Introduction:%20What%20is%20history?

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Introduction What is history?
HIST1002 Tradition and Transformation in Western
History
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What is history?

• 19th century was a great age for facts
• BUT, accuracy is a duty, NOT a virtue
• So, facts were raw materials only
• Most important of all, facts do not speak for
  themselves, facts have to be interpreted
• The duty of the historian is to interpret!

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What is history?

• perspective, insight, with vision
• thematic organization
• imaginative understanding
• (4th dimension time)
• speeches
• Pericles (in the 5th century B.C. Athens)
• .. (Pericles) saw what the polis can do for
  her citizens, and what the citizens can do for
  their polis.

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What is history?

• President John F. Kennedy
• Inaugural Speech (Jan., 1961)
• Ask not what the country can do for you ask
  what you can do for the country!
• Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
• On Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in
  History
• History of mankind is but the biography of Great
  Men.

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What is history?

• 1917 Russian Revolution
• World War I (1914-19)
• (A)  Leopold Haimson (US historian) believes that
  WWI stimulated patriotism in Russia, and thus
  deferring the collapse of the Czarist Russian
  Empire
• (B) George Kenan believes that WWI weakened
  further the Czarist Russian Empire, thus causing
  the collapse of the Empire

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The Stone Ages and the Birth of Civilizations

• 1. Old Stone Age (Paleolithic)
• About 75,000 to 30,000-10,000 B.C.
• Progress slow
• Life insecure, mainly hunting, cave painting,
  stone sculpture
• Then, Ice Age
• 10,000 to 8,000 B.C. (last glaciation)

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The Stone Ages and the Birth of Civilizations

• 2. New Stone Age (Neolithic)
• 8,000 B.C. ff
• development of agriculture gathering wild grain,
  discovering the uses of seeds (wheat, barley)
• animal domestication sheep, goat
• thus, growth of population
• social organization with leaders (warriors
  priests)

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The Stone Ages and the Birth of Civilizations

• 3. Valley Civilizations
• 4,000 to 3,000 B.C.
• Irrigation systems