From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography, Jeremy D. Popkin
Historiografie Hoorcollege 7-12
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SUMMARY JEREMY D. POPKIN, FROM
HERODOTUS TO H-NET. THE STORY OF
HISTORIOGRAPHY (NEW YORK:
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016)
2016 – 2017, Semester II
HISTORY
BACHELOR YEAR II
Lisa Jurrjens
,Summary Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016)
Content
Part 1 Historiography from Herodotus to the Twentieth Century .............................................. 3
Chapter 1 What is Historiography? ........................................................................................ 3
The Concerns of Historiography ......................................................................................... 3
Justifying the Study of the Past ........................................................................................... 3
A Short Field Guide to the Varieties of History ................................................................. 3
Chapter 2 History in Ancient and Medieval Times ................................................................ 5
Herodotus and Thucydides ................................................................................................. 5
History-Writing in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds ...................................................... 5
The Origins of Chinese Historiography .............................................................................. 6
History, Judaism, and Christianity ...................................................................................... 6
History in the Middle Ages ................................................................................................. 6
History in the Chinese and Islamic Worlds ........................................................................ 7
The Late Middle Ages in Europe ........................................................................................ 7
Chapter 3 The Historiographical Revolution of the Early Modern Era.................................. 8
The Renaissance Revolution in Historiography ................................................................. 8
Historians in a New World ................................................................................................. 8
The Age of Print.................................................................................................................. 9
History in the Age of the Enlightenment .......................................................................... 10
Chapter 4 The Nineteenth Century and the Rise of Academic Scholarship ......................... 12
The Revolutionary Era and the Development of Historical Consciousness ..................... 12
Ranke and His “Revolution” ............................................................................................. 13
Nationalism and Historical Scholarship............................................................................ 13
History and the Sciences of Society.................................................................................. 14
A Historical Civilization ................................................................................................... 15
Chapter 5 Scientific History in an Era of Conflict ............................................................... 17
Critiques of Scientific History .......................................................................................... 17
World War I and the Understanding of History................................................................ 18
The Founding of the “Annales” School ............................................................................ 18
History and World War II ................................................................................................. 19
Social History in the Post-war Period ............................................................................... 19
History in the Cold War World ......................................................................................... 20
Part II Historiography in the Contemporary World ................................................................. 21
Lisa Jurrjens 1
,Summary Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016)
Chapter 6 Glorious Confusion: Historiography from the 1960s to the End of the Millennium
.............................................................................................................................................. 21
The Challenges of the 1960s ............................................................................................. 21
Searching for a New History............................................................................................. 21
New Paradigms for History .............................................................................................. 22
Women’s History and the History of Gender Relations ................................................... 23
Contesting Eurocentrism ................................................................................................... 24
The History of Memory .................................................................................................... 24
The “History Wars” .......................................................................................................... 25
Chapter 7 History in a New Millennium .............................................................................. 26
A Historical Controversy to End the Millennium ............................................................. 26
History in the Internet Era................................................................................................. 26
History beyond the Printed Page ....................................................................................... 27
New Directions in Historical Scholarship......................................................................... 28
Chapter 8 Historians at Work ............................................................................................... 30
The Graduate School Experience...................................................................................... 30
Searching for a Job in History .......................................................................................... 30
The Quest for Tenure ........................................................................................................ 30
Is There Life after Tenure? ............................................................................................... 31
History Careers Beyond Academia ................................................................................... 31
Chapter 9 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 32
Lisa Jurrjens 2
,Summary Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016)
Part 1 Historiography from Herodotus to the Twentieth Century
Chapter 1 What is Historiography?
The Concerns of Historiography
In this book, we will be concerned with historiography in the more general sense – that is,
with the common issues that confront historians, regardless of what era or aspect of the past
they may be interested in.
The challenge and complexity of the subject of historiography reflects the complexity
of the term “history” itself. In most languages, the word history refers both to events that took
place in the past and to the accounts we give of them. Historiography is a critical enterprise
that deals, in good part, with the questions raised by the difference between these two
meanings of the word history.
Historiography is a “metadiscourse,” a “narrative about narratives” whose subject
matter is other works of history, rather than historical events themselves.
Learning about historiography is a way of coming to understand what history consists
of; it also involves learning what defines a historian. To study historiography also involves
learning about the institutions that hold the historical community together.
Justifying the Study of the Past
Although few historians today would argue that the study of the past can provide us with clear
rules to guide the making of public policy, most would still agree that knowledge of the past
can help us understand the range of possibilities we face in dealing with contemporary
problems.
