Q1 Flashcards
1
Q
Herodotus (484-424 BC) - Context
A
- Greek Writer and geographer credited for being the “first historian”
- 425 BC. published Magnus Opus, “The Histories” → meaning inquiry
Herodotus first produced his long account of the Persian Wars for oral presentation. - He eventualy created a written version and this was subesquently dividied into 9 ‘books’ that make up the modern publications of the ‘Histories’
2
Q
Herodotus (484-424 BC) - Methodology
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- Herodotus wanted a deeper more rational understanding of history by looking at events from both sides
- Travelled to the places he wrote about only creating first hand anecdotes to ascertain accuracy as well as only events which happened within his lifetime
- By framing the histories as an inquiry, he sought to encapsulate many different perspectives
- Herodotus was the first historian to use the autopsy to reach reasonable conclusions:
Eyewitness (opsis)
Ta Legomena (traditon)
Gnome (reason) - Sought the encapsulate legacy of the Greeks
3
Q
Herodotus (484-424 BC) - Critiques
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- Greek origin made him more susceptible to bias
- Cicero, a 1st Century Roman writer, “Fables scarcely less numerous than those who appear in the works of poets”
- Similar to the legendary poet, Homer, who created his Illiad and Oddysey to be performed - there was an entertaiment factor to the histories
4
Q
Livy (56/64 BC - 17AD) - Context
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- Contemporary of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire - this was a tumultuous period in Roman history
- Livy’s work is shaped by the social upheaval which characterised his lifetime
- Livy’s “Ab Urbe Condita” (27-9 BC) - the Roman Republic which had been characterised by a system of checks and balances was undergoing significant social and political changes beginning with the reign of Augustus - reflects the changing political landscape and a sense of nostalgia for the older, more virtuous days of the Roman Republic
- Purpose in writing - provide a comprehensive account of the city’s legendary foundation and the subsequent development of Rome, its government, and its people. In doing so, he sought to convey important moral and political lessons to his contemporary audience.
5
Q
Livy (56/64 BC - 17AD) - Methodology
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- Not just a straightforward account - has an inherently didactic purpose when attempting to educate his readers on the moral values and virtues he believed had contributed to Rome’s greatness in the past - used historical examples, anecdotes and narratives to illustrate these virtues
- Writing style included various literary flourishes, vivid characters and scenes. These elements added to the dramatic and rhetoric quality of his work.
- Livy did not seek to approach history in political terms (had no connection to Roman politics, which some saw as a disadvantage), he sought to convey history in moral and ethical terms
- Preface, “I invite the reader’s attention to the much more serious consideration of the kind of lives our ancestors lived, of who were the men and what the means, both in politics and war … a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings.”
6
Q
Livy (56/64 BC - 17AD) - Critiques
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- Livy often relied on Roman traditions and cultural beliefs when constructing his narrative. This sometimes led him to include elements which some historians may consider myth or legend - often use Livy’s in conjunction with others to form opinions
- G.B Miles, “Livy: Reconstructing History (1995)” - “Critics missed the point of Livy’s text…perpetuates and interprets the collective memory on which the identity and character of the Roman people depend”
7
Q
The Venerable Bede (672-735 AD) - Context
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- English Monk, historian and scholar who lived in the Kingdom of Northumbria - monk at the double monastery of Monkwearmouth-Jarrow
- His most famous works “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People)” (731 AD) has been a vital source for the study of early English history for years - idiosyncratic with “the Father of English History”
- Bede’s contributions extend to popularising the Anno Dommini dating system, notably discussed in his chronology work, De Teporum Rationale (725 AD) - played a widespread role in its use amongst contemporaries and subsequent generations
- Most historians believed the “Six Ages” to have occurred over 5500 years - Bede recalculated this to only 3952 years
8
Q
The Venerable Bede (672-735 AD) - Methodology
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- Christian historiography linear versus a cyclical history
- Inherently evangelical purpose - to spread the correct teachings of Christ’s gospel, as distilled by the Roman Churcha and the contemporary needs of his own Northumbrian Church
- Polemical purpose - the latter mid sixth-century work The Ruin of Britain dealt with the end of Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon invasions by blaming them all on the sins of the Britons
- Employed rhetoric to propagate his Christian bias which sought an Anglo-Saxon Chronical, “the accurate recording of the past was more important than the truth”
- Detached scholar - remote from time, allows him to employ a methodology which sees the past without the distortion of his own political circumstances
- Admits his faults and inaccuracies throughout - “Should the reader discover any inaccuracies in what I have written, I humbly beg that he will not impute them to me, because, as a true law of history requires, I have laboured honestly to transmit whatever I could ascertain from common report for the instruction of prosperity”.
