97-579: Bathers Beach , also known as Whalers Beach , is a section of coastline that has a written history since the European settlement of what is now called Fremantle , Western Australia. In the 1890s it was bounded to the south by the Long and Short jetties. In the 1930s and 1940s it was called City Beach . The water offshore has also been called Bathers Bay . It is the shore below the Round House and
194-428: A scientific method to the philosophy of history (which Dawood considers something "totally new to his age") and he often referred to it as his "new science", which is now associated with historiography . His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of the state , communication , propaganda , and systematic bias in history. By the eighteenth century historians had turned toward
291-464: A change". Like many practicing historians, they treat causes as intersecting actions and sets of actions which bring about "larger changes", in Danto's words: to decide "what are the elements which persist through a change" is "rather simple" when treating an individual's "shift in attitude", but "it is considerably more complex and metaphysically challenging when we are interested in such a change as, say,
388-529: A civilization enters upon an era of Caesarism after its soul dies. Spengler thought that the soul of the West was dead and that Caesarism was about to begin. Narrative and causal approaches to history have often been contrasted or even opposed to one another, yet they can also be viewed as complementary. Some philosophers of history such as Arthur Danto have claimed that "explanations in history and elsewhere" describe "not simply an event—something that happens—but
485-538: A complex exposition of his theses, which can lead to more than one mistake. For this reason, a series of works have been written aimed at interpreting the writings of the German philosopher, including his philosophy of history, which has been considered one of his clearest works. Hegel's philosophy of history aimed for a philosophical reflection on world history, thinking about the history of humanity in all its spatial and temporal breadth. This Hegelian particularity, versus
582-674: A historical thesis of the course of French political history—a critique of both the monarchy and the Third Estate. Foucault regards him as the founder of the historico-political discourse as political weapon. In Great Britain, this historico-political discourse was used by the bourgeoisie, the people and the aristocracy as a means of struggle against the monarchy—cf. Edward Coke or John Lilburne . In France, Boulainvilliers , Nicolas Fréret , and then Sieyès , Augustin Thierry , and Cournot reappropriated this form of discourse. Finally, at
679-602: A judgement of history. The goals of historical judgements or interpretations are separate from those of legal judgements , which need to be formulated quickly after the events and be final. In his Collège de France lectures published as Society Must Be Defended , Michel Foucault posits that the victors of a social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda , which may go so far as historical negationism . Wolfgang Schivelbusch 's Culture of Defeat takes an opposing approach that defeat
776-458: A larger plan of history. However, Leibniz's principles were not a gesture of fatalism . Confronted with the antique problem of future contingents , Leibniz developed the theory of compossible worlds , distinguishing two types of necessity, in response to the problem of determinism . G. W. F. Hegel may represent the epitome of teleological philosophy of history. Hegel's teleology was taken up by Francis Fukuyama in his The End of History and
873-761: A more positivist approach—focusing on fact as much as possible, but still with an eye on telling histories that could instruct and improve. Starting with Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) and Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), historical studies began to move towards a more modern scientific form. In the Victorian era , historiographers debated less whether history was intended to improve the reader , and more on what causes turned history and how one could understand historical change. Many ancient cultures held mythical and theological concepts of history and of time that were not linear . Such societies saw history as cyclical, with alternating Dark and Golden Ages. Plato taught
970-679: A more secular approach into historical study. According to John Tosh , "From the High Middle Ages (c.1000–1300) onwards, the written word survives in greater abundance than any other source for Western history." Western historians developed methods comparable to modern historiographic research in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and Germany, where they began investigating these source materials to write histories of their past. Many of these histories had strong ideological and political ties to their historical narratives. In
1067-609: A more generalized account built on the more specific research found in the first two types of sources. Philosophy of history Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and its discipline . The term was coined by the French philosopher Voltaire . In contemporary philosophy a distinction has developed between the speculative philosophy of history and the critical philosophy of history, now referred to as analytic . The split between these approaches may be approximately compared, by analogy and on
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#17327987708181164-472: A perceived "fundamental bifurcation between historical and fictional narrative" (Ricœur, vol. 1, 52). In spite of this, most modern historians such as Barbara Tuchman or David McCullough consider narrative writing important to their approaches. The theory of narrated history (or historicized narrative) holds that the structure of lived experience, and such experience narrated in both fictional and non-fictional works (literature and historiography) have in common
1261-692: A popular conception in the nineteenth century. Auguste Comte 's (1798–1857) positivist conception of history, which he divided into the theological stage, the metaphysical stage and the positivist stage, brought upon by modern science, was one of the most influential doctrines of progress. The Whig interpretation of history , as it was later called, associated with scholars of the Victorian and Edwardian eras in Britain , such as Henry Maine or Thomas Macaulay , gives an example of such influence, by looking at human history as progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science. Maine described
