Introduction to Historical Method: Index

Series originally posted in Summer 2005

Below you will find a 5-part series entitled Introduction to Historical Method. The bulk of the information was taken from the notes and readings of a course in Historical Methodology taught by Professor Donna T. McCaffrey at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. As such, Dr. McCaffrey deserves full credit for the majority of the information provided as well as for developing the main structure of the way the information has been presented. However, I have amplified some topics and added my own touches--such as providing all of the hypertext links--where I've seen fit.

Additionally, the section devoted to "The History of the Development of Historical Method" relies heavily on Gilbert Garraghan's A Guide to Historical Method, which was a constant reference both throughout Dr. McCaffrey's course and the consolidation of these posts. Additionally, two works by John Tosh--Pursuit of History and Historians on History--have been utilized.

Finally, I realize it is somewhat ironic that a work explaining the proper use of method and technique in the study of History does not itself include proper citation. Simply put, I decided that this was the best, most web-readable way to present this information.

Part 1 : What Is History
Part 2 : The Meanings of History
Part 3 : The History of Historical Method
Part 4 : Practicing The Historical Method
Part 5 : Certainty in History

Barzun on History (via Nat'l Review)

The November 19, 2007 issue of National Review contains an "Appreciation" of Jacques Barzun by M. D. Aeschliman. Similar pieces have been penned in the New Yorker and New Criterion and all were inspired on the occasion of his 100th birthday. The plaudits are well deserved. Barzun is the sort of public intellectual and polymath that we rarely see nowadays. I was first exposed to Barzun when one of my former professors (a practicing psycho-historian) sent me along a selection of articles on psycho-history, including an excerpt from Barzun's Clio and the Doctors, a skeptical critique of quantitative and other "scientific" methods of doing history. Later, I read much more of Barzun in my historical methods class (his book with Henry Graff, The Modern Researcher, was an assigned text) and have enjoyed his work on historical theory (among other things!) ever since. Here's a bit from the NR piece:

It is Barzun’s contention that history is fundamentally made by individuals, and that all forms of determinism are grievously mistaken and destructive. Human liberty is an absolute datum of consciousness and reality: The human person’s “supreme pleasure and prerogative,” he writes, “is to feel himself at once a moral being and a natural philosopher.” No subjectivist, Barzun is nevertheless a rootand- branch opponent of two dominant modern intellectual extremes and errors: scientific reductionism (“what it reduces is the individual”) and histrionic subjectivism, dominant in the modern arts, a kind of permanent childishness: “We are permissive, not from love of liberty, but because we lack self-control and fear restraint as such,” he wrote 40 years ago. “We praise innocence because we want the license to behave like an infant.” These extremes congeal into intellectual attitudes and institutional forms in the culture and the schools: the scientistic worship of material procedures and objects, and the anarchic exaltation of aesthetic eccentricity and “self-expression” (what C. S. Lewis called “a world of incessant autobiography”).

***
Though inevitably and consciously a philosophical historian, Barzun is rightly suspicious and critical of all works on “the philosophy of history”—from Marx and Hegel through Spengler and Toynbee—that deny human agency and novelty. “A trend is variable and may be reversed,” he wrote in 1964, “as history, which is the graveyard of trends and the birthplace of counter-trends, amply shows.” Communism is dead, though its Western historical trumpet E. J. Hobsbawm is still alive and sounding. There is no monocausality and no determinism in history:
The “relentless” modern “drive to de-anthropomorphize,” to “unman” the human person, Barzun writes, must be shown to be not only logically false but emotionally demoralizing and politically harmful.

In addition to his timely 1941 critique of Marxism—at the high point of Western intellectual sympathy for and collaboration with Communism—Barzun’s lifelong hostility to the implicit, incessant, invalid philosophizing of Darwin and the Darwinians (increasingly explicit and vocal today) isone of his most courageous and illuminating achievements as an intellectual historian and civic moralist. In the 1870s the German Darwinist biologist Haeckel wrote to Darwin to congratulate and praise him for having “shown man his true place in nature . . . thereby overthrowing the anthropocentric fable.” Barzun’s teacher Hayes, Barzun himself, his student Fritz Stern, and Richard Weikart in his recent From Darwin to Hitler have shown in detail how historically and morally disastrous this transgressive philosophical dehumanization was for the Western mind. Barzun quotes a 20th-century “positivistic” French jurist as writing: “Responsibility, which is the foundation of the penal code, eludes scientific analysis and is thus a source of error and confusion.” Like Dostoevsky and C. S. Lewis, Barzun repeatedly argues that “learned foolishness” is the most dangerous folly of all, especially when clothed with the authoritative mantle of high science as in “the behavioral idea that mind and purpose are illusions.”

Barzun’s rationality is never reductive or arbitrary: “Life, which spurs desire and fills the mind, is wider than science or art or philosophy or all together. Mind encloses science, not the other way around.” Yet the radical voluntarists and irrationalists—whether historians or artists—are also mistaken: We are conditioned rational beings with implicit obligations to civilization as an ideal and partial reality. Among early modern thinkers, Barzun particularly admires Erasmus and Swift in this regard. In “Swift, or Man’s Capacity for Reason,” he wrote in the somber year 1946: “The axioms of social reason have a long history in Western culture, and Swift met them again and again in his favorite authors . . . Herodotus, Lucian, St. Augustine, Dante, Rabelais, and Montaigne.”

Barone's Theory of History: Conformity Lost, or Conformity Redefined?

Michael Barone takes a look at Morton Keller's America's Three Regimes: A New Political History and wonders aloud about his own "theory of history":

The natural state of America, in my theory, is decentralized toleration: We stand together because we can live apart. We are, most of the time, the nation described by Alexis de Tocqueville, made up of various ethnic, religious, and racial strands who believe fervently that we can live and triumph together if we allow one another to observe our local mores. We can embody David Hackett Fischer's "four British folkways" and at the same time be a united people. There's a tension in that, which threatens to come apart. In the midcentury America of the 1850s, the threat was that we would come apart: We had an explosive political conflagration over the issue of slavery in the territories and an explosive ethnic conflagration in the decade that had the largest immigrant influx, in percentage of pre-existing population, of any decade in our history. Citations: Kenneth Stampp's America in 1857; the opening chapters in James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. And in fact, we produced a civil war.

