Our Knowledge of the Historical Past

Our Knowledge of the Historical Past PDF

Author: Murray G. Murphey

Publisher: Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill

Published: 1973

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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Dealing with the nature of historical knowledge, this book is concerned with both philosophical and historical questions. It involves considerations as various as statistical hypothesis testing, componential analysis and the problem of the Synoptic Gospels. --

Why Study History?

Why Study History? PDF

Author: John Fea

Publisher: Baker Books

Published: 2024-03-26

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1493442708

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What is the purpose of studying history? How do we reflect on contemporary life from a historical perspective, and can such reflection help us better understand ourselves, the world around us, and the God we worship and serve? Written by an accomplished historian, award-winning author, public evangelical spokesman, and respected teacher, this introductory textbook shows why Christians should study history, how faith is brought to bear on our understanding of the past, and how studying the past can help us more effectively love God and others. John Fea shows that deep historical thinking can relieve us of our narcissism; cultivate humility, hospitality, and love; and transform our lives more fully into the image of Jesus Christ. The first edition of this book has been used widely in Christian colleges across the country. The second edition provides an updated introduction to the study of history and the historian's vocation. The book has also been revised throughout and incorporates Fea's reflections on this topic from throughout the past 10 years.

Our Knowledge of the Past

Our Knowledge of the Past PDF

Author: Aviezer Tucker

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004-04-26

Total Pages: 303

ISBN-13: 1139452258

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How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific discipline should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines.

Historical Knowledge, Historical Error

Historical Knowledge, Historical Error PDF

Author: Allan Megill

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2007-02

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0226518302

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In the past thirty years, historians have broadened the scope of their discipline to include many previously neglected topics and perspectives. They have chronicled language, madness, gender, and sexuality and have experimented with new forms of presentation. They have turned to the histories of non-Western peoples and to the troubled relations between “the West” and the rest. Allan Megill welcomes these developments, but he also suggests that there is now confusion among historians about what counts as a justified account of the past. In Historical Knowledge, Historical Error, Megill dispels some of the confusion. Here, he discusses issues of narrative, objectivity, and memory. He attacks what he sees as irresponsible uses of evidence while accepting the art of speculation, which incomplete evidence forces upon historians. Along the way, he offers succinct accounts of the epistemological road historians have traveled from Herodotus and Thucydides through Leopold von Ranke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and on to Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, and Lynn Hunt.

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts

Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts PDF

Author: Samuel S. Wineburg

Publisher: Critical Perspectives on the P

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 9781566398565

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Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present. These essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

Historical Knowledge

Historical Knowledge PDF

Author: Susanna Fellman

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2011-10-18

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 144383484X

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Historical Knowledge approaches the topic of historical knowledge in depth and from various angles. It seeks to offer theoretical and methodological building blocks for the use of anyone pursuing historical research. This book brings novel insights into classic and topical issues currently under debate: the importance of theory in historical thinking, the dialectic of “text” and “annotation”, the actor and observer levels, the relationship between the general and the individual, the issue of comparison, and the problem of sporadic sources and of understanding the singularity of each one. The overall theme of the book, the possibility of historical knowledge, reflects the very issue that makes historical research distinctive: the challenges of evidence and the problems, both concrete and conceptual, with deciphering and interpreting remnants of the past. This book refreshes the discussion about sources and proper evidence, two issues that the linguistic turn and the postmodern challenge pushed into the background. The book addresses these issues in an easily accessible way and serves as an introduction and guide to the role of theory, method and evidence in historical research not only for students and scholars of history, but also for anyone outside the field with an interest in the topic. Historical Knowledge is the first book to include texts by the three eminent historians, Professors Natalie Zemon Davis, Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi. The other contributors, Professors Risto Alapuro, Janken Myrdal and Matti Peltonen, are active debaters in current theoretical and methodo-logical discussion.

History and Identity

History and Identity PDF

Author: Stefan Berger

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-01-20

Total Pages: 507

ISBN-13: 110701140X

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This introduction to contemporary historical theory and practice shows how issues of identity have shaped how we write history. Stefan Berger charts how a new self-reflexivity about what is involved in the process of writing history entered the historical profession and the part that historians have played in debates about the past and its meaningfulness for the present. He introduces key trends in the theory of history such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, constructivism, narrativism and the linguistic turn and reveals, in turn, the ways in which they have transformed how historians have written history over the last four decades. The book ranges widely from more traditional forms of history writing, such as political, social, economic, labour and cultural history, to the emergence of more recent fields, including gender history, historical anthropology, the history of memory, visual history, the history of material culture, and comparative, transnational and global history.

Empathy and History

Empathy and History PDF

Author: Tyson Retz

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2018-07-27

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1785339206

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Since empathy first emerged as an object of inquiry within British history education in the early 1970s, teachers, scholars and policymakers have debated the concept’s role in the teaching and learning of history. Yet over the years this discussion has been confined to specialized education outlets, while empathy’s broader significance for history and philosophy has too often gone unnoticed. Empathy and History is the first comprehensive account of empathy’s place in the practice, teaching, and philosophy of history. Beginning with the concept’s roots in nineteenth-century German historicism, the book follows its historical development, transformation, and deployment while revealing its relevance for practitioners today.

History in the Plural

History in the Plural PDF

Author: Niklas Olsen

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2012-01-30

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 0857452967

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Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of "grand theory," Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a "great thinker" and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone)

Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) PDF

Author: Sam Wineburg

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-09-17

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022635735X

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A look at how to teach history in the age of easily accessible—but not always reliable—information. Let’s start with two truths about our era that are so inescapable as to have become clichés: We are surrounded by more readily available information than ever before. And a huge percent of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. With the Internet at our fingertips, what’s a teacher of history to do? In Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone), professor Sam Wineburg has the answers, beginning with this: We can’t stick to the same old read-the-chapter-answer-the-question snoozefest. If we want to educate citizens who can separate fact from fake, we have to equip them with new tools. Historical thinking, Wineburg shows, has nothing to do with the ability to memorize facts. Instead, it’s an orientation to the world that cultivates reasoned skepticism and counters our tendency to confirm our biases. Wineburg lays out a mine-filled landscape, but one that with care, attention, and awareness, we can learn to navigate. The future of the past may rest on our screens. But its fate rests in our hands. Praise for Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone) “If every K-12 teacher of history and social studies read just three chapters of this book—”Crazy for History,” “Changing History . . . One Classroom at a Time,” and “Why Google Can’t Save Us” —the ensuing transformation of our populace would save our democracy.” —James W. Lowen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me and Teaching What Really Happened “A sobering and urgent report from the leading expert on how American history is taught in the nation’s schools. . . . A bracing, edifying, and vital book.” —Jill Lepore, New Yorker staff writer and author of These Truths “Wineburg is a true innovator who has thought more deeply about the relevance of history to the Internet—and vice versa—than any other scholar I know. Anyone interested in the uses and abuses of history today has a duty to read this book.” —Niall Ferguson, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of The Ascent of Money and Civilization