Kind Of History Research Articles

What History for the Year 2000?

THE FOLLOWING pages represent the musings of an academic who has taught history for nearly 40 years and who does not hesitate to offer prescriptions for teaching history in the next 40 years. They cover the entire field-briefly, prococatively, even self-righteously, as befits an overburdened and disoriented age that pays no attention. We begin with reflections on the teaching of history in our times; we end with a course description and a personal testimony: this is how I try to teach the kind of history that helps students to live more confidently and responsibly. These are the views of a veteran who relishes not only teaching history but also holding outsized opinions. We live in an extraordinary age;intellectuals who don't think big therefore don't pull their own weight. What follows is a bit of unsolicited advice and a manifesto of sorts.

The History of Mentalities: The New Map of Cultural History

A few years ago, French historians began using the expression of to characterize their work in the field of intellectual history. While awkward in French and infelicitous in English translation, the phrase has survived; for it expresses a need to assign autonomy to a kind of historical inquiry which offers new perspectives on the civilizing process. Briefly stated, the history of considers the attitudes of ordinary people toward everyday life. Ideas concerning childhood, sexuality, family, and death, as they have developed in European civilization, are the stuff of this new kind of history. Work in the history of is closely identified with the long-standing investigations of the Annales school, which portrays the history of as but one dimension of the total history it is their ambition to write.1 But the history of mentalities, even among its Annales practitioners, does have its own specific concerns. While Annales historians are most likely to address the material realities conditioning man through economic processes, social structures, and environmental influences, those historians investigating prefer to consider the psychological realities underpinning human conceptions of intimate relationships, basic habits of mind, and attitudes toward the elemental passages of life. The history of mentalities, moreover, has obvious affinities with approaches to intellectual history developed before the arrival of the French school. In effect, mentalities is a code name for what used to be called culture. It takes up again themes pursued by idealist historians such as Burckhardt in the nineteenth century and Huizinga early in the twentieth. For these historians, problems of culture were essentially problems of world-views and their interpretation. They took pains to evaluate these in their social and political context. But the history of ideas served as their basic frame of reference. Culture in this historiographical tradition meant high culture, and for this reason these historians directed their attention toward the role of valueforming elites. Though they did not treat culture as the exclusive preserve of

The Search for Ancestors: A Swedish-American Family Saga

A metaphor for the Swedish migration to America in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sven Svensson family, traced here by historian H. Arnold Barton, a descendant, provides a model for genealogical research with which all persons interested in ancestors can identify and from which anyone can learn.The field of migration history has taken on new importance as a result of accelerating interest in ethnicity and genealogical research. Though a family history, and in a sense an inner voyage of self-discovery, the search for ancestors told here reveals the broader contours of Swedish and American history in the nineteenth century.The Search for Ancestors is a microanalysis of those social, economic, and cultural developments that led to the gradual breakup of an ancient way of life in the Swedish countryside and the migration of growing numbers of Swedish peasants across the Atlantic to America.Barton s personal odyssey took him to Gowrie, Iowa, the heart of Swedish America, and to the province of Smaland in southern Sweden. Research in the Swedish Statistical Central Bureau in Stockholm, contacts with emigration historians in Stockholm, and search in Swedish provincial and national archives, finally gave him the impressive mass of information and statistical data with which to chart his family s historyover four centuries, back to the 1530s.A kind of history with the works showing or do-it-yourself genealogical kit, the book will be fascinating as well as informative for general readers as well as students of history.

From Market to Manager

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977. 608 pp. In 1965 John Higham drew attention to a new genre then emerging in American historical writing: "Deriving partly from studies in entrepreneurial and business history and partly from contemporary American sociology, this kind of history is less concerned with motives than with structure and process. It shows men managing and being managed through rational systems of control and communication. Perhaps we may call this the new institutionalism; for it is bringing back to life a morphological study of organizations, now freed from the formalistic, evolutionary emphasis of 19th century scholarship. Although institutionalists thus far have not gone much beyond the monographic level," he continued, "the breadth and importance of their contribution seem sure to grow."1 There is no better example of the accuracy of Higham's prediction than The Visible Hand. It is a model institutional history, a magisterial historical synthesis and interpretation of modern corporate enterprise, and a penetrating examination of the interaction of technology and administrative structure in economic and organizational growth.