9
Q
The Venerable Bede (672-735 AD) - Critiques
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- “Bede was writing within a particular literary and intellectual environment so far from our own that it is risky business to describe him by such words as a “historian”” (Nick Hingham, An English Empire, 1995)
- Bede’s particular vision of Christian historical truth was further coloured by his love of the Church of Rome, Bernicia, Northumbria and Anglo-Saxon England. He was not in a position to ignore secular matters given the way in which Church and state were intertwined in his society.
10
Q
Edward Gibbons (1737-1794) - Context
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- English rationalist and scholar best known as the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), a continunous narrative from the 2nd Century CE to the fall of Constantinople in 1453
- Both in his lifetime and after, he was attacked and personally ridiculed by those that feared his skepticism would shake the existing establishment - he was hailed as a champion by militant agnostics (he himself was not a militant and was primarily concerned with the accurate construction of history)
- While he treated the supernatural with irony, his main purpose was to establish the principle that religons must be treated as a phenomena of the human experience
- The Decline and Fall is comprised of two parts. The first half covers a period of around 300 years to end the empire in the West, about 480 BC. In the second half - nearly 1000 years are compressed. Yet the work is coherent by virtue of its conception of the Roman Empire as a single entity throughout its long and diversified course.
- Gibbons imposed a further organic unity to his writing by viewing it as an undeviating decline from those ideals of political and intellectual freedom he had found in classical literature
11
Q
Edward Gibbons (1737-1794) - Methodology
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- His work was composed without consulting other scholars and impressed individuality
- Methodologies centred largely around his meticulous research and search for historical accuracy; his approach to writing reflected both the 18th century Englightenment atmosphere of the philosophies and the legacy of the 17th Century erudite, whose works tended to be massively detailed and factual
- Pessimism and detached use of irony was common to the historical genre of the era
- Gibbons methodology was so accurate that little to this day can be found to contradict his use of primary sources for evidence. While modern historical methodology has changed, his skill in translation of sources was impeccable, and contemporary historians still rely on - - Gibbons as a secondary source to substantiate references
- Gibbons’ footnotes are famous for their idiosyncrasies, providing an entertainment, moral commentary, on both Ancient Rome and 18th Century England
12
Q
Von Ranke (1795 - 1886) - Context
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- Archetypal Empiricist
- Ranke was born in the small town of Wiehe in Thuringia, Germany - in the late 18th Century, Germany was not a nation state but a loose grouping of over 300 sovereign states which owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire
- Ranke had deeply felt Lutheran religious beliefs, never completing theological studies at university as he believed religion could not be shoe-horned in such a way
- Ranke’s first published work was Histories of Latin and Germanic Nations (1824), in his preface he wrote, “History has been given the function of judging the past, of instructing men for the profit of future years. The present attempt does not aspire to such a lofty undertaking. It merely wants to show essentially how things happened”
- He detested Voltaire’s attacks on organised religion, and rational systematising would fit uneasily with his concept of the relationship between what the human mind could do and its limits in uncovering the ultimate truth which was God. On the other hand, since God lay behind the unfolding of human history, there ought to be some sort of meaning or discernible purpose therein, even though it would be wrong and presumptuous to identify a precise pattern
- Ranke was inclined to blame the philosophes for providing intellectual fuel for what he saw as the mindless, irreligious and destructive machine that was the French Revolution; Ranke rejected all the enlightenment stood for
13
Q
Edward Gibbons (1737-1794) - Critiques
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- English Historian Sir Leslie Stephen, “Whatever its shortcomings, the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period”
- Gibbons’ treatment of causation has been much criticised by modern historians - not only was he biassed against Christianity, but also failed to offer an in-depth analysis of causes of various types (political, economic, social etc.) and a clear indication of their relative importance
14
Q
Von Ranke (1795 - 1886) - Methodology
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- Sympathised with Fitche’s concept of the role of a true scholar in discovering something a “divine idea” from the world as we perceive it
- The past is to be studied in its own terms, with appropriate recognition of the value systems to each age
- Writing about his, ‘English history, principally in the 17th century (1859)’, he said that he had tried to “extinguish my own self, as it were, to let things speak”, in other words - he claimed to let the past speak for itself through original documentary sources.