We had the opposite situation in the midcentury America of the 1950s. After the shared experiences of the Depression and World War II, with universal institutions like the comprehensive high school, the military draft, and the big factory workforces represented by giant industrial unions, we were a culturally more uniform country than we have been before or since. We were a nation of conformism, of the regular guy, of the average guy who gets along with his peers. Citations: David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd; William H. Whyte's The Organization Man. It was a society, to take one example, far more hostile to homosexuality: The midcentury society of the 1850s could evidently tolerate Ishmael and Queequeeg sleeping together in Moby Dick and the poems of Walt Whitman, while the midcentury society of the 1950s cast its eyes away from the obvious gayness of the early Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and Roy Cohn.

The Civil War, the imposition of New England Yankee mores in the way described by Morton Keller, and the creation of national business and professional organizations described by Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order 1877-1910 reversed the extreme decentralization of the 1850s. The cultural rebellions, to the left and the right, described recently in neat form by Brink Lindsey's The Age of Abundance reversed the extreme centralization of the 1950s.

For those of us who grew up in the backwash of the 1950s, this decentralization seemed like an abandonment of American tradition. In the long line of history, I think it is more like a reversion to norm. The seeming inconsistency of currently prevailing attitudes on marriage and divorce, gambling and drinking, cigarette smoking and marijuana smoking, is part of the continuing turmoil of a decentralized society. The results don't cohere, but perhaps that is to be expected in a society like ours.

I'm not sure about this. If nothing else, we have become more centralized governmentally and culturally, haven't we? Perhaps we are more polarized politically, yes, and perhaps we all live in our own fortresses, Bowling Alone, so to speak. I think Barone is correct insofar as he links the America seen by Tocqueville with that of today vs. the 1950's. But I think that what has happened is that a new definition of conformism has evolved. Conformism now implies "to each his own" and an underlying "don't be judgmental." Additionally, so many traditional cultural boundaries have been pushed or broken, that nothing much surprises us anymore. Further, to be critical or judgmental about the wrong people is frowned upon. It may be going too far to say the new conformity is essentially what we today call political correctness, but there is some sort of alignment there, I think.

Post-Modern Conservatives

In the latest dead-tree version of National Review, Michael Potemra reviews Gerald J. Russello's The Postmodern Imagination of Russell Kirk. (Russello is editor of the Russell Kirk Center's "The University Bookman"). Huh? A conservative post-modernist? Well, just hold on...According to Potemra:

Kirk, like the best of the postmodernists, is calling not for a radical relativism—i.e., an assertion that truth doesn’t exist—but for a humility of the intellect. The postmodernist challenges us to learn from the aspects of the truth presented by today’s less powerful voices; the traditionalist Kirk asks us to show the same respect for those who are less powerful because they are voices of the past. (This idea is echoed in Chesterton’s phrase “democracy of the dead.”) Modernity viewed the past as an oppressor whose shackles must be removed from thought, but postmodernism can view the past the way a healthy new republic treats its former king: He is no longer king, but he must not be denied the full rights of citizenship—for he, too, has much to teach us.

Like the postmodernists, Kirk presents us with what has been called a “romance of the marginal.” Gerald Russello’s fine book demonstrates how looking at the margins can give us directions to the moral and intellectual center; how Lyotard’s “crisis of narratives” can yield a vision of the permanent things.

In an interview with John J. Miller at NR, Russello explained:

Kirk’s conservatism is “postmodern” in the sense that it was never modern, and therefore is not burdened as liberalism is with the weaknesses of the Enlightenment worldview. Kirk’s emphasis on imagination, his concern for the imagery a society creates of what it admires or condemns, his treatment of tradition and history as not objective but one in which we participate and can change, and his devotion to what Burke called the “little platoons” of society all have parallels in postmodern thought. Moreover, Kirk himself saw this. In 1982, he wrote in National Review, that “the Post-Modern imagination stands ready to be captured. And the seemingly novel ideas and sentiments and modes may turn out, after all, to be received truths and institutions, well known to surviving conservatives.” With liberalism moribund, it “may be the conservative imagination which is to guide the Post-Modern Age.”

Looking at the historical margins for the moral constants exhibited by the silent majorities of the past could be--and has been--a worthwhile endeavor for conservatives.

But perhaps this bit--from an interview with James G. Poulos at the American Spectator--goes further in explaining Kirk's post-modern leanings:

Reviewers since the 1950s have noted the internal dilemma of conservatives: once they start articulating what it is to be conservative, the battle is already half lost. Bernard Crick, in a review of The Conservative Mind, thought that Kirk was in an intellectual quandary, because "[h]aving no significant conservative tradition, Americans are put to the unconservative task of inventing one." In order to defend what they thought was worth conserving, many mainstream conservatives once believed that they had to engage liberalism on its own terms, in a "dialectic" mode that is foreign to the rhetorical, didactic, and imaginative modes more amenable to conservative expression. Kirk tried to overcome that difficulty by wrapping his arguments in a protective covering of narrative imagination. To state outright the traditions one wishes to preserve, and the means to do so, succumbs to the liberal temptation of reducing to reason things that are not always rational. To cast the same lessons through stories and autobiography, however, can leave enough room for the creation and preservation of tradition to take root. I think this is what Kirk was trying to do in the overall body of his work.

Now we can see the allure of post-modernism for anti-modern traditionalists like Kirk and many other conservatives. (Admit it, most of us can at least be partially described this way). Yet, I don't doubt it'll still rub conservatives the wrong way to be lumped in with the contemporary--and satirized--post-modernist. But they, like the po-mo social and cultural historians, may discover important truths (heh) if they pay a visit to the heretofore ignored masses.

Kennedy Assassination: Ideological Turning Point of Democratic Party

I missed the first round of interviews and reviews of Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism by James Piereson. Rich Lowry has a new one up, though, which caught my eye:

[Kennedy's] kind of liberalism -- "tough and realistic," as Piereson puts it, in the tradition of FDR and Truman -- was carried away in the riptide of his death. In a crucial and counterintuitive interpretive act, the nation's opinion elite made JFK a martyr to civil rights instead of the Cold War. Kennedy had been killed by a communist, Lee Harvey Oswald, who a few years before had tried to defect to the Soviet Union. Liberals nonetheless blamed the assassination on, in the characteristic words of Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, "the hatred and bitterness that has been injected into the life of our nation by bigots."

Thus, the assassination curdled into an indictment of American society: "Kennedy Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation," read a New York Times headline. Until this point, 20th-century liberalism had tended to see history as a steady march of progress. Now, the march had been interrupted by the country's own pathologies. "Kennedy was mourned in a spirit of frustrated possibility and dashed hopes," Piereson argues, and that sense of loss came to define the new liberalism.