Norbert Elias: An Outsider Full of Unprejudiced Insight

The history of the sciences has the considerable advantage over other kinds of history that historical errors are easier to correct in it than elsewhere, and that the admission of mistakes strengthens rather than weakens scientific integrity. In discussing and reevaluating the work of Norbert Elias, we want to show a larger public what worldwide recognition has come in recent years to a scholar's work which was long, indeed too long, known only to a few. To evaluate the work of Norbert Elias involves tracing the history of this work. If in doing so, one proceeds from historical accidents to a search for the real reasons which determined the changing course of his initial non-recognition and eventual recognition, one is only applying the principles which have been decisive for Norbert Elias himself and for his work.

In Our Times: America since World War II

More concise, livelier, and broader in coverage than other similar volumes, this popular overview of American life since 1945 offers a clearly-written, authoritative interpretive narrative that pays special attention to major trends in foreign policy, mass culture, social history, gender, politics, civil rights, economics, and political culture. Organized both chronologically and topically, it provides balanced insights into all topics. KEY TOPICS: Integrates political, social, and cultural history -- demonstrating the ways in which different kinds of history blend together and provides a broad view of politics. Explores social history -- and ethnicity and gender -- in depth. Incorporates new scholarship on the Cold War Era -- including discussions on recently declassified materials. Takes account of new scholarship on civil rights, gender relationships, the 1960s, cultural history. For anyone interested in American history since 1945.

Local history in two Arab communities

Recently, social anthropologists have become critical, once more, of the neglect of history by their colleagues, particularly those who have engaged in studies of peoples belonging to one or other of the Great Traditions. Presumably, no one would deny the significance of historical research for any of the disciplines represented in our society. Without history, the various countries, communities and social systems of the Middle East would become little more than a bewildering mosaic of disparate types, a storehouse of examples of different kinds of economies, political organizations, kinship structures, cult groups and so on. What gives the Middle East its unity, despite the diversity in its parts, is that contemporary institutions are not only the products of human responses to particular local conditions, but also responses to the history of human relations between its parts. Agreement in according this order of precedence, in our studies, to history is one thing; how to use history is quite another, and about which Evans-Pritchard, perhaps more than any other social anthropologist since the war, was conscious, when urging the need to take cognizance of history in the analysis of contemporary institutions. He did more than content himself with advocacy. Instead of bawling abuse at his contemporaries, he set about writing a history of the development of 'The Sanusi Order', isolating some eight fundamental processes at work in this development; and in doing this he sought, by way of example, to give an exposition of what he thought to be the manner in which history should be used. Later, in a public lecture (called 'Anthropology and History', and republished in Essays in Social Anthropology, 1962) at the University of Manchester, he gave his views on the different uses to which several kinds of history could be put. After castigating social anthropologists for turning away from history--and perhaps I should say that the suffering of severe castigation is an occupational hazard in social anthropology--he turns to some of the consequences of this breach with history. The first consequence is the uncritical use of documentary sources, and he notes, rightly, that while famous figures of the past were 'remorseless' in their attacks on the theories of their colleagues in the subject, they accepted with almost bland uncriticality the data on which their own theories were based, a habit which has been with us until the present. This structure is to be taken all the more seriously as comparison, with the very considerable increase in specific studies, gathers momentum. For, as I understand Evans-Pritchard's remarks, anthropological monographs are documents, much as are the documents handled by historians, and should be subject to the same techniques of criticism. The second consequence of this breach with history is that insufficient attention has been given to the reconstruction of social institutions from the historical records of people or the verbal histories preserved by peoples themselves. On the surface, at least, these are two distinctively different kinds of history. Among people not schooled to literacy, history, it might be thought, is no more than some kind of collective folk memory. Different issues, one might