- Allowed the facts to emerge from the sources before considering the general issues which msut have contributed to the facts “No state has ever existed without a spiritual basis and a spiritual content. In power itself a spiritual essence manifests itself”
- In the History of France (1861) Ranke argued that the historian’s task was both a science and an art. It had to match the scientific demands of philology, whilst offering the reader the appeal of imaginative literature
- Ranke was able to offer a ‘scientific’ method that did not involve the kind of theorising which explained the past through laws of human behaviour which excluded God - if God lay at the centre of everything he must have left a precise pattern for humans to uncover
15
Q
Von Ranke (1795 - 1886) - Critiques
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- Von Ranke has been criticised for over stating the possibility of objectivity, and that his own objectivity can be called into question, since he wrote from a conservative, pro-Russian view point.
- Focused only on the histories of elites when considering diplomatic and political history
- Ranke could be criticised in that he only wrote on issues that concerned him, whereas other historians would claim the premise of objectivity would require the historian to write on issues of no personal interest to him
16
Q
Theodore Mommsen (1817-1903) - Context
A
- German historian and writer famous for The History of Rome
- Became a master of both epigraphy and philology
- Made the corpus of Latin inscriptions into a source work that was essential in complementing the one sidedly literary tradition which attempted to make the most comprehensive understanding of the Ancient World
- As a native of Schleswig he was a subject of the Danish King, but considered himself Geman, and looked forward to German unity - for him, freedom meant not only the independence of German states from foreign influence but also the freedom of the German citizen to adapt himself to any sort of constitution except that of depotism or a police state
- Vigorous participation in political activity (POLITICAL AGENDA)
17
Q
Theodore Mommsen (1817-1903) - Methodology
A
- Mommsen wrote the first three volumes of the “Romische Geschichte”, up to the Battle of Thapsus in 46 BC. This work embodied the new historical method being applied to the study of Rome. Mommsen critically examined hiterto unquestioned traditoins and rejected the attitude of the enligtenment, which had idealised the classical age.
- Brought forward rigourous criticism of historiography → rather than examining the content of sources he examined the production of the history
- Without being a poet, he used to means of poetry and enjoyed exercising his poetic talent
- Didn’t write anything he himself didn’t feel capable of knowing
- Emphasised the importance of empirical research, relying on concrete evidence such as legal documents, administrative records, and material artefacts to support his arguments and interpretations
18
Q
Theodore Mommsen (1817-1903) - Critiques
A
To many critics, Mommsen’s glorification of Caesar’s opponents, Pompey and Cicero, seem strangely inconsistent with his political liberalism
19
Q
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) - Context
A
- There is a truth to human societies and it is developed through class conflict and dialectical materialism (it is there despite context)
- An understanding of religion has to go hand in hand with an understanding of the social conditions which created it
- His consideration of religion, politics, economics and society as a whole was not merely a philosophical excerise, but an active attempt to change the world and help it find a “heart”, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in a certain way, the goal is to change it” - 11th thesis on Feurbach
- By 1848, Marx was thus able to open the Communist Manifesto with the contention that, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”. This for Marx, was the real motor of history: real struggle between classes which produced real historical outcomes which in turn went on to become new struggles as the process of negation of the negation - the “old mole” as Marx called it - carried on burrowing away, all the time throwing up new ways of thinking which themselves went on to negate and change the world
- Inherently a naturalistic teleological study of history
- Preface to a “Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy on 1859” - for Marx the development of history emerges out of the relationship between the material forces of production and the social relations of production rather than a pre-ordained way
- 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonparte from 1852, “Men do not make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” → there is a transcendent aspect of history, men’s building of the past precipitates our building of our past
20
Q
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) - Methodology
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- The dialectic theory of motion says that within every given situation is a negotiation
- Marx’s history was the first to be based on truly scientific socioeconomic analysis
