Midterm Flashcards
(29 cards)
What it’s Collingwood’s criteria for history
History scientific because it starts with questions not answers
It is humanistic about who we are
Is rational you can’t be crazy and it is self revelatory
What is the definition of history
History of the account of the pass in a certain order history comes from the Greek word for investigation or inquiry
What are some of the uses of history
History and memory you must have context to understand what is happening around you
preserve the memory of things
How can you abuse history
Manipulating what happen for personal gain examples China under mao and Russia under Putin
What is retrodiction
There are limited amounts of information about what happened in complete sources you can only make a best guess about what exactly happened
Versions of history might need to be revised based on new information or sources
Being aware of unintended consequences people can set out to do one thing and create unintended situations example the war in Iraq and Howard Iran
What are the three stages of historical inquiry
Step one ask a question what happened? what did people do? How did the historical actors behave?
Step to ask my people behaved as they did tricky because you have to interpret things. Most historians use the rational human model leave multiple set rational goals for themselves. This is criticized because some people believe that class and economic structure will contribute to peoples actions
Step three ask the question how did it turn out? who was affected? historian seldom agree on the outcomes of things because of their different beliefs and values
The formative age of Greek and Roman historiography
From 800 to 500 BCE
The Greeks invented critical history as a method of sorting out the truth from the false
Homer he was a blind man who wrote poetry about the heroes and antiheroes of Greece (an oral poet in a written age)
He wrote mythography which is myth with a historical grain of truth
He had a lot of anachronisms in his writing used elements from a different age in his stories such as bronze weapons and not iron
Hesiod
700 B.C.E.
Wrote theogony which was the birth of the gods
Writes about collective human past and began dividing history into different ages like the silver gold bronze iron
Use the idea of the pass is better than the present
Herodotus
484 to 424 B.C.E.
Lived in present-day Turkey
Read about things that were important to the great
Read about the Persian wars Persians were called barbarians because they couldn’t understand what they were saying
There are nine books in the histories that represent the nine Muses
One through four of the books described wide-ranging backgrounds
Polybius
Romes histories discussed the sequence of
government
Believed in the cyclical nature of government
Which starts with monarchy
Then moves to tyranny because people want power
Then comes an uprising which leads to an aristocracy
Which then becomes an oligarchy were a few people rule
Then turns into a democracy where the people rule
Then comes anarchy which leads back into monarchy
Julius Caesar
Wrote about his conquests and Gaul
Wrote about himself in third person very simple unadorned style no-frills
Livy
Wrote the history of Rome in 142 volumes only 35 still exist
Believed in the superiority of the old Rome
He was a moralist and attacked the decadence of the age he lived in
Tacitus
Wrote history as a morality tale
Wrote the annals of Imperial Rome (they covered 14 to 68 CE)
The histories covered 69 to 96 CE
Kathy this is the first historian to mention Christians in a non-Christian text he was not a fan of them
Read fragment about Boudicca
St. Augustine
He was a Bishop of hippo and north Africa
He wrote the city of God which is the most influential Christian interpretation of history ever devised
It was in response to the catastrophe in your 410 when the Goths captured Rome and destroyed it
He rejected the Greek idea of cyclical time. He thought time moved in a straight line with a beginning middle and end
Teleology and eschatology
The branches of philosophy and theology concerned with the nature of providential design and the conclusion of time during the last days
Annals
Lists in brief entry form that recorded memorable events in a location during a single year
Kind of like a year book or a register
A chronicle
An aggregation of annal entries arranged in an annual sequence with some additional narrative
Annals and Chronicles
Usually intended to record God’s activities and manifestations and could also contain information about secular life
Hard to know who the author is because it continued for generations and were passed around between monasteries
The venerable bede
Spent his life in a monastery in Northumbria studying teaching and writing on religious subjects
Wrote the ecclesiastical history of the English people first reliable description of early Britain taking into account the sacred and secular aspects
BeCame interested in history when trying to figure out how to accurately put events in order and the proper dates for Christian festivals
Otto of freising
One of the greatest German chroniclers
He wrote the deeds of Emperor Frederick Barbarosa
And he wrote Chronicle or history of the two cities which is a universal history based on the works of St. Augustine
Believed in a linear conception of time believes in a beginning and an end respectively the creation and the second coming
The shih
Historian, literally means record keeper. Used before 1000bc much before Herodotus
The shu-jing
The classic of history
About virtue and 6 classics
Odes rights changes
Schwartz and the dao
Dao means the way- there is a nominative order in Chinese behavior
“Rin” is the golden rule
The Qin dynasty
State defeats everyone else
The first emperor built the terra-cotta soldiers
Was a rupture in Chinese history he burned a lot of books very Confucian scholars alive
He for bid any references to history and burned everything except for books from the qin dynasty
Followed legalism