Prehistory as a Kind of History

Prehistory as a Kind of History

I. The Defection of Sir Edward Dering, 1640–1641

Historiography of the years immediately preceding the English civil war has tended to conceive of two disparate entities in politics, Westminster and the localities. There are in practice two distinct kinds of history, reflecting diis division, which connect only on rare occasions. The latest major work on the period can, despite its title, limit itself almost entirely to the confines of Westminster and the court, while the student is faintly aware of volumes of local works which contain scarcely a hint of what passes outside the town wall or beyond the county boundary. Parliament was indeed an aggressively self-conscious and independent body, and the county or borough was frequently particularist and introverted, but this did not preclude all contact between the two. Dr Pearl has demonstrated how vulnerable parliament was to the influence of London, and vice versa, and there have recently been several local studies which illustrate the close relationship between the county and the centre. But by and large, Clarendon's assessment of the importance of the Buckinghamshire petition against the attempt on the Five Members, and the obvious prominence accorded by Commons leaders of both sides to petitioning, has not been sufficiently appreciated. Parliament was deeply concerned about what might be termed ‘public opinion’: events in the localities, and the reactions to parliament's policies.

An Investigation of the Inarticulate: Philadelphia's White Oaks

IT is a truism that the literature of American history has always reflected, to some degree, the times in which it was written. To illustrate this point, the impact of Populism and Progressivism on historical writing is usually cited. These movements produced class and sectional conflict in American society; historians writing in their midst discovered class and sectional conflict in American history. The Constitution was portrayed as the covenant of an economic class; the Revolution was pictured as triggering a struggle for supremacy in American society between west and east, rich and poor. Historians writing during the I940s and I950S -drastically revised this scenario, but of course theirs was a drastically different world, the era of World War II and the Cold War, a time when the United States was constantly threatened by powerful foreign enemies. These external challenges produced a high degree of cohesion in the country, which historians (so their later critics alleged) began identifying as the chief characteristic of early American society. The people of the American colonies, according to the so-called consensus historians of the I940s and I950S, were distinguished more by their similarities than by their differences; they agreed about the fundamental objectives of colonial society, they shared the same ideals and aspirations, and most of them occupied the same middle rung on the socio-economic ladder. The historians of this era reexamined the Constitution and found it to be less a class compact than it had formerly been considered, and they tended to see the Revolution as a contest for home rule rather than a conflict over who should rule at home. Looking at the present period, one would not hesitate to predict the kind of history it would produce. We are living in one of the most divisive decades in American history, a time of conflict between races, classes, and age groups. Therefore, what is surprising is not that historians are

Local history in Finland

Abstract In Finland, as in Norway,1 local history has become an important branch of historical research. According to the estimate in 1965 by Professor Mauno Joki-pii,2 of all Finland's 607 towns or rural parishes (including those of the districts ceded to the Soviet Union in 1940, the earlier history of which is still the subject of research in Finland), 355 have had their histories written to greater or lesser extent. Briefer studies, dealing merely with some aspects of history, have been made of 156 towns or parishes, and only 96 localities remain without any kind of history. In the latter group there are only two towns. In recent years it has been usual for up to a dozen major local histories to be published annually, and about 140 parishes have work of this kind in progress.

Moral Theology By the Rev. Heribert Jone, O.F.M. Cap., J.C.D. (review)

