Chapter 4

Question 1

Various types of histories

Answer 1

Histories are told through a frame/lens, history is shaped by the the cultural lens it is viewed through, usually the victors eyes– consider July 4th, Revolutionary War to Americans, American War of Independence to the British

• Political histories– written histories that focus on political events
• Intellectual histories– written histories that focus on the development of ideas
• Social histories– written histories that focus on everyday life experiences of various groups in the past
• absent histories– any part of history that was not recorded or that is missing. Not everything that happened in the past is accessible to us today because only some voices were documented and only some perspectives were recorded
• family histories– histories of an individual family that are typically passed down through oral stories
• national history– a body of knowledge based on past events that influenced a country’s development
• cultural- group histories– the history of each cultural group within a nation that includes, for example, the history of where the group originated, why the people migrated, and how they came to develop and maintain their cultural traits

Question 2

Power of texts/language

Answer 2

• language shapes culture

* Sapir- Whorf video– the more diverse our perceptions, the more difficult it is to gain a mutual understanding

Question 3

Contact hypothesis

Answer 3

• when we bring “different” people together, does it facilitate communication?
• the notion that better communication between groups is facilitated simply by putting people together in the same place and allowing them to interact