Fred Siegal disagrees:

Mr. Piereson's own argument is persuasive and well-presented, but liberalism was never as reasonable as he assumes. The irrationalism that exploded later in the 1960s had been a component of left-wing ideology well before. Herbert Croly, the liberal founder of the New Republic magazine, was drawn to mysticism. In the 1950s ex-Marxists fell over themselves in praise of Wilhelm Reich and "orgone box," hoping that sexual therapy might replace Marxist theory as the toga of the enlightened. And in the very early 1960s a veritable cult of Castro, informed by Franz Fanon's writings on the cleansing virtues of violence, emerged among intellectuals searching for an alternative to middle-class conventions.

It's not reason that is at the heart of modern-day liberalism but rather the claim to superior virtue and, even more important, to a special knowledge unavailable to the unwashed or unenlightened. Depending on the temper of the time, such virtue and knowledge can derive disproportionately from scientism or mysticism--or it can mix large dollops of both. "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution" lays bare the long-ignored failure of intellect that hastened the decline of American liberalism. If liberals can belatedly come to grips with their failure to acknowledge Oswald's political identity, they might be able to celebrate a revival that involves more than a Broadway show.

Ed Driscoll, too:

But the actual causes of liberal disorientation regarding Kennedy's death and the motives of his killer predate his assassination by several years. It was during the 1950s and early '60s that that liberal elites declared America's nascent and disparate conservative movements to be a greater threat to the nation than the Soviet Union, as illustrated by films of the day such as Dr. Strangelove and The Manchurian Candidate. And the subtext of those films was very much based upon "a vast literature that developed in the '50s and early '60s about the threat from the far right," Piereson says, specifically mentioning Richard Hofstadter's The Paranoid Style In American Politics, and Daniel Bell's The Radical Right.

As Piereson writes, leading up to Kennedy's fateful trip to Dallas, there was a remarkable amount of violence in the south, caused by a backlash against the civil rights movement. In October of 1963, Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' presidential candidate in the 1950s who had been appointed the ambassador to the UN by Kennedy, traveled to Dallas for a speech on United Nations Day. Stevenson is heckled, booed, spat upon, and hit over the head with a cardboard sign. Stevenson says publicly, there's a "spirit of madness" in Texas. And Kennedy's White House staffers believe that he should cancel his already announced November visit to Dallas.

Thus, at the beginning of November 1963 a framework has been established that the far right is the threat to American democracy, "and that they've moved from heated rhetoric to violent act," Piereson says.

"So when the news spreads that Kennedy has been killed, the immediate response is that it must be a right winger who's done it," Piereson notes. And while the Birch-era right definitely had severe issues, JFK's assassin on November 22, 1963 had, of course, a polar opposite ideology. "When the word is now spread that Oswald has been captured, and that he has a communist past, and they start running film of him demonstrating for Castro in the previous summer, there is a tremendous disorientation at this."

...

The shock that Kennedy was in reality a victim of the Cold War simply did not compute on a national level.

Keeping the Gates at the Medieval Castle

Over at ADM's place, there is a fine discussion concerning academic gatekeeping. I tentatively entered the fray by quibbling with what I inferred to be condescension towards those of us who may not regularly translate texts for ourselves. Yikes! I got smacked around and explained my perspective after the fact (with some help). Ah well. The perils of attempting to scale the ivory tower with only a step ladder...

Ideology and Anglo-Culture

The Kirk Center's most recent University Bookman contains William Anthony Hay's review of J.G.A. Pocock's The Discovery of Islands. Begins Hay:

Each generation revises history to fit its own needs and preoccupations because, while the past itself remains constant, the prism through with it is seen changes. Besides helping people understand their own time, history shapes identity and provides a sense of place. These factors together explain how historiography—the principles, perspectives, and methods behind the writing of history—responds to questions driven by contemporary preoccupations.

Spot on. Take British History, for example:

The Whig interpretation in Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s nineteenth century History of England and Henrietta Marshall’s children’s book Our Island’s Story describes British history as the progressive movement toward increasing liberty and prosperity. As academic history emerged in Britain under the guidance of scholars like Macaulay’s nephew George Otto Trevelyan, it largely assimilated Whig assumptions to shape public culture into the 1920s. Declining power and a crisis of confidence posed new questions that led British historians to examine the past in different ways. Marxism and social science methodology turned historiography from constitutional history and focused instead on class conflict and social change. Postmodernism reflected the growing hold of expressive individualism from the 1960s with a consequent interest in identity that posed questions about sexuality and ethnic differences. Failure of the post-1945 social democratic consensus during the 1970s followed by Thatcherism further shifted the terms behind historical inquiry.

So, what about Pocock?

Decolonization, renewed interest in histories of component nations within the United Kingdom, and reorientation toward Europe as part of Britain’s membership in the European Union have also influenced historiography, and J. G. A. Pocock’s essays in The Discovery of Islands offer a profound reconceptualization of British history....Pocock argues for a British history that examines relationships within the Atlantic archipelago and its overseas progeny.

This rings familiar--the interpretive frameworks of the Anglosphere and Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History came to mind. The seeming symbiosis of the latter with Pocock isn't too surprising, given both Bailyn and Pocock found themselves largely on the same side (forgive the implied oversimplification) of the "republican synthesis" debates of the '70's and '80's. This leads to the context that Hay provides concerning Pocock's point of view:

Far from nostalgic pining for a world he admits has been lost, Pocock’s emphasis on the British diaspora follows from his efforts to understand the terms in which people see themselves or what he would call “the nuts and bolts of the mind.” A noted historian of ideas, he pioneered a new approach to intellectual history that viewed texts in the context of their time so as to understand the language contemporaries used to communicate ideas. Instead of great books providing a debate amongst themselves across the ages, key texts could offer insight on how men at a specific point of time saw their world. Pocock’s approach to British history as the story of nations interacting with and occasionally seceding from an imperial state plays this theme from his other work in a different key.

Both Bailyn and Pocock dealt with how ideologies were formed and used to justify the actions of individuals and groups. Bailyn has gone deeper into how Anglo culture and society has been maintained and modified around the Atlantic basin. Pocock has turned his head to Europe.

