TOK situations in history
Knowledge of the human past built from traces that survive by accident as much as by design. History is unusual in that its object cannot be observed or repeated, so its claims rest on the interpretation of evidence produced by people with their own purposes.
- Southeast Asia
Perpetrators, re-enacting
The Act of Killing invited men who carried out Indonesia's 1960s massacres to restage their killings in the film genres they loved, and the perpetrators' own…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- Southeast Asia
The city the lasers found under the jungle
Airborne laser scanning over Angkor stripped away the canopy digitally and revealed a vast low-density urban sprawl around the temples, overturning estimates…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- India
A dance banned, then rebuilt
Colonial-era campaigns pushed hereditary temple dancers out of practice, and Bharatanatyam was later revived largely by urban reformers who reshaped its…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Culture
- Latin America
Bones as witnesses
Forensic teams exhuming mass graves in Guatemala and Argentina matched skeletal evidence to survivor accounts, converting disputed atrocities into documented…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Responsibility
- Africa
The ruins colonialism refused to attribute
Colonial administrations in Rhodesia promoted foreign builders, Phoenicians, Arabs, anyone but Africans, for Great Zimbabwe, and at times pressured…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Perspective
- Power
- Africa
Historians without paper
West African griots have carried genealogies, epics and political history across centuries through trained recitation, with lineages of transmitters…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- East Asia
An alphabet designed for everyone
King Sejong's fifteenth-century promulgation of Hangul gave Korean a script learnable in days, against the years Chinese characters demanded, and literate…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Baghdad's translation century
Abbasid Baghdad funded the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic, and scholars there corrected, extended and argued with what they…
Enduring · History
- Truth
- Culture
- India
The script nobody can read
Thousands of short inscriptions survive from the Indus Valley civilisation, yet after a century of attempts, no decipherment commands consensus, and scholars…
Enduring · History
- Interpretation
- Certainty
- India
Calculus before Newton, in Kerala
Mathematicians of the Kerala school, beginning with Madhava in the fourteenth century, derived infinite series for pi and trigonometric functions centuries…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Truth
- Perspective
- Oceania
The raft, the genes, and Pacific origins
Heyerdahl's 1947 Kon-Tiki voyage showed a raft could drift from South America into Polynesia, and the spectacle carried his settlement theory for decades.…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Evidence
- Justification
- Latin America
Twenty-seven books, one afternoon
Diego de Landa burned Maya codices in 1562 as works of the devil, and only a handful of pre-conquest Maya books survive anywhere today. Much of what…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- East Asia
Why did the treasure fleets stop?
Zheng He's fifteenth-century fleets dwarfed anything Europe would float for centuries, then the voyages ceased and records were neglected or destroyed.…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Explanation
- India
The library that burned for months
Nalanda drew scholars from across Asia for centuries until its destruction around 1200, its manuscript collections reportedly burning for months. What survives…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Latin America
Drawings meant for no one on the ground
The Nazca lines have been read as astronomical calendars, ritual pathways, water markers and stranger things, with each era's favourite explanation tracking…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- Global
When oral tradition entered the courtroom
In the Delgamuukw case, Canada's Supreme Court held that Indigenous oral histories must be admitted as evidence of land rights on their own terms rather than…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Culture
- India
A film, a queen, and a fight over the past
Protests over the film Padmaavat turned on a figure known mainly from a sixteenth-century epic poem rather than contemporary chronicles. Crowds defended the…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Truth
- Interpretation
- India
Reading Ashoka after two thousand years
When James Prinsep deciphered the Brahmi script in the 1830s, rock inscriptions across the subcontinent suddenly spoke, and Ashoka re-entered history after…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Interpretation
- Latin America
Records tied in knots
Inca administration ran on quipus, cords whose knots encoded census and tribute data and possibly narrative, and Spanish authorities destroyed many precisely…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Interpretation
- Culture
- The Middle East and North Africa
Cracking hieroglyphs against a bilingual stone
Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs leaned on the Rosetta Stone's parallel texts and his knowledge of Coptic, and the proof was predictive: readings…
Enduring · History
- Justification
- Interpretation
- The Middle East and North Africa
The scrolls only a committee could read
For decades after their discovery, many Dead Sea Scrolls could be studied only by a small editorial team, while outside scholars waited on official publication…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Oceania
Maps you must sing
Aboriginal songlines encode routes, water sources, law and cosmology in song cycles tied to travel across country, with fuller layers restricted to those with…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Interpretation
- Culture
- India
Reading the colonial archive against itself
The Subaltern Studies historians argued that South Asia's archives, largely produced by colonial administration, recorded peasants and rebels only at the…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Objectivity
- India
Reconstruction surgery in an ancient compendium
The Sushruta Samhita describes surgical techniques including nasal reconstruction, and European surgeons in the colonial period documented Indian practitioners…
Enduring · History · The natural sciences
- Truth
- Culture
- India
Who designed the Taj Mahal?
The Taj Mahal's architect is credited variously to several named figures, with the documentary record thin and contested, while the thousands of craftsmen who…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Evidence
- Power
- East Asia
One event, two national textbooks
Japanese and Chinese school treatments of the 1937 Nanjing atrocities have differed for decades in wording, casualty figures and space allotted, and textbook…
Enduring · History
- Perspective
- Power
- Africa
Smuggling a library to safety
When militants occupied Timbuktu in 2012, families and archivists smuggled hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out in trunks and boats, hiding a…
Enduring · History
- Responsibility
- Culture
- Africa
Truth commission, plural truths
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission explicitly distinguished kinds of truth, factual, personal, social, restorative, and accepted survivor…
Enduring · History
- Evidence
- Interpretation
- East Asia
Who influenced whom
Japanese woodblock prints reshaped late nineteenth-century European painting, and the story is usually told as European artists discovering Japan. Told from…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Perspective
- Power
- India
The textbook called Vedic Mathematics
The calculation shortcuts published in the twentieth century as Vedic Mathematics are useful and teachable, but historians of mathematics find no source for…
Enduring · History · Mathematics
- Power
- Justification
- Southeast Asia
A language that changed its alphabet
Vietnam's shift to the Latin-based quoc ngu under colonial influence enabled mass literacy campaigns, and within generations most Vietnamese could no longer…
Enduring · History
- Power
- Culture
- Southeast Asia
History taught by shadow puppets
Javanese wayang kulit performances retell epics through the night, with dalangs weaving in contemporary politics and local commentary as they go. Audiences…
Enduring · History · The arts
- Power
- Interpretation
- Culture
- Oceania
Ancestors in the storeroom
Museums worldwide hold Maori and Moriori ancestral remains collected in the colonial era, and New Zealand runs a standing programme negotiating their return…
Current · History
- Power
- Values
- India
Editing the national textbook
Successive revisions of India's national school textbooks have added, trimmed and removed episodes, with each round defended as correction and attacked as…
Current · History
- Perspective
- Power