Present-day historians are more likely to emphasize the value of history in producing a
collective sense of identity than its use in terms of providing practical guidance. Acutely
aware of how historians in the past often contributed to national myths that sometimes led to
disastrous consequences, professional historians today are more likely to insist that historical
consciousness should help us recognize the diverse nature of the groups we belong to.
Learning about history can give us a sense of perspective, not only on the society we
live in, but also on ourselves. Finally, of course, good history is interesting. It immerses us in
stories about other human beings that have the special attraction of being rooted in reality.
A Short Field Guide to the Varieties of History
In this section, we will categorize the most common types of history that we will be
discussing in the following chapters.
Political history and its close cousins, diplomatic history or the history of foreign
relations, and military history, remain among the most vital varieties of history. These forms
of history go back a long way.
Political history and diplomatic history are sometimes criticized on the grounds that
they concentrate too narrowly on “great men”, leaving out the mass of the population and
women. This judgment is often misguided. Political history can be and often is written about
Lisa Jurrjens 3
,Summary Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016)
mass movements, such as the Chartists in England, and feminism has an important political
history, as work on the suffrage movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Political, diplomatic, and military historians can usually draw on well-organized
bodies of sources that often allow them to imagine that they can achieve a degree of certainty
that is harder for other varieties of history to achieve. Despite plentiful documentation, many
aspects of political history remain enigmatic.
Social history is another of the major species roaming the discipline’s savannah, often
closely associated with economic history. Social history emphasizes the different ways human
beings have been connected with one another in different periods, as members of families,
communities, and social classes. Economic history highlights especially the significance of
the ways in which people have made a living, the technology they have used, and the effects
of flows of wealth. Social and economic historians often emphasized the importance of the
lower classes who have made up the overwhelming majority of the population in most times
and places.
Social and economic historians often depend on data that can be transformed into
numbers and analysed statistically: census reports, tax rolls, figures for imports and exports of
goods, and records of wages and prices. Other important sources for social history can include
property registers, police records, traveller’s accounts, and private documents such as diaries.
Cultural history is another important variety of history. Cultural historians study the
various ways in which human groups have created meanings for themselves over the course
of history. Cultural history may deal with elite culture, popular culture, and everything in
between.
Many cultural historians do work with printed sources and written archival materials,
but others find their materials in museums and among the possessions of private individuals.
Lisa Jurrjens 4
, Summary Popkin, From Herodotus to H-Net (2016)
Chapter 2 History in Ancient and Medieval Times
Herodotus and Thucydides
Herodotus and Thucydides are the earliest authors whose written works of history have come
down to us largely intact. They were certainly not the first people to record information about
historical events or to construct stories about the past. Although the two Greek authors did not
know it, members of other civilizations had also constructed historical narratives.
What made the works of Herodotus and Thucydides different from previous records
and stories about the past was their attempt to define history as a distinct method of telling the
story of the past. They agreed that history should concern itself with exceptional events that
affected the lives of whole societies, not with the lives of individuals.
The Greek word “istoria” that Herodotus used for his work can be translated as
“inquiry”, and Herodotus devoted a good part of his writing to recounting the travels he had
undertaken. Herodotus often indicated the sources of his information and critically evaluated
them for his audience. Thucydides said less about his sources, but he did promise readers that
he had included only incidents that he had personally observed.
Thucydides limited himself to writing about things that had taken place during his own
day, asserting that these were the only events about which certain knowledge could be
obtained, and he had no interest in the entertaining anecdotes that livened up Herodotus’
work.
The most important contribution the two men made to history was the fact that they
put their narratives in writing. The preservation of their words on permanent materials meant
that those words survived to influence readers long after their author’s deaths.
History-Writing in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds
A half-century after Thucydides’ death, the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle offered one
of the first and most influential characterizations of the nature of history and its relationship to
other forms of thought.
The city-state of Rome was rising in importance by the beginning of the second
century BCE, and it soon began to exert direct influence in the Greek world. The first
important work on the history of Rome, that of Polybius, was written in the middle of the
second century BCE by a Greek.
Polybius and his successors, of whom the most important, Livy and Tacitus, wrote in
Latin, inherited the models of history forged by Herodotus and Thucydides, but they faced
some new challenges of their own. They all recognized the difficulty of separating truth from
legend. Among other things, they attempted to reconcile the different chronologies of Rome.
Polybius’s history, although it emphasized the rise of Rome, strove to cover the whole
of the known world of his day. His successors, who concentrated more exclusively on Roman
history, invented the genre of the national history, the story of single political community over
an extended period of time.
By the end of the second century CE, Greek and Roman authors had created an
extensive tradition of historical writing and even a tradition of critical writing about historical
methodology.
Lisa Jurrjens 5
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