1. The "common trait" between all histories involves the sense of consubstantiality of being ("everything is interlocked").
2. That said, histories are different (compared to one another) because of the freedom of the historian to pick and filter subjects, events, data, all of the stuff he uses when writing his history.
3. In other words, a history is a creation of a historian who, being limited in being (he was born, he will die, he is not omnipresent, he has to carry the burden of his ethnicity/upringing/culture/politics/etc.), will always present a subjectively distorted viewpoint. — Mariner

1. Everything is interlocked, but we have to categorize in order to study things in a practical way.
2. Agreed. Categories and subcategories.
3. I see your reasoning, but I don't know if I agree with it 100%. The Historian assesses an occurrence in the past. Yes his bias is a product of his ethnicity, politics, culture etc, but despite that bias, there is a kernel of objective truth in the past. Without that kernel, you are dealing in fiction, not history.

We write history because it gives us certain bearings on reality. Through history we see where we come from. From that narrative, we can derive legitimacy to certain claims, and make decisions about the present and the future.

Hard labor in a quarry seems reasonable to me, Greg.

Being the godless communist that I am, I can see the merit in having a fine proportionate to one's income.

However, I can see the argument (without agreeing with it) that all individuals should be equal before the law in their punishment. Then again, the lofty ideal of equality-before-the-law has never been fully achieved, and, to make matters more complicated, their are two perceptions of achieving it:

The Proportional Method: Since nobody can truly be economically equal, the law should operate proportionally to income. The law should acknowledge the wealth gap between agents, and should compensate for the sake of egalitarianism.

The "Justice is Blind" Method: In theory, this mode of justice should completely ignore everything but the facts pertaining to the case: the agent(s) and the action(s). Wealth and privilege should be ignored, because that is the only way legal equality to be achieved.

There's quite a bit of dialectical tension between the two. I for one can see these schools of thoughts permeating American politics and culture. The question is, which one is more in line with that good ol' fashioned sense of Liberal Egalitarianism.

Which would lead to nonsense. History isn't about verifying if some molecules or atoms interacted in some way or not. Yes, at the most simple level the historical question is that did something physically happen or not. This kind of question doesn't get us far and it doesn't at all tell about the reasons why something happened.

That doesn't mean History cannot have empirical elements in order to answer certain questions. It's certainly feasible that an archaeologist would take a sample of pottery from a dig site, and have a chemical analysis done on it in order to further his own studies. History cannot be analyzed through pure mathematics, but mathematics can be a boon to historical study.

Now getting back to your original question: all the fields of history are, in the broadest way possible, univocal. From the History of the Cosmos to the History of the 2000's, every time we study the past, we are asking the univocal question: "What happened?"

The only problem is that looking at History in such a broad context would be difficult. Imagine taking a survey of U.S. History course and having to listen to a lecture on the time period between the Big Bang and the rise of the Mississippian Culture.

Bottom line: Univocal? Yes, but in a broad and impractical way.

Real talk, I think it should be a symbol instead of a single Philosopher.

A picture of Hegel to scare people off.

I have an interest in future human beings. I truly hope we go on living as a species for a long time to come, and continue to learn and expand the borders of knowledge.

Will we? I would assume so. Global Warming is going to be a really rough thing to deal with, but I feel like there is just too many of us to go extinct, at least from that dilemma. That does not mean it should be ignored, we should do things in the present to alleviate the problem.

As far as what we can do as individuals to make the lives of future humans more enjoyable, I would say the only thing we can do is live as ethically, and expand the limits of human understanding as much as we can.

Glad to see there's another Epicurean on here. Of course I just use Epicurean teachings to drink, eat, and shag too much.

Well Greg sent me a message giving me a heads up about this forum. I'm still green on the old forum, so I don't know what it was like before it got bought out by the man. So I'll browse and post on there for a while. When the shit hits the fan there, I'll move here. I'll probably make a few posts here as well.