mutilated knowledge” and is “cut on the pattern of mutilated documents”. His claims refer to the way in which humans learn about history. Unlike the sciences, history cannot be thoroughly studied and rigorously tested. This is not due to any faults in historians, but the faults in the documents and ruins they must examine. Veyne refers to these as “mutilated documents”, in the sense that they are not wholly accurate and factual representations of past events. Additionally, not all evidence survives the
different ways. This is because there is little evidence that had survived to go by in which historians have to use to study the past. Evidence, written and made by the historical people themselves, include but are not limited to written documents, such as books and letters, and material culture, as in art and architecture. Now, because the original authors or artists are not alive to tell the story, historians have to examine the evidence left behind to make an educated judgment on what had really happened
the evolution of modern history. Hoefferle begins her book with the start of early histories, noting key ancient Greek historians such as Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides.
Response to Howard Zinn article History is something we constantly refer to progress ourselves as humans, we learn from our mistakes and continue to strive from our successes. But who is to say what is a horrible mistake or a courageous act of valor? That which was documented about what happened so long ago, was done by a person who spread the story or wrote it down from their perspective. Howard Zinn’s argument that there is no
Assess historians’ perspectives of the significance of revisionism in shaping contemporary understanding of the construction of the Salem witch trials across time. The implementation of revisionism in historical works has demonstrated itself as highly influential in altering the construction of the Salem witch trials from 1692 to the early 21st century. This is relevant to the contemporary construction of the crisis as historians challenge orthodox views by rewriting history in search for historical
Historians analyze facts and sources to discover and understand the mysteries of the past. Based on the sources, a historian’s perspective is influenced a great deal. They also include their own points of view from their own research, influencing their thinking. With different sources and different perspectives, disagreement is bound to rise. Variation in history results in multiple ideological frameworks. Howard Zinn was a historian, author, and social activist who grew up in a poor Russian family
will likely find nothing wrong with its content or presentation. They hear many famous names and key dates of the famous people and events of the past and do not bat an eyelash because they learned history in the same way. On the other hand, if a historian were to walk into that same classroom, they would be incredibly disappointed by the fact that students are not really learning how to practice history. Granted, they probably learned about history in the same way at one point or another during their
Subjectivity and Its Place in Historical Writings Howard Zinn was an acclaimed historian and social rights activist, born in 1922. He has written many well-known books, including A People’s History of the United States and A People’s History of American Empire. The reason that these books are so well known is because Zinn is a very special kind of historian. Unlike other historians who might be more objective about history and just give you the straight facts, Zinn is openly partial in his account
From the dawn of historical writing to present day, one of the key questions has been over historical truthfulness. A modern day historian cannot look back to Ancient societies and be able to fully reflect the truth of its history. However, through thorough research and academic inferencing historians can come up with the most probable version of truth. With this, history throughout the ages has been written in a number of different ways resulting in the need to find truth. Specifically, this paper
is believed that he is the first to write down histories. A historian from 400 years after Herodotus, Dionysius, had stated that Herodotus “chose not to write down the history of a single city or nation, but to put together many, varied events of Europe and Asia in a single comprehensive work”. The book is useful in the sense that the level of detail present and Herodotus himself included his insight on the events to give modern historians an idea about the events. These were evident with his description