- Aruged that theorieis of his rivals, the utopian Communists and anarchists as well as Hegians and liberals, were based in idealist moral abstractions which dealt in notions of freedom, justice, fairness and equality in what they called the political superstructure of society, while theirs were based on an objective and scientific understanding of the real, but largely invisible forces at work in the socio-economic base
- Marx and Engels saw change and revolution as historical necessities emerging out of a material contingent reality driven by socioeconomic forces
21
Q
Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) - Critiques
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- One of the main critiques of Marxism is that itself is nothing more than a secularised form of dogmatic religious belief
- Traditional Liberal, Karl Popper, “Marxism is nothing more than a hegelian teleology in quasi-religious clothing, in which history is seen as merely a means of reaching a pre-exisitng endpoint
- Historian Antonio Gramsci rejects the view that Marx saw history as having a pre-exisitng endpoint, “if Marx thought that it would all come about automatically, then there would be no need for his 11th thesis on Feuerbach, which declared it was more important to change the world than interpret it”
22
Q
Eric Hobsawm (1917-2012) - Context
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- Eric Hobsawm was an unrmoresful communist and Stalinist, never expressing any regret for the Communsist taste → politically far to the left, an unorthodox supporter of the Britsh Communist party
Hobsawm is known for his works on labour history and social agitation such as Primitive Rebels (1959) and his four volume account of Europe History The Age of Revolution (1962) - His abiding historical theme was the struggle of political men and women to get to the top of their world and the economic forces that bested them
- The Age of Revolution was Hobsawm’s first four volumes of history that opens with the French Revolution and British Industrial Revolution, two explosions of the late 18th Century that spurred, “the greatest transformation in human history” since antiquity.
- For Hobsawm, this “dual revolution” announced two different orientations to modernity - in first, men and women sought to control the world through action in concert - in second, there was a transformation that happened by coincidence and indirection, through the choice of business men whose only “choice was the buy in the cheapest market and sell without restriction in dearest”
- “Without [the industrial revolution] we can not understand the impersonal groundswell of history on which the more obvious men and events of our period were borne”
- The particular appeal of his writing is it’s indebtedness to Marxist model’s of interpretation, deployed with clarity and power, and abetted by a wide range of sources
23
Q
Eric Hobsawm (1917-2012) - Methodology
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- As a Marxist historiographer, he focussed on the analysis of the dual revolution (the political French Revolution and the British Industrial Revolution) and seeing their effect upon the predominant trend toward liberal capitalism
- Hobsawm’s achievement as a historian was to “deprovincialise” the story of the rise of the West, putting it in proper global context, linking it to uneven surges of capitalism and class formation - exploring and even appreciating the uneven and sometimes viscous exclusion of bourgeois society
- Claimed, “nothing can sharpen the mind like defeat” and claimed his political failures shaped his historical successes
- Hobsawm focussed on a body of published sources to produce, “a structural, problem oriented history” that broke decisively with the conventional wisdom in the field
Wanted Leninism to become his second nature in writing histories - did not ascertain objectivity in any manner
24
Q
Eric Hobsawm (1917-2012) - Critiques
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- Strong Marxist beliefs shaped his narratives
- “Marxist ideas helped him to develop concepts that made sense of inchoate material of history”
25
Q
Michael Foucalt (1926-84) - Methodology
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- Included an analysis of texts, images and buildings in order to map how forms of knowledge can change
- Rejected the positivist tenet that the methods of pure or natural sciences provided an exclusive standard for arriving at genuine or legitimate knowledge - critique concentrated upon the fundamental point of reference that had grounded and guided his inquiry into human sciences: the concept of “man”
intiiatly pressed the analogy between the corpus statements of subjects produced and presumed true at any given historical moment and the artefacts of some archaeological site or complex. He was thus able to flesh out frequent allusions not simply discourses - Progressed to “genealogy”, a method that traced the ensemble of historical contingencies, accidents and illicit relations that made up the ancestry of one or another accepted theory or concept in sciences → hoped to unearth the artificiality of the dividing line between the putatively illegitimate and its putatively normal/opposite.
