1. A person who is an expert in writing history about facts or events that occurred in the past or present.
2. One who is dedicated to studying history.
Etymology: Configured on the word history, by the Latin historywith respect to the Greek form ἱστορία (history), to which is added the suffix -ar, to adapt as a transitive verb in ‘historiar’; then, it ends with the suffix -dor, as an associative property with respect to the action.
Grammatical category: masculine noun
in syllables: his-to-ria-dor.
Historian
Karina Mora Mendoza
PhD in History
When you have to look back in time to understand who we are and why we live the way we do, it is not enough to talk about the past, it is necessary to go in search of a professional. A Historian is a collector, an agent who not only knows how to go to the past, but also has the appropriate tools to navigate through it and bring back substantial information.
Historians are people with a keen gaze who, over more than a century, have developed the professionalization of our discipline going through different moments on how we look at the past, this is what we would call from the discipline of History as Historiography, that is to say, the way in which each one of the historians focuses on looking at the past. These multiple ways that he has to do it have changed over time and with it the objects and objectives of said investigations that also become temporary and, therefore, subjects of history itself.
If we think that history is all that past event where man has been involved, we would have to complement by saying that a historian is the one who, from the present moment, manages to undertake a journey with the appropriate questions and tools to the past and, in this way , and in a meticulous and detailed way, manage to rescue information that allows him and his contemporaries to understand that fragment of time.
Sources of work and interpretative-comparative capacity
Let us take as an example the need to know and analyze how many men and women lived in Mexico during the period of the war against the United States. This question can be asked by anyone without having to be a specialist in History. However, it will be difficult for him to approach the sources that provide him with said information, in addition to the fact that, if he came across them in a fortuitous act of good luck -since historians know specialized archives and collections- it would be difficult for him to process the data dumped there. The historian will know, due to the specialized training he has in this regard, that in this period there was still no civil registry like the one we know now, and that, therefore, the documents that during this moment in the past could contain such information They would be, on the one hand, the ecclesiastical world and on the other the world, the secular or civil world.
The certificates of births, marriages, deaths or the administrative counts by parish that they elaborated as judiciously as they continue to do up to now, would be a reference to begin the search, however, only a historian would have the most appropriate tools to make the approximate calculations at face this information.
On the other hand, in this period the other sources that could contain data in this regard are the so-called “Descriptive Statistics” that were carried out with different objectives throughout the first half of the 19th century and that almost always reported this information to administrative instances such as part of the legal-administrative demarcations that they were in charge of.
The important thing about both sources of information is that only the historian has the tools to filter such figures and ask questions such as the origin of the information, the reliability of the sources, the clarity of the numbers, the location of populations or cities that they have changed their name and, above all, the patience and discipline to spend long days working in the documentary collections, first searching for and then processing said information.
For all this, it is that a historian becomes a specialist of the past, an explorer of sources and an adventurer of time. Because depending on the problem that arises and the time when he looks for said information, the difficulties he encounters will be, the type of sources he can study and the interpretation he can reach.
Regarding the latter, it is important to take into account that, in History, as in many areas of knowledge, research is not conclusive nor does it reach the truth. A historian is not concerned with rescuing the truth from the rubble of the past, but is interested in gathering as many pieces of the puzzle as possible, analyzing with his own cultural background and worldview (checking the input for subjectivity) and contributing to science in general and historical knowledge in particular, this story that you want to tell about, for example, the amount of population that existed at a given time.
Finally, it is important to mention that there are specific treatments to use the documentary heritage that it is difficult for someone who has not completed a professional training to know, such as the temperature and environmental conditions in which the documents can be stored, the optimal light conditions , the work of reproduction or data collection and the referenced location of the same from the different systems that exist to guide the veracity and origin of the sources. Being a historian is not an easy task, but without a doubt, when you have the passion for knowledge of the past, you only need patience and determination to honor such a great task.
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