“Europeanizing” British history involves downplaying the centrality of the state and refocusing relationships toward continental Europe rather than within the British isles or overseas. Deconstructing identities often involves a smug provincialism among elites who cannot see beyond their own times. Pocock warned that demolishing Whig history—even though it brought a deeper understanding of past and present—amounted to a program for “asking the present to live without a past that justifies it.” Much the same could be said of postmodernist enthusiasm for Europe without the compensating benefit of illuminating the past. Indeed, where revisionism opened doors, the politics behind the new historiography of Europe seems eager to close them. Pocock contends that a history of either Britain or Europe must consider how it is a creation of nation-states even before attempting to transcend that framework.

Too often this mistake is made: the present circumstance is taken as a priori. Little thought is given to the political, social or cultural structures or mores that were in place that allowed [insert currently en vogue enlightened state here] to flourish. Pocock is warning that we need to be careful. Finally:

Pocock’s concluding chapters highlight the symbiotic relationship between historiography and politics. History serves a central purpose in public culture, and, consequently, the question of how it is to be written never quite finds a resolution. Each generation rewrites its history to understand its present. Pocock gives a judicious and well-written overview of the process, and his essays leave a sense that the past may not be such a foreign realm as is sometimes thought.

Hazards of Late Antique/Germanic History--Don't just guess!

From Martin at Aardvarchaeology (this is all him, so don't be confused by formatting):

The concept of an Old Norse religion (as it has been used by e.g. Karl Hauck and Lotte Hedeager) is useless. Such a non-codified, orally performed and transmitted body of mythology and liturgy cannot be coherent across time nor space. So all statements about Old Norse religion must be qualified with two questions: Where? When? And when things don't add up, this is only to be expected.

Think about it. Even heavily codified religions, such as Judaism or Christianity, aren't coherent.

This skepticism of monolithic coherent entities in societies of the past and present is actually a post-modernist viewpoint, and to my mind a valuable one. Unlike real po-mos, however, I don't draw the conclusion that anything goes in interpretation. Quite the contrary, I find it a strong argument to drop all discussion of anything not strongly anchored in source material. Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber darf man ganz bestimmt schweigen, po-mo Dummköpfe.

This reminds me of something I wrote the other day in a letter to a charming Aard regular:

"The problem is often called 'essentialism', as I think you may have seen in my review of Herschend's The Idea of the Good. The argument presupposes that there's this huge block north of the Imperial border called Germanic Society, that this block has the same essence from the border to the North Cape, and that when the block changes, all of it changes at the same time, in the same way. All this is in my opinion a) pure speculation, b) very, very unlikely."

Do non-European Cultures have a "Medieval" Period?

I have a daily Google alert for the word "medieval". Today it included a link to a Princeton University Symposium on Medieval Japanese art. That got me thinking: is it really correct to associate the word medieval--which describes the time between classical European history and the Renaissance (roughly)--to a concurrent time period in a non-European culture or society's history? I suppose it's more correct than alluding to the same period in Japanese history as the "Middle Ages", but then again, the term "medieval" is essentially a synonym for "middle ages." So how has it come to pass that we refer to a Japanese Medieval period which may or not have truly been "in the middle" of anything? Is it a relic of Eurocentricity?

Previewers of Movie "300" See What They Want

From the NY Times:

Three weeks ago a handful of reporters at an international press junket here for the Warner Brothers movie “300,” about the battle of Thermopylae some 2,500 years ago, cornered the director Zack Snyder with an unanticipated question.

“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” one of them asked.

The questioner, by Mr. Snyder’s recollection, insisted that Mr. Bush was Xerxes, the Persian emperor who led his force against Greek’s city states in 480 B.C., unleashing an army on a small country guarded by fanatical guerilla fighters so he could finish a job his father had left undone. More likely, another reporter chimed in, Mr. Bush was Leonidas, the Spartan king who would defend freedom at any cost.

Mr. Snyder, who said he intended neither analogy when he set out to adapt the graphic novel created by Frank Miller with Lynn Varley in 1998, suddenly knew he had the contemporary version of a water-cooler movie on his hands. And it has turned out to be one that could be construed as a thinly veiled polemic against the Bush administration, or be seen by others as slyly supporting it.

...when viewers find a potentially divisive message in big studio movies that were meant more to entertain than enlighten...[there is a] danger...that an accidental political overtone will alienate part of the potential audience for a film that needs broad appeal to succeed.

The story also explains that attempts to analogize President Bush and the Iraq War to the characters and events at Thermopylae are nothing new and predate the movie. It also explains that some plot changes may have also amplified the apparent political under- (or over-) tones.

This is actually quite a good example of how people carry their preconceptions with them everywhere they go and that these preconceptions seriously affect how they view the world. With their antenna up thanks to the Iraq War, many political junkies will look for potential analogies (pro or con) in any war movie---whether they are intended to be there or not. I had a professor explain to me that one way to look at ideology is that people "believe what they want to believe." It may be slightly simplistic--and perhaps a little cynical--but it does get close to the core of a problem that those who adhere to a particular ideology have: they often have blinders on. They are so intent on interpreting events through their ideological lenses, that they too often miss the true essence of what they are looking at. They forget that, believe it or not, there are some people who don't grind their political axes all the time and that, sometimes, it's good to simply enjoy entertainment for what it is.

Defining History and Adding A Warning Label

As most historians probably do, I have a habit of accumulating various articles that have piqued my interest over the years. In particular, I have a penchant for ripping book reviews out of magazines and journals. Well, every now and then I wade through the detritus. What often happens is that about 1/3 of the articles and reviews don't seem quite so germane or important as before. Of the rest, a few are digested and set aside for further reflection, but others warrant immediate action. That is what I'm doing now.

One such clipping was a book review of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom by Conrad Black, written by Forrest McDonald for the November 24, 2003 edition of National Review. I originally had kept the review because of McDonald's rather acerbic explanation of what makes a historian:

What historians do is make generalizations. They study and tke notes from the relevant documents and secondary literature. As they ingest the data, they digest them and reduce them to general propositions. When they sit down to write they select and report only that which makes cogent the story they are telling or the analysis they are offering. Two other kinds of folks who study the past go about their tasks differently. Antiquarians delight in learning details for their own sake and are likely to report them accurately and fully, if somewhat randomly. Authors of academic history characteristically record their research on note cards, arrange them in chronological order, and write by turning the cards over one by one. The results in either case are well-nigh unreadable.

