User:LBird BASc/sandbox/ATK/Seminar6/Power/Power in History

Introduction

Bo Yang, a Chinese poet, historian and essayist based in Taiwan, published An Outline of Chinese History in 2002. This book was the first Chinese chronology expressing time in a Western format. Different from previous history work which expressed time in terms of each emperor's reign, Bo Yang used centuries and BCE/CE. As a result, this work better reflects how the historical changes impacted the life of ordinary Chinese people than other chronologies. Instead of entirely focusing on the contributions made by emperors, officials or army generals, this book covers lots of stories of people from lower classes whose names are unknown due to the lack of records and pays attention to their social conditions.

Power in History

Power plays a great role in history study. Those who were in higher positions tend to appear more often in all kinds of historical works, and this can in turn leave a false impression on readers that these people were the only ones who changed the course of the human history and make them fail to realize how the ordinary people contributed to the historical movements. Apart from power in terms of social classes, power related to gender is also a major element in shaping the historical narrative. Women were usually written out of history. Women aren’t allowed to be characters in history, and they have to be stereotypes.

Methods to deal with power in history

We should work hard to fill the gaps which are caused by power. Bo Yang has already offered us a good example in doing this. First, historians could consider change the way they write history works, which means instead of following the old traditions passed down by the former historians they could make an attempt to create new ways of narrative that include rather than exclude people from usually ignored groups. Second, historians should try to uncover more historic evidence related with lower-class people and women, and fully present it in the history work.