Topic 3: Demography, History, and Geography

• Demography is the science of human population, its size, composition, and changes (birth, death, migration).
• Demography is mostly quantitative, obtaining data from censuses, statistical analyses, and surveys.
• Demography is interdisciplinary, drawing concepts from fields like sociology, biology, economics, history, etc.
• Demography is applicable, used to study or formulate public policies.
• Censuses were conducted in ancient times for taxation, military recruitment, and land grants, such as the Persian Empire in 500/499 BCE and Han Dynasty in China in 2 CE.
• In 1370, the Ming Dynasty in China conducted a census that included age, sex, and household relationship.
• In the 17th century, demography marked its birth and development as a scientific discipline.
• John Graunt (1620-1674) created the first table for the population in England which included mortality rate and predicted percentages of the population.
• Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was one of the pioneers in the formal study of population, probing the impact of a great increase in population will affect human welfare through a decrease in resources.
• Alfred Lotka (1880-1949) argued that mathematics is necessary in examining population growth rates, as well as birth and death rates.
• The data used for demography are obtained from censuses, registers, and other sources.
• Formal demography develops and applies new methods for the analyses of demographic data.
• Social demography uses demographic data in explaining and predicting social phenomena such as the relationship between disasters and population growth of a certain area.
• Geography studies the physical aspects of the earth and how it affects mobility, outcomes, and interactions of individuals and societies; the bridge between human and physical sciences.
• The Tribute of Yu (500 BCE) in ancient China was the first recorded to discuss geography which surveys the provinces of ancient China, with information about the soils, rivers, and agricultural products.
• Eratosthenes (276-149 BCE) first used the term “geography” as “the description of the earth as the abode of human beings”; coined as the “Father of Geography”; and invented latitude and longitude to locate places and measure distances.
• Strabo, a Roman scholar, wrote Geographica (ca 100 BCE - 100 AD) which describes the world.
• Ptolemy, another Roman scholar, wrote about cartography (science of mapping), projections, and calculations of Earth’s dimensions.
• In the Age of Exploration (13th - 17th centuries), the Europeans explored new worlds which led to the immense development of the study of the world.
• In the 19th century, European colleges and universities offered geography as a separate degree.
• In the US, historians used computers to help them analyze the events of the past.
• Primary sources are documents that contain information from an eyewitness or participant of an event/specific historical biography.
• Diplomatic history: history of international relations among states.
• In Italy, the idea of microstoria arose, or the idea that history should expose the reality that is closer to the individual subjects.
• Political history: the study of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, etc.
• Annales School has two approaches: longue durée - writing of a history of a certain event within a long period (example, 17th through 19th centuries) and histoire événementielle - writing of a history of a certain event within a short period (example, a history of disability during the Marcos administration in the Philippines).
• Historiography: the study of writing history or how history is being written.
• Historians use sources of information in the past that are primarily written (documents).
• Local history: the study of past events in a barangay, municipal, provincial, regional, or city-level.
• Beginning in the twentieth century, there have been many schools of thought in history.
• Gender history: looks at the past from the perspective of gender.
• Historical criticism involves examining the authenticity and accuracy of historical sources.
• Microhistory: In Germany, there arose another school of thought that influenced the writing of history–the Alltagsgeschichte or the history of everyday life.
• Secondary sources are scholarly works that use primary sources (e.g., books, articles, etc.).
• Bielefeld School: A German school of thought that proposed that history should use the methods of social sciences to study the past.
• Annales School proposed that historians must be aware of their subjectivity and they should get the help of other social sciences (geography, sociology, economics, etc) to interpret the past.
• Annales School: a French way of writing history that veered away from the “official sources”, hence getting information from unofficial sources such as diaries, cultural traditions, etc.
• Economic history: history related to the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services.
• Remote sensing: the science of acquiring information about the earth from a distance, typically from satellites or high-flying aircraft.
• Global positioning system (GPS): a network of orbiting satellites that send precise details of their position in space back to Earth.