Historiography MIDTERM Flashcards
Heroic science
emphasis on truth and rationality, “peeling and throwing off ignorance and superstition”, there is one way to know truth, it is verifiable and replicable, Age of Reform, make things better, science must be replicable, but history isn’t replicable, so how can you do history in a scientific way? Everything can be known through the scientific method, science will cause improvements on life.
Scientists are the most free of all people, they are repressed by religious and political figures
Explanatory history (52)
the search for the laws of historical development, used as a tool to all peoples trying to make sense of where they had been and what they were becoming (60) if laws of human history could be understood, time would bring progress not decline, because laws could be followed to make things get better
Scientific conception of time
time is the same everywhere, at all times, watches became cheaper, more people could afford clocks, time became an ever-present, standardized sequence of units disciplining the cadences of work and daily life, (56) if time was imagined and universally the same and history construed as a secular story of its unfolding, then it made sense to train historians in universities according to secular, standardized, scientific methods
For contrast, before scientific history, Christian history (58):
wished to link all previous history to one universal story, informed by their faith, events were interpreted as God’s divine intervention – this theory lost credibility as Enlightenment attacked it, more scientific breakthroughs and knowledge about the ancient Greeks and Romans and people in distant lands
Andrew Dickson White: (48)
did not believe in the Bible, greatest science historian of nineteenth century, firmly attached a triumphant history of science to the ideals of the secular republic
Benedict Anderson
“Imagined communities” The role of theory, the lens you choose to view history.
Karl Marx
Change because of economics, materialist history, “most scientific”, beleived in large-scale causation. He assumed modernization.
Johann Gottfried Herder (64)
Romantic scholar of history, “each culture and every historical epoch had to be understood on its own terms, historians should adopt a posture of respectful deference toward the past
Comte
Progress in all knowledge as science depends on developing general laws out of direct observations of phenomena
Hegel
Truth is never permant because society is ever changing. Relativism is the idea that truth depends on historical circumstances.
Positivism
a philosophical system that holds that every rationally justifiable assertion can be scientifically verified or is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and that therefore rejects metaphysics and theism. Laws are to be understood as social rules, and are valid because they are enacted by authority or derive logically from existing decisions. Progress in all knowledge as in science depends on developing general laws out of direct observations of phenomena.
Historicism
the tendency to regard historical development as the most basic aspect of human existence and the social and cultural phenomena are determined by history. Historicism prepared the way for relativism.
Marxism
understanding history through materials/economics not through big ideas/events. History goes bottom up.
Modernity
Belief in modernity meant the belief that accumulated knowledge, when diffused and applied, could only lead to improvement, to better living standards
Annales School
Broad demographic changes and economic, a branch of French history before WWII and extended its impact internationally, uninfluential in United States. Durkheim’s idea of the effects of long-term social processes(78-79). offered an alternative to Marxism in the postwar period, systematizer of Annales school was Fernand Braudel(82). Insisted on durkheim had called soical facts. Social facts is long tern processes such as population growth or contraction, price curves, harvest yields, tax receipts, and the like.(83)