118BOOK REVIEWS a pure spirit can be conceived as sexually differentiated, but whether such differentiation is incompatible with the idea of a perfect man, whether such differentiation could not have been included in God's first conception of man as part of his nature. A composite creature, as man is, made of spirit and matter, must have development, generation and history. If Adam had not sinned, we would have had a very different kind of history; man's would have been a different story to tell in eternity; but there would have been a story all the same, or else God would never have created the kind of creature man is. That S. K.'s doctrine is unjustified, can be demonstrated by the fact that in the beginning and before the fall, God created them man and woman, "and God blessed them, saying: Increase and multiply, and fill the earth." There are many passages in this book which indicate a profound dissatisfaction with Hegelianism, idealism, rationalism and other trends of thought which were beginning to invade the mind of Protestantism in his time; and yet, in spite of all that, it is not true to say that S. K. was even oriented in the direction of the truth, certainly not as far as this book goes. How could Kierkegaard, who spent his life thinking and writing about religious problems, miss the simple and obvious solution? How could he fail to discover the sweetness of the yoke of Christ? Why all this "fear and trembling," "sickness unto death," when one has the good news of the Gospel to tell, a story which, even in the sufferings of the saints and the torments of martyrs, is bursting with joy? It may be that S. K. himself gave us the answer to all such questions: "But men are not willing to think eternity seriously, they dread it, and dread discovers a hundred ways of escape." Fakhri Maluf Cambridge, Mass. Moral Theology. By the Rev. Heribert Jone, O.F.M. Cap., J.C.D.; Englished and adapted to the Code and Customs of the U.S.A., by the Rev. Urban Adelman, O.F.M. Cap., J.C.D. (Newman Book Shop, Westminster , Md., 1945. Pp. xx+634. With analytical and alphabetical indexes. $3.00.) Father Heribert Jone, O.F.M. Cap., J.C.D., published his Katholische Moraltheologie in 1929. It met with such universal success in Germany and Austria that it was republished in as many as nine editions. Written "with special reference to the stipulation of the German, Austrian and Swiss Codes," this successful German edition was translated and adapted to French law and custom by Marcel Gautier in 1936. The present edition, written entirely in English, was translated and adapted to the Code and American customs by Fr. Urban Adelman, O.F.M. Cap., J.C.D., journalist and editor. The present American edition fills a real need in that it supplies the American priest with a ready and handy reference book of moral science adapted to the customs of his own country. Many will find it of primary value since it is conveniently written in English. Its main advantage, however , consists in the fact that it is a comprehensive study of moral theology BOOK REVIEWS119 in the light of American law and custom. Fr. Urban has captured the essentials of the subject and has admirably succeeded in presenting these abstract principles in a clear, concise and orderly style. The brevity of exposition does not, as it might possibly seem to the scholar, obviate the necessity of consulting larger and better-equipped manuals of theology. Rather it presupposes a knowledge of these authors without which such a brief summary would be of little value. Therefore, it is not recommended as a substitute for the ordinary manuals of Moral Theology but only as a vade-mecum for quick and accurate reference. Although all the tracts are well done, the most interesting ones are those on "Ownership in General" and "Titles to Ownership." In speaking of the subject matter for contracts the author notes that every contract must have four qualities: The matter must be possible, belong to the disposing contractants, morally...

The Historicity of God

RECISELY what is meant by Whether as an object of professional investigation or a term for the life which the church lives, why should church history be distinguished from any other kind of history? One commonplace assumption is that church history is an account of what has happened under the jurisdiction of ministers, bishops, and popes or in connection with some form of institutional

Pre-Industrial Urbanism in Japan: A Consideration of Multiple Traditions in a Feudal Society

There is a kind of history... which... deals with trends and forces and the lives of great men. But it is not the kind of history I have in mind. I am thinking of what the French call la petite histoire; of everyday life as it is lived or has been lived not by prime ministers and secretaries of state and other historical figures who are or ought to be exceptional, but by ordinary human beings who in their communities and societies make the raw materials from which history is shaped. (Sansom 1951: 44.)

