Abstract

When teaching history, we often struggle to find the balance between helping students to build a foundation of historical literacy and helping them to engage in nuanced historical reasoning. Thinking in our discipline is oriented first toward making claims, from imperfect evidence, about concrete particulars. That is, we make claims about what has been and is no more, what happened and why it happened that way in some time and place. Having reasoned well at that level and engaged with the complexity of the human past, we then can better engage with questions of meaning and the relationship of historical truth to other disciplines. This paper explores several key thinkers as guides for ourselves and our students in our quest to think historically. It will begin with questions of how we come to know about the past. St. John Henry Newman’s epistemological thought, especially in <i>Grammar of Assent</i>, helps us see how reliable historical claims arise from a convergence of evidence, rather than from abstract logical proof. Our notions of historical reasoning are further enhanced by engagement with recent writing on historical thinking from scholars such as Carl Trueman and Brad Gregory. Finally, the paper will explore such thinkers as St. Augustine and Christopher Dawson on questions of meaning in man’s story.