What is Historical Perspective?

It is crucial that all your writing for this course (including quizzes and exams) be based on sound historical perspective. What do I mean by this?

To understand historical perspective, it is important to consider an obvious, but still often overlooked fact about the study of history that distinguishes it from other academic disciplines. Historians are most concerned with uncovering how things change over time. They choose a variety of subjects to explore: politics, diplomacy, economics, societal custom and practice, cultural norms and social customs. No matter what the precise topic, however, historians are chiefly engaged in an exercise of clarifying the particular historical context of the issue at hand. It is impossible, for instance, to explain the dynamics of monarchical power in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century without first explaining the beliefs, rules and customs that governed that form of government. And it would not make sense to critique a seventeenth-century monarchy on the grounds that it did not afford its citizens democratic rights, since the very idea of democracy was not established until much later. Arguments of this type show a poor understanding of the dynamics of historical change and are easily labeled anachronistic.