Reflections On the Subject Matter of the History of Philosophy

The expression commonly employed, “history of philosophy,” often seems either inexact or incomplete, depending on whether the term “philosophy” is understood to mean a system of the sciences or whether it is taken in the historic sense. In the first case, what is in question is a certain ideal system of well-founded questions and of exact and logically demonstrated affirmations relative to the objects of a certain domain. So defined, philosophy is not the object of this study. In the second case, the historic sense, the term “philosophy” designates a collection of questions and affirmations growing and changing in time, effectively expressed in a given time and by specific men. They ought to concern the objects of the domain of philosophy in the sense of systematic exposition, whose content, however, itself underwent notable changes in the course of the development of philosophy in the historical sense—particularly of European philosophy. In the spirit of their authors they ought to be true. However, according to all probability, many of them are false or at least insufficiently founded. They are, moreover, the intentional products of a certain number of cognitive, human acts. But they result at the same time—in their properties, their content, their formulation, the mode of their justification—from the influence of other states and extra-cognitive attitudes of philosophers: various sentiments, desires, religious beliefs, etc. It is therefore improper to speak of the “history of philosophy” in the sense of a philosophic system, for, in this sense, philosophy insofar as it is an ideal, extratemporal product can have no kind of history. If, on the other hand, this expression is intended to involve a question of philosophy in the historic sense, it is necessary to complete it by specifying that in the given historic consideration we are dealing with the evolution of a given philosophy—for example, of Greek philosophy from Thales to the death of Aristotle. So understood, the history of philosophy is an empirical discipline relative to certain empirical facts which occur in time. It is necessary to bear clearly in mind the nature of these acts: Is it a question only of a certain collection of phrases, or of something more?

Historians in Early Nineteenth-Century America

I N 1809 Washington Irving drew a caricature of the contemporary historian in one of the most famous parodies of American literature. To Irving the historian was a slightly ridiculous figure, a good-natured soul, abhorring publicity, too much in love with toil and detail and pedantic scholarship ever to complete his work, and so wedded to the past as to be oblivious of the realities of the present.1 The caricature is not unlike cartoons of the absent-minded professor. There was truth in Irving's portrait, but the pre-Civil War historian, a hobbiest who wrote simply because he wanted to, who honestly loved scholarship and art, and who never questioned his own usefulness, was very unlike the modern professor, and he produced a kind of history in marked contrast to that turned out by the forced labor of professionals in later generations. There are 145 historians listed in the Dictionary of American Biography-a surprisingly large number-who did a major portion of their work between 1800 and 1860, and from their lives a more thorough, if less colorful, portrait of the historian than that of Irving emerges, and one which especially points up the contrast with the typical historian of today.2

Water from the Desert: Some Ancient Egyptian Achievements

IN egypt, 6000 years ago, when the latest rainy interlude began to wane, neo? lithic tribesmen from both sides flocked into the Nile Valley and there perforce exchanged pastoral existence for an agricultural one. The nomads who remained in the eastern desert could do little more than follow the scanty rains; west of the Nile, where there is no wadi network to concentrate the fall, the rain evaporated as it fell, the water table sank out of reach and the victory of nature over nomadic man was complete. Within few generations the peasant Egyptian had become, in Winkler's phrase, a stranger to the desert, the land of his forefathers. Some centuries later, when the kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt had united, the coordination of labour into vast gangs had strengthened man's hand, and now and again he began to fight back. To the deserts the new strangers returned to seek gold and copper, turquoise and ornamental stone; and, to sustain their assaults, water was necessary. The Bedouin cousins of the Egyptians had done no more than scoop out few shallow holes. Now, some unknown Pharaoh, with an architect far ahead of his time, attacked the problem in the grand style of the Pyramid Age. The oldest dam in the world.?Seven miles south-east of Helwan, in the Wadi el-Garawi, one may still see the abutments of the Sadd el-Kafara, the Dam of the Pagans, the first of its kind in history and one whose failure was so catastrophic that nothing of the sort was attempted again till over 3000 years had passed.1 Its age is not in dispute. From the style of its masonry and the nature of the potsherds lying in the workmen's huts about 200 yards from the site, Professor Schweinfurth who discovered the dam in 1885,2 Mr. Ernest Mackay who visited it in 1915 3 and Mr. Guy Brunton who accompanied me to the site in 1935,4 all agreed in ascribing its erection to the period of the Illrd or IVth Dynasties, from 2950 to 2750 B.C. For an initial experiment in dam construction, the size of the structure is surprising: I took the measurements quoted myself in June 1945. It is 348 feet long at the top and about 265 feet at the base; the lintel stood 37 feet above the lowest point in the wadi floor; and, passing through the great breach, one sees that the dam was composite. That is, it was made up of two separate rubble masonry dams, each 78 feet thick at the base, with space of 120 feet at ground level between them, which was later filled in with over 60,000 tons of shingle from the wadi bed and rubble from the hillsides. Beyond that, some 30,000 cubic yards of rubble masonry, say 40,000 tons, were employed in the construction of the upstream and downstream dams?a task that must have occupied the energies of many hundreds of men and animals for whole season in this desert place, 9 miles from the Nile cultivation.