Quite some time after reading McDonald's review, I picked up the book in the bargain bin of a local discount chain. (Mostly because it was big and thick and cheap and had to do with history, I must confess). I had forgotten what McDonald had written about Black's FDR:

Conrad Black's unconsionably long biography of Franklin Roosevelt shares almost none of the characteristics of genuine history and fall halfway between the work of antiquarians and academicians. Like them, he includes every detail, however irrelevant, though he is not always accurate and sometimes arranges his note cards out of sequence.

I have now tucked McDonald's review inside the book as a "warning label." I wonder if this might not be a good practice to follow in general? Does anyone else do such a thing? Seems like keeping a critique of a book that one might fall in love with may be a good hedge against literary or historical cupidity.

Clifford Geertz

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has passed away.

Dr. Geertz's landmark contributions to social and cultural theory have been influential not only among anthropologists, but also among geographers, ecologists, political scientists, humanists, and historians. He worked on religion, especially Islam; on bazaar trade; on economic development; on traditional political structures; and on village and family life. A prolific author since the 1950s, Dr. Geertz's many books include The Religion of Java (1960); Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia (1968); The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (1973, 2000); Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (1980); and The Politics of Culture, Asian Identities in a Splintered World (2002). At the time of his death, Dr. Geertz was working on the general question of ethnic diversity and its implications in the modern world...

Dr. Geertz's deeply reflective and eloquent writings often provided profound and cogent insights on the scope of culture, the nature of anthropology and on the understanding of the social sciences in general. Noting that human beings are "symbolizing, conceptualizing, meaning-seeking animals," Geertz acknowledged and explored the innate desire of humanity to "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order." In Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (1988), Geertz stated, "The next necessary thing...is neither the construction of a universal Esperanto-like culture...nor the invention of some vast technology of human management. It is to enlarge the possibility of intelligible discourse between people quite different from one another in interest, outlook, wealth, and power, and yet contained in a world where tumbled as they are into endless connection, it is increasingly difficult to get out of each other's way."

I was first exposed to Geertz's work through my studies of Bernard Bailyn's work on the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. Geertz's attempt to understand how humans "make sense out of experience, to give it form and order" went a long way towards explaining how ideology can be an important historical force.

Spinning Clio : Best of 2006

With nominations for the 2nd Annual Cliopatria Awards opening soon, I thought I'd offer up some of my best/favorite posts over the past year. Sure, I'd like some of 'em nominated (if they deserve it), but I also think it's a worthy exercise in and of itself. Blogging can get a little ephemeral and rediscovering one's own work may inspire further investigation down a forgotten path. Anyway, they are with a brief blurb about each:

Meet the new boss, will he turn out like the old boss?: Prompted by a Peggy Noonan column about the insular elite, I tied in a discussion of a "new elite," Glenn Reynold's Army of Davids, Alan Taylor's William Cooper's Town and Turner's frontier thesis.

I Like Medieval Women (Especially Queens) : An introduction to the study of medieval queens, with a few suggested readings.

A Positive Historical Baseline : I argue that we should be truthful about the missteps in America's past, but "[w]e should teach our kids to give their own nation and those who built it the benefit of the doubt" when first exposing them to American history.

The Historiography of the Early Middle Ages and National Homogeneity : After reading a piece by Götz Aly on re-contextualizing the Holocaust in which he mentions the medievalist Jacob Burchhardt, I delved into how current medievalists have shown that the concept of ethnically pure nation-states was a myth.

Qualifying Bennett's Jefferson: How Jefferson Was Able to Wage War on the Pirates : An excerpt from William Bennett's America: The Last Best Hope seemed to me to give too much credit to Thomas Jefferson--and to be too dismissive of the efforts of George Washington and John Adams--for how the U.S. finally dealt with the Barbary Pirates. In short, Jefferson used a Navy that he had previously and repeatedly tried to scuttle.

Historical Consumerism : Historian Stephen Fry spoke about why history matters and I explained why, and how, I discovered it matters to me.


And there you have 'em. The six bests post of the past year, IMHO.

Medieval Expert Witness

In "How French TV fudged the death of Mohammed Al Durah", Boston University professor Richard Landes describes what he has discovered about the Al Durah film and how his expertise in the area of medieval blood libel has landed him in the middle of a court case involving the French TV station that has refused to allow critics view the original film.

I have become involved for two reasons. First of all, I noted almost immediately that Palestinians and anti-Zionists, insisting that Israel killed the boy on purpose, used Al Durah in a way familiar to medievalists--as a blood libel. This was the first blood libel of the twenty-first century, rendered global by cable and the Internet. Indeed, within a week, crowds the world over shouted "We want Jewish blood!" and "Death to the Jews!". For Europeans in particular, the libelous image came as balm to a troubled soul: "This death erases, annuls that of the little boy in the Warsaw Gherro," intoned Europe1 editorialist Catherine Nay. The Israelis were the new Nazis.

And second, when I saw the raw footage in the summer of 2003--especially when I saw the scene Enderlin had cut, wherein the boy(allegedly shot in the stomach, but holding his hand over his eyes) picks up his elbow and looks around--I realized that this was not a film of a boy dying, but a clumsily staged scene.

Late Antiquity Migrated to the Early Middle Ages

Late Antiquity, the Migration Period, or the Early Middle Ages? Just askin'.....still waiting for Peter Heather's latest, btw. (Though the seller got back to me to let me know that it was being sent priority now...apparently it was hidden underneath some papers). According to the Late Antiquity article from Wikipedia:

While the usage "Late Antiquity" suggests that the social and cultural priorities of Classical Antiquity endured throughout Europe into the Middle Ages, the usage "Early Middle Ages" emphasizes a break with the classical past, and the term "Migrations Period" emphasizes the disruptions in the same period of time.

More later.

Introduction to Historical Method: The Meanings of History

[Nota Bene: What follows is Part 2 of a five-part series entitled Introduction to Historical Method. The Series Index is located here.]

The Meanings of History

Introduction

Many think that history is passive and unalterable. It has been called an "exciting and vivid costume drama" or "a tedious catalogue of dates." This attitude towards history is largely a result of people being taught that history is a Static process, that it never changes. This is the predominant way it is taught in our schools and is usually considered BORING. History as taught in college, especially on the graduate student level, is shown to be more of a Dynamic process. The essential plot and the people are the same, but new interpretations are investigated. This last is what is known as revisionism. Unfortunately, revisionism has gained a negative connotation because of the excessive zeal with which some historians have attempted to rewrite history. Some of these radical historians (left, right and middle) have too often thrown the baby out with the bath water when reassessing historical events. They are guilty of anachronism or "presentism"--applying the morals and mores of the present to the past--and have produced historical re-interpretations that seem excessively critical and dismissive of previously honored historical actors. This has alienated many non-historians who have in turn shut out all attempts at historical reinterpretation and resigned themselves to the boring, static history they learned in school. Historical revisionism is good, but it must be done correctly and carefully.

