History and its methods.ppt
- 1. History of Russia Lecture # 1 History as a kind of knowledge
- 2. Russia's history is an epic saga of strength, sufferings and, ultimately, of survival. It is a tumultuous drama acted out on a vast and violent stage millions of square miles in area, where enormous casts of ordinary people were repeatedly conscripted for extraordinary historical scenes that gave credence to the claim that, truth is stranger than fiction. It is а litany of extremes; extreme weather, extreme contrasts, extreme twists of fate, extreme changes of fortune, and extreme solutions for extreme problems… A brief history of Russia by M. Kort
- 3. The definitions of history. The sources of historical knowledge and the historical method. Empiricism and Marxism Psychohistory History as a point of view on society
- 4. History is the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events.
- 5. The history of the world is the memory of the past experience of Homo sapiens sapiens around the world
- 6. Amongst scholars, the fifth century BC Greek historian Herodotus is considered to be the "father of history".
- 7. Ancient Greek ἱστορία means "inquiry" or "knowledge from inquiry" In Middle English, the meaning was "story" in general
- 8. Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, for him, historia was "the knowledge of objects determined by space and time", that sort of knowledge provided by memory
- 9. Historians write in the context of their own time, and with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret the past, and sometimes write to provide lessons for their own society.
- 10. How can we study history?
- 11. In general, the sources of historical knowledge can be separated into three categories: what is written (texts), what is said (oral tradition), and what is physically preserved
- 12. The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history
- 13. In the 20th century, academic historians focused less on epic nationalistic narratives, which often tended to glorify the nation or individuals, to more objective and complex analyses of social and intellectual forces
- 14. A major trend of historical methodology in the 20th century was a tendency to treat history more as a social science rather than as an art
- 15. The main theoretical approaches to research and right history (about theoretical basis on which evidence is selected, filtered and understood)
- 16. Empiricism It has its origin in the Scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
- 17. Central to the natural philosophy of the period, originating with Francis Bacon, was the belief that knowledge should be derived from observation of the material world
- 18. The philosophers of the eighteenth-century (Enlightenment) applied this idea to the study of human society
- 19. The empiricists argued that historians should refrain from judging the past, and simply write what actually happened They intended that each historical period should be understood on its own terms
- 20. Focusing upon the political and diplomatic history of Europe The first step of research is the basic verification of authenticity
- 21. Empiricizm One of the most famous forged documents in history, the Donation of Constantine, purported to show that the Emperor Constantine gave his crown and empire to Pope Sylvester I after the latter cured him of leprosy. The document was exposed as a forgery seven hundred years later by Renaissance writer Lorenzo Valla
- 22. Leopold von Ranke a German historian, considered one of the founders of modern source-based history.
- 23. Marxism Marx's interpretation of human history is known as the materialist conception of history, or “historical materialism”
- 24. The basic principles were first developed in The German Ideology, written in 1846
- 25. Historical materialism locates the central dynamic of human history in the struggle to provide for physiological and material needs:
- 26. 'life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these needs, the production of material life itself'
- 27. Marx believed that the economic structure of society formed the base upon which all other aspects of society rested.
- 28. For Marx, the rest of society - the superstructure of political institutions and legal systems - was derived from the forces and relations of production.
- 29. Marx separated human history into three historical epochs, each the product of a progressively more advanced mode of production: ancient society (Greece and Rome); feudal society, and capitalism
- 30. Psychohistory Psychoanalytic theory was developed by Freud during the early part of the twentieth century, but was little employed by historians until about 1960
- 31. Psychohistory is the use of psychoanalysis to aid our understanding of historical personalities, groups or trends
- 32. The Annals “school” The conceptual foundations of the Annales were laid in 1929 when the journal was first published by the Strasbourg professors L. Febvre and M. Bloch
- 33. Febvre and Bloch rejected the monopoly of French history by political and diplomatic topics, an approach they saw as sterile
- 34. Febvre and Bloch promulgated an ideal of total history, arguing that all aspects of a society were part of historical reality
- 35. Historical sociology In the late twentieth century, many theorists seem to agree that a sociology which explains as well as describes must be an historical sociology
- 36. they ask questions about social structures of processes understood to be concretely situated in time and space
- 37. they address processes over time, and take temporal sequences seriously
- 38. they mostly attend to the interplay of meaningful actions and structural contexts, in order to make sense of the unfolding of unintended as well as intended outcomes in individual lives and social
- 39. they 'highlight the particular and varying features of specific kinds of social structures and patterns of change
- 40. History as a point of view on society Any society is changing Changing is linear Any historical event is unique Human society is the highest step of development of the universe
- 41. History and Christianity In ultimate form idea of history was formed in europian culture only, due to long influence of christian religion
- 42. The Bible confirms the extraordinary nature of the man as the last creation of God
- 43. Time is going on from Creation to Last Judjment in christian cultural paradigm
- 44. O. Spengler considered that european mankind is the only one completely historical culture. Really, idea of history in european culture belongs to the special role. It is not limited by sphere of the study of society. History became the all-embracing view, having spread from biology (the theory of evolutions) to physicists (the origin of the Universe).