Men, Machines and History

During The Present Century There Has Appeared A New Kind Of History, Concerned Not With Parts But With The Whole Of Human History. There Were, Of Course, Before This, Many Attempts To Write' Universal History'; But They Consisted Merely In Lumping Together In A Single Continuous Narrative Condensed Histories Of The Chief Countries Of The Old World. This Synthetic Or Accretive Method Has The Same Defects When Concerned With The Sequence Of Time As It Has When Concerned With Space. You Cannot Make A Correct Map Of The World Or Of Any Part Of It Simply By Sticking Together On A Single Sheet The Plans Of Separate Portions Surveyed Independently By Different People, With No Comprehensive Framework Binding Together The Whole Area. Nor, To Vary The Metaphor, Is A Cathedral Constructed By Putting Several Parish Churches Together Beneath One Roof. The New History Is Related To The Old Universal Histories Exactly As Is A Modern Map Of The World To Such Medieval Concoctions As The Hereford Map.

Return To the Middle Ages

D URING the First World War it was usual for the Allies to represent their cause as that of democracy, which was defined as the free and spontaneous movement of the human spirit, unfettered by logic. Germany, on the other hand, stood for machine-like regularity and cold, calculating rationality. Henri Bergson and Gustav LeBon grew quite eloquent on this theme. During the Second War, the roles were reversed. This time Germany was the country of blind instinct and wild emotional surges, moving in a kind of somnambulism and thinking with its blood. The West stood for reason and logic, for an ordered view of life in conformity with permanent rational values. In defiance of all respectable historiography, the United Nations were made the heirs of the cool and tranquil culture of Rome, with Christian universalism added, whereas Germany represented the survival of the frenetic barbarism of the Nordic pagans. Even the boundary line was supplied: it was the Wall of Limes in southern Germany, which marked the farthest outpost of permanent Roman settlement. Now that the Third War is in the offing, the boundary line has been changed, but the protagonists remain much the same. The Wall of Limes has moved to the Elbe, a shift which makes naturalized democrats of the Germans, who a short time ago were regarded as the mortal foes of democracy. On the west bank of the Elbe today stands Christian democracy, a sort of Joan of Arc, the champion of reason and natural law, while atheistic Bolshevism, foe of this two-millenial culture, glowers from the east bank. The reader can document this picture from his daily paper. There is nothing new or out of the way about this. The Incas, before conquering an adjoining people, used always to spread the story that their enemies were cannibals and deserved what they were about to get. What the Incas said may or may not have been true, but it is certain that the current representation of the East-West dispute is false. The idea of a unified Christendom with a common heritage was always a myth, and the myth itself was shattered at the Reformation. Democracy, again, is the product of the spiritual individualism and the secular rationalism which replaced the theocratic conception of a law of nature of the middle ages, and is altogether inconsistent with that conception. Ten years ago no one would have had the face to talk the kind of history that is now current.

International Wheat Council

The special session of the International Wheat Council which began in Washington on January 28, 1948, announced on March 6 the successful conclusion of a five-year International Wheat Agreement fixing a range of prices within which 500 million bushels of wheat would flow annually through the channels of international trade. The agreement was signed by some 36 nations, including all the major wheat-importing and wheat-exporting countries of the world with the exception of Argentina and the Soviet Union. Subject to the ratification of the signatory states, the multilateral agreement — the first of its kind in history — was to come into force on August 1, 1948, climaxing many years of effort to stabilize the world wheat market through international cooperation. The agreement provided maximum and minimum prices for each of the five years of its duration and specified quantities to be purchased or sold by each of the importing and exporting nations. While transactions outside the prescribed range were permitted, they would not apply toward the fulfillment of each member's quota under the agreement.