Static and Dynamic Concepts of History

As mentioned, the Static form is the prevalent form and is basically a fixed story of the past. Alternatively, the Dynamic concept of history is a story of the past that is in constant dialogue with the present. Contrary to any impression which may have been given, not all historians embrace the dynamic concept. They would prefer that past interpretations be kept as they are. Some are simply disconcerted with the idea of shifting from a Static to a Dynamic concept, though this is probably not so much the case any more. It would seem that these historians have lapsed into a comfortable belief that some history has already been adequately researched and nothing new has come up. Perhaps they have confused Past Actuality with its Record?

The primary benefit of a dynamic concept of history is that it continually invites historians to reassess the past. If the scholarship is good, it will be embraced, if not, it will be rejected. This concept of a "changing past" offers intellectual reward and inspiration to keep researching. This does not mean that responsible historians are attempting to change the past, rather, they are always striving for a better explanation.

Revisionism

Revisionism is a central tenet of historical scholarship. It is the unending search for fresh material, sources and interpretations of the past. The debates which develop out of revised interpretations of the past are essential to the field of history. As has been said, the term "Revisionist" has gained a negative connotation, but it is not some new phenomena; it's a constant process that has gone on for centuries, though especially the last few. Why should we revise history?

As the pace of change quickens, from such forces as science and technology and the rapid dissemination of information, there arises a pressure to revise accounts of the past. Human's identities are wrapped up in the past. As our self-perceptions in the ever-changing present change, our view of past actuality also changes. New questions are asked about the past, especially as new, previously ignored groups (minorities and women, for example) emerge. Also, new historians may revisit "old" records or these records may gain new importance and are reinterpreted. The philosophies of the Eighteenth Century, dominated by the Enlightenment, inspired a desire to use revision of history in a campaign to exult reason.

Voltaire and Gibbon

Voltaire broke with long established tendencies of studying history and Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire offered a new interpretation for why the Roman empire fell. Gibbon asserted that Christianity turned the minds of the Roman leaders from problems of this life to the afterlife and they also suffered from "immoderate greatness." Both Gibbon and Voltaire wrote reverentially of past governments and countries. Their works are regarded as classics and were manifestos to advance liberty and reason. They weren't supporters of their contemporary governments. This idealogy inspired them to reassess past interpretations of history as they looked for ways to buttress their own arguments against the status quo. They were searching for historical precedents.

Malthus, Marx and new forms of History

The Reverend Thomas Malthus, "the gloomy economist," was concerned with population growth. He viewed contemporary history as a history of higher classes and believed that a history of the general population was needed. He also believed that statistical analysis was key and called on others to do research in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Heeding his call, historians studied 200 years of statistics related to the poor and the general population. This led to the development of the social sciences, especially demographics, as a reaction to history of the wealthy. After the study, Malthus concluded that lower classes couldn't control their lust and he proposed to keep population in check by keeping wages at subsistence level. Essentially, he felt that government should simply leave the poor alone rather than make life better for them. Before continuing, it is important to provide some context.

Malthus' study occurred during the Industrial Revolution when massive demographic change and political unrest developed as people moved from farms to factories in or near the city. Malthus' concern with population growth didn't properly factor in the Industrial Revolution so his perception of the overpopulation problem was skewed. His conclusion that the best way to control overpopulation was to basically let the poor fend for themselves, or die trying, was a bad idea, to say the least. Yet, his investigation opened up an area of inquiry, the study of the common man, which proved beneficial. A fine example of the silver lining on a very dark cloud.

Meanwhile, during the Industrial Revolution (which Malthus missed), militant groups of workers evolved out of social unrest as they vowed to fight for better wages and working conditions. How could this be accomplished? Karl Marx studied the roots of social unrest and thought that he had an answer in his Communist Manifesto of 1848. This was not a work of scholarship, but rather a call to arms. Marx believed that human history was the history of class struggle, which proved to be one of the most sweeping statements ever made in the history of History. Marx believed each epoch related to economic interests and challenged people to think about the causes of social unrest.

Slowly at first, historians began to embrace his concepts, some more wholeheartedly than others. The Marxist school was dominant through the 20th Century, though it took a serious fall with that of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Historians didn't necessarily embrace Marxism, though there were a quite a few who did, but used it as a new way of thought and a new focus for research. Marxism helped to reveal that "the people" could be studied and that history was more than the study of leaders of nations. It was a juxtaposition of old form with new methods. Today, many Marxists still cling to the more utopian ideas of the theory and continue to champion neo-Marxist philosophies. Time will tell if Marxism will regain its status as a major school of historical thought or if its valuable aspects have already been accepted and its time for the rest of it to wither away.

People's History

The rapid transformations of the 18th Century, along with the influences of Malthus and Marx, also created a new movement towards what became known as 'Peoples History.' In 1874, Reverend John Richard Green wrote A Short History of English Peoplein which he passed over the traditional historical highlights and the elite and instead focused on the average people. It was released at a time when populist and nationalist movements and "phobias" (such as anglophobia) were prevalent. It was a very popular work and was translated into many languages. Who were "the people" Green wrote about? He didn't include women or minorities. He also spoke of the "English people", thereby implying an acceptance of the nation as the primary social unit that is to be studied. As a result, Green's work accelerated revisionism as a younger generation embraced the core of his idea and took it further. They began to recognize that other social units, besides "the nation," were legitimate. This eventually led to studies in minority history and women's history.

W.E.B. Dubois was an African-American scholar who was impressed by Marx. He wrote of "Negro History" and founded the Journal of Negro History. His quote, "Historical invisibility is a virtually universal corrollary to powerlessness" provided he and others with inspiration to delve into the history of those who had been "forgotten." For his part, he rescued black history from obscurity and the biases of white historians. All of the books that he wrote went un-reviewed, denying him acknowlegement as a scholar by his peers, but he brought about the expansion of black history and opened the door for others. A new body of scholarship was created that increased the overall understanding of history and increased the racial pride of blacks and glorified their goals. Dubois' work showed that a good study could educate the majority and foster an attitude of equality and opportunity. Other minorities, such as Hispanics and Native Americans, became interested in studying history. Women also became increasingly engaged in historical research that dealt specifically with women's history. Many like to point to June Sochen's Herstory as the pivotal work in Women's History. The title evoked the necessity of a story told by a woman other than that told by male historians.

