GRE Sample Essay 2

Claim: Though often considered an objective pursuit, learning about the historical past requires creativity.

Reason: Because we can never know the past directly, we must reconstruct it by imaginatively interpreting historical accounts, documents, and artifacts.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which the claim is based.

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Response for GRE Essay 2

History is all about the past. It is pronounced in the form of written documents. All the events occurred in history are documented and people who document events are called as historians. Historical period is the time people can never visit. Hence, a lot of imagination is required to interpret the past about how people used to stay, what they used to wear, their cultural tradition, their markets, their food, their politics, etc. To understand all this, imagination plays a vital role in the life of historians. There are distinct forms of history such as World history, People’s history, Environmental history, economical history, diplomatic history, cultural history, etc.

A historian’s document, account, and artefacts are helpful to imagine the lifestyle and creativity that is required to interpret and portray history in the present form. Many movies are examples of such imagination and creativity such as The Mummy series, The Cleopatra, Titanic, etc. The directors of these movies might have got historical information from written documents available, but it requires lot of creative mind and artistic view to put those articles in real scenarios and present in the form of a movie. Hence, to understand history, imagination, and creativity is very essential and both go hand in hand. 

The historical evidences are in no way excavated in a chronological manner. Hence it becomes difficult to find out when the events might have occurred. The excavation also cannot tell precisely about the related history with the artefacts found in the excavation.

During the pre-historical period when written documents were not in vogue, people used to crave pictorial representation of events in caves. This surely requires imagination to understand the pictorial language and decipher what might have happened then.

School textbooks contain myriad evidences about history. Understanding history is not just about reading it. In schools, learning history as a subject takes students to a different world of imagination and students start thinking about the life of that time. Right from school, history teaches children to imagine and think. As a result, one requires to join the dots of events occurred and form a story that could depict history in the most commensurate form.

Generally, historians discover, collect, organize, and present information about past events. They discover or gather this information through available archaeological evidences, written sources from the past, etc. They gather the information and relate the incidences chronologically. This indeed requires deep understanding of facts and imagination to relate those incidents with each other. 

In conclusion, to interpret the historical information, one requires a lot of imagination and creativity. Lacking both will hinder the study. We should be thankful to historians who study all the evidences and information in detail and form a complete story out of it, to help common people understand history in a much better form. 

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