The Study of History

The following is a statement of my personal understanding of the study of History, and how it relates to the past, relics, collective memories, and the meaning of the past.

1. History is the study of the past.
2. The past is a set of events that occurred previous to the present.
3. Events can leave evidence, which is known as relics.
4. Not all events create relics.
5. The relation that makes a relic historically significant is that it was affected by the past in a way that could bear meaning.
6. Human-created relics can bear meaning.
7. Relics act as symbols for bundles of meanings.
8. The relation between the bundles of meanings associated with relics and the past is determined by collectives of individuals.
9. The collectives normalize meaning amongst themselves via communication about the remembered past.
10. Collectives are determined by some aspect of commonality.
    1. Degrees of difference can remove individuals from identifiable collectives.
    2. Collectives are not necessarily inclusive or exclusive.
       
11. Memberships in multiple collectives can overlap [implication of 10].
12. Some individuals may only be included in one identifiable collective [10 a-b].
13. Collectives are not necessarily exhaustive [12].
14. The recollections of one collective does not fix a single universalizable history.
15. The normalized recollections of multiple collectives does not fix a single universalizable history.
16. Commonalities are not limited to specific times (¬ time-dependent trait).
17. Collectives can extend through time [10, 16].
18. Collective memories are not limited to first-hand accounts [7-9].
19. Provided that the collective continues, collective memories continue [17, 18].
20. Communication is an active process which may begin in the past, but can only be received in the present.
21. Normalization is the product of a chain of communications received in the present [9, 19, 20].
22. Meaning of the past is not fixed by the past [4-5, 9, 12-15, 21].
23. Communicated recollections can become relics, and if they are recorded in a tangible form, they become persistent relics [2, 3].
24. All humans (including historians) are members of one inclusive, continuing collective: humanity [10-12].
25. All relics can be meaningful to the historian [5, 24].
26. The historian creates a new chain of communication from previous relics, including collective communications about individual recollections [3, 5-9, 23].
27. The new chain (or “discourse”) becomes a relic in its own right [6, 25-26].
28. Every chain of communication, or discussion of relics works toward normalizing meaning [22, 27].
29. The normalization of the meaning of a relic can change the meanings associated with the past [5, 28].
30. The study of History can change the meaning of the past [1, 5, 22, 25, 29].