What of the future of People's History in all of its varieties? As can be inferred, it has been often used as a tool by various "movements" as a path to legitimization. The desire for group recognition is understandable and admirable, but it also lends itself to bias and a tendency to gloss over the bad and highlight the good of a particular overlooked group. At the same time, it does exactly the opposite with the perceived "oppressors" (usually, rich, elite, white men).

Initially, particularly in minority history, the elite of these groups, such as Malcolm X or George W. Carver, were highlighted. As the genre matured and developed, more studies of average people were done. The methods used in People's history are often the same as those used in sociology and there are many instances of cross-fertilization. This points to a danger of losing the actual craft of history as a viable discipline within the genre of People's history, but most historians still do rely on a narrative form of exposition. What is required for People's historians is to maintain or rediscover good methodology, ignore the temptation to propogandize and to properly tell history. Regardless, their work conjures up debate, which is always beneficial.

The Annales School and Cliometrics

In 1929, a new kind of historical scholarship, called the Annales School, arose. Its practitioners aimed to capture the totality of the human experience and relied heavily on social sciences to achieve this goal. They emphasized the enduring patterns of culture that changed little over time. Central to their approach was a rejection of event oriented history as such events were just "ripples on a lake." A concern with events was replaced with a search for societal patterns. The concept of mentalites was put forth, the idea that a particular way of life and values persisted over time, despite upheavals. Marc Bloch and Fernand Braudel were the key founders of the Annales school and it was Braudel who coined the term longue duree, the vast sweep of time during which little real change occurred. He did this in his The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, written in 1949, which emphasized the area around the Mediterranean basin rather than a particular nation. No doubt, he was influenced by his times (Nationalism, Communism, World War II) in attempting to write history in this manner. As a result, the Annales school, in its purest form, began to throw out any sense of history as story and became a conceptual melting pot of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology and geology.

Another method, Cliometrics, also came to the fore during this time. Cliometricians attempt to use quantification to reveal historical meaning and rely on statistics, computers and scientific models to achieve their goal. Their work was very valuable, especially in the particular area of Economic history, but there is a tendency for cliometricians to reject source material that can't be quantified. They term such material as "soft" or "impressionistic" and use them reluctantly or only to support their "hard" evidence. As a result, Cliometrics is a self-limiting field in that its practitioners can only study such topics as have suitable amounts of statistical data. Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross provides an example of Cliometrics being taken too far. The authors set out to disprove the accepted view of slavery and ended up seeming to attempt to make the institution of slavery look beneficial based on their statistical evidence. Their study opened the entire school of Cliometrics to attack. Included among its attackers was Jacques Barzun, whose now-classic Clio and the Doctors poked holes in the growing scientification of history and also was an eloquent plea for keeping history in the domain of narratives.

Psychology and History

Psychohistory attempts to apply the Freudian or other psychoanalytic methods to historical study. The inherent problem within the field is that there are roughtly 15 generally recognized methodologies of clinical analysis and the question of which-to-apply-when is a genuinely critical question. Nonetheless, psychohistory is a good tool for dealing with motive as it seeks to determine the real, often unstated, reason of the actions of historical entities. Erik Erikson's book Young Man Luther was probably the first example of this approach. Lewis Namier used a psychohistorical approach in his work on the British House of Commons and Fawn Brodie's psychobiography of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, also is a notable work in the field. Brodie's work showed that man's inner life affects all and that to illuminate it takes technique as well as empathy and nuance.

Psychohisotry is a bold discipline that believes in the science of clinical evidence. It also lends itself to narrative and has helped revive the historical biography. Social psychology (integration of the South in the 1950's) and abnormal psychology (Hitler) also add dimensions to the field. The primary problem of psychohistory is that its practitioners often must resort to post- mortem psychoanalysis of their subject, something that neither Freud nor those of other psychological schools had in mind when developing and expanding upon their theories of psychoanalysis.

Changing Roads to the Past

As has been seen, history is an organic, dynamic, and not anachronistic, process. Despite fads and trends, it is still usually expressed in a narrative form, though those approaches are also evolving. A definitive history is non-existant and scholars refrain from using the term anymore as it implies a static body of knowledge and lends support to those who criticize the validity of historical scholarship. Additionally, the teaching of Historiography, the study of the practice of history influenced by ideas of continuity, must continue. Related to the maintenance of an awareness of historiography is a mastery of sound methodology and a willingness to embrace new techniques with the ability to discriminate between valid theories and fads while being critical of the latter. As has been seen, many of the new theories of historical research have been valid, if not overestimated, in their comprehensive ability to explain history. There is no one magic method that stands above the others and the historians task is to consider these approaches, in addition to their own preferred method, as they strive to create the historical record.

Up Next: The History of Historical Method

Introduction to Historical Method: What is History?

[Nota Bene: What follows is Part 1 of a five-part series entitled Introduction to Historical Method. The Series Index is located here.]

Introduction: What is History?

History can be defined as the most complex, inclusive and many faceted of the social sciences. Quite a statement, but is it true? In fact, it is only a description; it assumes you know what social science is and, as such, is really not a proper definition at all. History is difficult to define because people, both present and past, have different preconceptions and viewpoints as to what exactly history is. Most definitions are at least partially true, but what does the term "History" mean? Generally, the following aspects of the term "History" are agreed upon:

1) Past Actuality - All things that have happened until this moment. Specifically, past human events that are irrevocably fixed in time and space. It is considered to be absolute and objective - it is what happened.

2) Record of Past Actuality - The human attempt to recapture the past, to fix it in words and to give it meaning. It is relative and subjective and is only a version of what happened from the viewpoint of the recorder. It used to be primarily considered a written record, but the 20th century saw a rediscovery of the value of oral history as well as technological advancement leading to visual mediums (other than art) such as movies and television as well as recordings. There are three types of record, Narrative, Didactic, and Genetic.

