I was taught by the Wits History Department have enabled me to fulfil my academic ambitions and to find a really fascinating job. I rely every day on the analytical tools I was taught by Wits Historians. And, of course, a sense of the past is a constant source of pleasure and enlightenment. – Simon Dagut (BA Hons, Ph.D (Cantab))
History is a clock that people use to tell their political and cultural time of day. It is also a compass that people use to find themselves on the map of human geography.
John Henrik Clarke African People in World History.
Study the past, if you would divine the future.
Confucius Analects.
Historians seek to be detached, impartial. In fact no historian starts out with his mind a blank, gradually to be filled by the evidence.
A. J. P. Taylor – Times Literary Supplement “The Rise and Fall of ‘Pure’ Diplomatic History”.
It is the most agreeable talent of an historian to be able to draw up his armies and fight his battles in proper expressions, to set before our eyes the divisions, cabals, and jealousies of great men, to lead us step by step into the several actions and events of his history.
Joseph Addison, Spectator.
It is the nature of politics that conflict stands in the foreground, and historians usually abet the politicians in keeping it there.
Richard Hofstadter The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It.
No historian achieves the highest excellence whose work cannot be read for pleasure as well as profit.
A. J. P. Taylor New Statesman and Nation.
No one can really know the life of his own day, let alone that of times long past. Always the historian sees as in a mirror darkly, the reds and golds rendered drab by the shadows of time.
Attributed to: Earl R. Beck
The “facts” of history do not exist for any historian until he creates them, and into every fact he creates some part of his individual experience must enter.
Carl Becker Atlantic Monthly “Detachment and the Writing of History”.
The historian is after all, the skilled detective who asks questions, locates and follows clues, and must not reveal the solution until the tale is told.
John Clive Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History.
The historian must re-tell, with a new richness, the story of what some one of the worlds of the past was, how it ceased to be what it was, how it faded and blended into new configurations, how at every stage what was, was the product of what had been, and developed into what no one could have anticipated.
Bernard Bailyn American Historical Review “The Challenge of Modern Historiography”.
The historian who writes history therefore, consciously or unconsciously performs an act of faith…His faith is at bottom a conviction that something true can be known about the movement of history and his conviction is a subjective decision, not a purely objective discovery.
Charles Beard
A history without moral dimension is a history without human causation and hence what is natural is what occurs and what occurs is natural.
John P. Diggins (1935– ), U.S. historian.
American Historical Review “Consciousness and Ideology in American History”.
A nation must be willing to look dispassionately at its own history.
Willy Brandt (1913–1992), German statesman.
Declaration on the 25th anniversary of the end of World War II.
A page of history is worth a volume of logic.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), U.S. judge.
New York Trust Co. vs. Eisner.
A people not prepared to face its own history cannot manage to face its own future.
Attributed to: Karl-Heinz Hansen, German politician.
A self-sufficient and self-contained discipline, important for its own sake. By providing a coherent, intelligible account of the past, it satisfies a profound human yearning for knowledge about our roots. It requires no justification other than that.
Theodore S. Hamerow (1920– ), U.S. historian.
Referring to history.
Reflections on History and Historians.
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimate determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.
Friedrich Engels (1820–1895), German socialist.
Referring to Karl Marx.
Letter to J. Bloch.
All history is necessarily written from the standpoint of the present, and is, in an inescapable sense, the history not only of the present but of that which is contemporaneously judged to be important in the present.
John Dewey (1859–1952), U.S. philosopher and educator.
Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.
All history is the history of thought.
Attributed to: Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), Italian philosopher, historian, and politician.
Referring to the role of imaginative re-creation in historical writing.
All history must necessarily have reference to the existence and condition of Man. History is a memorial of the succession of time; and in the created universe, man is the only being known to man to whom the succession of Time is an object of perception.
James Adams (1879–1949), U.S. historian and editor.
American Review “Society and Civilization”.
And history? What use is history? Is history not the opium of the imagination?
Edwin Morgan (1920– ), Scottish poet.
Crossing the Border “The Resources of Scotland”.
Behind the oft-repeated statement that each generation must write its own history lies a tragic situation…the historian is doomed to be forever writing in the sand.
Avery O. Craven (1885–1980), U.S. historian.
Journal of American History “An Historical Adventure”.
Every history has one quality in common with eternity. Begin where you will, there is always a beginning back of the beginning. And for that matter, there is always a shadowy ending beyond the ending.
Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), U.S. writer and Methodist minister.
The Circuit Rider.
Examine the history of all nations and all centuries and you will always find men subject to three codes: the code of nature, the code of society, and the code of religion…these codes were never in harmony.
Denis Diderot (1713–1784), French encyclopedist and philosopher.
Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville.
For a people to be without History, or to be ignorant of its history, is as for a man to be without memory—condemned forever to make the same discoveries that have been made in the past, invent the same techniques, wrestle with the same problems, commit the same errors; and condemned, too, to forfeit the rich pleasures of recollection.
Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), U.S. historian.
The Study of History.
For history, international relations are the only sure standards of movement; the only foundation for a map.
Henry Adams (1838–1918), U.S. historian.
The Education of Henry Adams.
For history, the object to be discovered is not the mere event, but the thought expressed in it…All history is the history of thought.
R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist.
The Idea of History.
For the essence and drama of history lie precisely in the active and continuous relationship between the underlying conditions that set the boundaries of human existence and the everyday problems with which people consciously struggle.
Bernard Bailyn (1922– ), U.S. historian.
American Historical Review “The Challenge of Modern Historiography”.
History enables us to understand the past better—no more and no less. Any historian who is dissatisfied with this conclusion should take up some useful profession such as knitting.
A. J. P. Taylor (1906–1990), British historian.
Observer “Requiescat in Pace”.
History furnishes many instances of similar struggles, where the love of liberty has prevailed against power under every disadvantage, and among them few more striking than that of our own Revolution.
John C. Calhoun (1782–1850), U.S. statesman.
Speech championing states’ rights.
History is a cage, a conundrum we must escape or resolve before our art can go freely about its business.
John Edgar Wideman (1941– ), U.S. writer, 1992.
History is a vast early warning system.
Attributed to: Norman Cousins (1915–1990), U.S. newspaper editor.
History is as all-embracing as life itself and the mind of man.
Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), U.S. historian.
The Nature and the Study of History.
History is not only becoming, it is also being.
Henry S. Canby (1878–1961), U.S. historian.
American Memoir.
History is organized memory, and the organization is all important!
Henry Steele Commager (1902–1998), U.S. historian.
The Study of History.
History is philosophy teaching by examples.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus (lived 1st century BC), Greek historian and critic.
Ars Rhetorica.
History may lean on the social sciences; it will never become one.
John Clive (1924–1990), British historian.
American Historical Review “British History, 1870-1914, Reconsidered: Recent Trends in the Historiography of the Period”.
History never stops. It progresses ceaselessly day and night. Trying to stop it is like trying to stop Geography.
Augusto Monterroso (1921– ), Guatemalan-born Mexican writer.
The Rest is Silence “Aforismos, dichos, etc.”.
History offers no comfort. It hands out hard lessons. It makes absurd reading, mostly. Admittedly, it moves on, but progress is not the result of history. History is never-ending. We are always inside history, never outside it.
Günter Grass (1927– ), German writer.
Documents on the Workings of Politics.
History smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks all our rules; history is baroque.
Will Durant (1885–1981), U.S. historian.
The Lessons of History (co-written with Ariel Durant).
History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
Abba Eban (1915– ), South African-born Israeli statesman, December 16, 1970.
Times Speech.
History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future.
Benjamin Cardozo (1870–1938), U.S. Supreme Court justice.
The Nature of the Judicial Process.
Human history is a brief spot in space, and its first lesson is modesty.
Will Durant (1885–1981), U.S. historian.
The Lessons of History (co-written with Ariel Durant).
If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), British poet, December 18, 1831.
Table Talk.
In history, as in art, man sees himself. Seeing himself, he understands the past.
George H. Callcott (1929– ), U.S. historian.
History in the United States 1800-1860.
In our nuclear age, the lack of a sense of history could have mortal consequences.
Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978), U.S. vice president.
Today’s Health “What My Students Taught Me”.
Historians and students should have no sympathies or antipathies.
Henry Adams (1838–1918), U.S. historian.
The Education of Henry Adams.
We are not free, separate, and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way.
Thomas Mann (1875–1955), German writer.
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (H. T. Lowe-Porter (tr.)).
We’re dying from not knowing and not understanding our past.
Jacques Bainville (1879–1936), French journalist and historian.
Journal.
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