ANALYZE, INTERPRET, and EXPLAIN the painting below. For this discussion, you will attempt to use the art of INTERPRETATION as all historians do. Complete the following tasks in your discussion post thoroughly. Posts should be longer than 250 words. Include your word count total at the end of your post in parenthesis. Ex. (265 words)

Describe what you see. What do you notice first? What people and objects are shown? How are they arranged?

How can this painting represent what HISTORY, as a field of study, is all about? (Explain)

ANALYZE, INTERPRET, and EXPLAIN ONE of the following quotes. Be sure to reference the quote number in your post, so readers know.
Explain what the quote means in your own words and what the author is attempting to tell us about HISTORY.

“Just as a balance between oppression and liberation constructs identity for a person, so the same may be true of a social system. Here you can hardly do without history as a discipline, because it’s the means by which a culture sees beyond the limits of its own senses. It’s the basis, across time, space, and scale, for a wider view. A collective historical consciousness, therefore, may be as much a prerequisite for a healthy well-rounded society as is the proper ecological balance for a healthy forest and a healthy planet.” (149)

“History is a representation of reality. It’s not reality itself: indeed, if truth be told it’s a pitiful approximation of reality that, even with the greatest skill on the part of the historian, would seem very strange to anyone who’d actually live through it. And yet, with the passage of time, our representations become reality in the sense that they compete with, insinuate themselves into and eventually replace altogether the firsthand memories people have of events through which they lived.” (136)

“We know these things about the future only from having learned about the past: without it we’d have no sense of even these fundamental truths, to say nothing of the words with which to express them, or even of who or where or what we are. We know the future only by the past we project into it. History in this sense, is all we have. But the past, in another sense, is something we can never have. For by the time we’ve become aware of what has happened it’s already inaccessible to us: we cannot relive, retrieve, or rerun it as we might some laboratory experiment or computer simulation. We can only represent it.” (3)