• The oldest and most commonly understood is the Narrative, a true story that is told. It was the only way to tell history starting around 4000 BC until about 500 BC. It is simply a telling of history in a chronological order, the order of time if you will.
• The next form, Didactic, evolved sometime around 500 BC (usually credited to Thucydides Peloppennesian War) and is essentially instructive history or history that teaches a lesson. The deocentric, or Christian, writers of the Middle Ages are the best example of this type. They treated Past Actuality as a precedent for action and hoped to bring guidance to those who read of the past, whether to glorify God, a social group or an individual. Didactic was the preeminent form until the Enlightenment when Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern history, published his first work and exorted his students to "go to the sources."
• Shortly thereafter, the third type, Genetic, emerged and is the primary type practiced from the 1800's up to the present. The goal of Genetic history is to establish the "why" of historical events by studying the complexity of cause and effect which in turn reveal the growth, development and evolution (sometimes called the basic phenomena) of history. A better way to put it is that Genetic history tries to establish the "why" for complex historical events by investigating causal relations.

3) Making the Record of Past Actuality - The process or technique -the method- used to make a record of past actuality is also considered 'History.' Method makes history a science, though not an exact one. There are 4 steps to historical method:

• An exhaustive search for sources of information.
• The study of the information in those sources.
• A critical evaluation of the information. An active process to comprehend motives and judge actions.
• The final synthesizing of material and recasting it according to personal judgement.

The basic considerations of method are the type of sources used and their reliability. The sources are the data and evidence on which an historical case is to be built and there are
different kinds of these.

1. Primary Sources - Are those in which people write or speak of themselves or contemporaries.

2. Secondary Sources - Those writings of a later day about earlier events.

3. Tertiary Sources - A compilation of secondary sources, though they often include some primary sources.

A Note - Some historians take this out to even further levels, such as centenary (an admitted exagerration), but generally the aforementioned are enough.

Regardless of the type of source, it must be reliable. Therefore, the Reliability of Sources must be determined. Sources can be Fraudulent, Inaccurate, or Biased ("FIB") and must be tested for:

1. Consistency - Ensure the evidence is logical and not contradictory?

2. Corroboration - Check sources against one another.

3. Freedom from Bias

If any of the "FIB"s are revealed, the source must be evaluated with that in mind.

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With these factors in mind, one can make another attempt to define history. Thus, History is the science which first investigates and then records, in their causal relation and developments, such past human activities as are definite in time and space, social in nature, and socially significant. To explain further, History is a science because it does have a definite method, as will be shown. It is further important to qualify which human events are considered historical. That the event be 'definite in time and space' is important because if such is the case, then the event can be philosophically proven to have occurred. That an event be social in nature is an affirmation of the humanity of history which is further qualified by the fact that it must be socially significant, which means it must contribute to the common knowledge of humanity.

As can be imagined, there are a wide array of definitions of history, most of which arise out of various schools of historical interpretation. Various schools of history arise out of particular academic training and the belief that one particular aspect of human nature or environment is paramount in interpreting history. Other 'schools' are not ignored, they just aren't as important. It helps to imagine a spoked wheel, like that of a Conastoga wagon, where each spoke represents a particular school of history and the hub of the wheel represents the primary school to which a particular practitioner of history adheres. A historian would be familiar with the spokes and would use them as support for his argument, but the central thesis would be derived from the hub.

There are many schools of history. Below are a few of the more common ones. To further help explain them, I will use the example of what each school might describe as the primary cause of the American Revolution.

1. Social - Investigates the development of human groups and communities and their interaction with larger society as they emerge. EX: They would focus on the type of colonist in America (independent, free-thinking) as the primary cause.

2. Cultural/Intellectual - Often considered different, but approach with same method, if from different direction. Both deal with the meaning of ideas and attitudes and their effect on social changes. Generally, Intellectual is considered a study of the elite--the idea makers, if you will--while Cultural deals more with the ideas and traditions of the common people. EX: Both might argue that the people listened to the great thinkers, such as Locke and Jefferson, who espoused philosophical ideas of liberty, etc.

3. Political - Focus on the operation and acts of governments, parties and institutions. EX: The British Parliament's idea of taxation without representation and the Intolerable Acts stoked the fires of Revolution.

4. Diplomatic - Focus on the relations between governments. EX: Strained relations between the Colonies and Great Britain led to the war.

5. Economic - Study developments in technology, production, consumption and division of wealth. EX: Money was the cause as the British attempted to interrupt commerce.

6. Psychohistory - Investigate emotional development of individuals and families using techiques derived from psychoanalysis. EX: King George III had poor relations with his father which affected his judgement.

7. Post-modern - There is no such thing as historical truth, thus, because knowledge is arbitrary, so is our conception of the past. EX: We will never really understand the causes of the Revolution, but each of us can interpret or reinterpret the event as we see fit.

*NOTE: Please remember, these are very generic definitions and simplistic examples and don't begin to cover the wide array of possibilities.
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Closely related to 'Schools' of History are 'Philosophies' of History. A philosophy of history explains the forces of history--what moves them and in what direction they are headed. It is an explanation not only of the most important causes of specific events but of the broadest developments in human affairs. There have been three schools of historical thought that are generally agreed upon.

1. Cyclical - (4000 BC - 100 AD): The timeworn 'History Repeats' school. Events periodically re-occur. Essential forces of human nature are unchangeable and so humans make the same decisions, or mistakes, over and over when confronted with similar or identical situations. A cycle of Birth/Life/Death was generally accepted and served as a template for this philosophy.

2. Providential - (100 AD - 18th Century): Primarily a result of the rise of Christianity which held that there was life after death and thus humans could have some form of immortality. This broke the Birth/Life/Death cycle and further believed that Divine Intervention could overthrow the past as the course of history was determined by God. History was an ebb and flow, a constant struggle between good and evil with the eventual victory of good forseen, as determined by God.

3. Progressive - (18th Century - about 1945): Brought about by the scientific and secular age of the Enlightenment. Universal laws of science were unlocked and the question was asked: What are the universal laws of human nature? Human history was a continual progress in which the situation of humanity was improving because of it's own efforts, not God's. Further, each generation built upon the knowledge of the previous. In 1918, after World War I, this idea was challenged and doubt was cast as to whether humanity was really progressing. The interwar years saw serious debates which exploded during and after World War II. Though Fascism and Nazism was defeated, Communism still loomed large as did the threat of nuclear war and the ultimate destruction of mankind. How could this be progress?

So where are we now? There is now no "definitive" philosophy, though many philosophies abound, and many historians question whether a defining philosophy is even possible or necessary.

Up Next: The Meanings of History