1358-444: A question of epistemology . The study of different historical methods is known as historiography , which focuses on examining how different interpreters of recorded history create different interpretations of historical evidence. Prehistory traditionally refers to the span of time before recorded history, ending with the invention of writing systems . Prehistory refers to the past in an area where no written records exist, or where
1455-470: A spatial transition from east to west, that is, from Asia to Europe. This transition of reason, says Hegel, is made explicit in the concept of freedom that each civilization developed in these spaces has had. Thus, in the east, the Chinese civilization, India, and the various civilizations of Mesopotamia were characterized by considering that freedom belonged to a single subject, that person being understood as
1552-436: A written form or other documented communication which are subsequently evaluated by historians using the historical method . For broader world history , recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BCE, and it coincides with the invention of writing . For some geographic regions or cultures , written history is limited to a relatively recent period in human history because of
1649-683: Is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor, confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back. Related to the issues of historical judgement are those of the pretension to neutrality and objectivity. Analytic and critical philosophers of history have debated whether historians should express judgements on historical figures, or if this would infringe on their supposed role. In general, positivists and neopositivists oppose any value-judgement as unscientific. Early teleological approaches to history can be found in theodicies , which attempted to reconcile
1746-422: Is inaccessible to us except in textual form . . . it can be approached only by way of prior (re)textualization" (82). Since Plato 's Republic , civic education and instruction has had a central role in politics and the constitution of a common identity. History has thus sometimes become the target of propaganda , for example in historical revisionist attempts. Plato's insistence on the importance of education
1843-586: Is located just south of Arthur Head , at the entrance to Fremantle Harbour with the South Mole starting at its northern side. On 4 September 1829 Marquis of Anglesea dragged her anchors and was wrecked on Bathers Beach during a gale. A rocky promontory, which defined the southern end of the beach (now hidden beneath reclaimed land) and from which the Fremantle Long Jetty extended, was subsequently named "Anglesea Point". Daniel Scott , who
1940-615: Is not a subdivision of the Whole but this Whole itself apprehended in a specific modality. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History bring together the theses of the philosophy of history that Hegel developed during his classes at the University of Berlin taught in the years 1822–1823, 1828 and 1830–1831. Editions of the work by Eduard Gans in 1837, Charles Hegel in 1840 and Georg Lasson in 1917 stand out. Hegel's work presents
2037-519: Is nothing more than "an illusion, an instrument, or, at the best, an enemy. It is a discourse that beheads the king, anyway that dispenses itself from the sovereign and that denounces it". A current popular conception considers the value of narrative in the writing and experience of history. Important thinkers in this area include Paul Ricœur , Louis Mink , W.B. Gallie , and Hayden White . Some have doubted this approach because it draws fictional and historical narrative closer together, and there remains
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#17327987708182134-518: Is one of the earliest mentions of "pigtail of Brahmin boys". These poems also allude to historical incidents, ancient Tamil kings, the effect of war on loved ones and households. The Pattinappalai poem in the Ten Idylls group, for example, paints a description of the Chola capital, the king Karikala , the life in a harbor city with ships and merchandise for seafaring trade, the dance troupes,
2231-502: Is one of the few documents containing material relating to the Nāga and Yakkha peoples , indigenous inhabitants of Lanka prior to the legendary arrival of Prince Vijaya from Singha Pura of Kalinga. The Sangam literature offers a window into some aspects of the ancient South Indian culture, secular and religious beliefs, and the people. For example, in the Sangam era Ainkurunuru poem 202
2328-507: Is to simply recognize that all these issues in social evolution merely serve to support the suggestion that how one considers the nature of history will impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history. The critical under-explored question is less about history as content and more about history as process. In 2011 Steven Pinker wrote a history of violence and humanity from an evolutionary perspective in which he shows that violence has declined statistically over time. As early as
2425-420: Is written by the victors". G. W. F. Hegel adopts the expression " Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht " ("World history is a tribunal that judges the world", a quote from Friedrich Schiller 's poem Resignation , published in 1786) and asserts that history is what judges men and women, their actions, and their opinions. Since the twentieth century, Western historians have disavowed the aspiration to provide
2522-615: The Culavamsa "Lesser Chronicle", compiled by Sinhala monks, covers the period from the 4th century to the British takeover of Sri Lanka in 1815. The Culavamsa was compiled by a number of authors of different time periods. The combined work, sometimes referred to collectively as the Mahavamsa , provides a continuous historical record of over two millennia, and is considered one of the world's longest unbroken historical accounts. It
2619-582: The Bronze Age in the late Neolithic of the late 4th millennium BCE . The Sumerian archaic cuneiform script and the Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400 to 3200 BCE, with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BCE . The earliest chronologies date back to the earliest civilizations of Early Dynastic Period of Egypt , Mesopotamia and
2716-959: The Iron Age , which began with the Dorian invasion . Some scholars identify just four ages, corresponding to the four metals, with the Heroic age as a description of the Bronze Age. A four-age count would match the Vedic or Hindu ages known as Satya Yuga , Treta Yuga , Dvapara Yuga and Kali Yuga , which together make one Yuga Cycle that repeats. According to Jainism , this world has no beginning or end but goes through cycles of upturns (utsarpini) and downturns (avasarpini) constantly. Many Greeks believed that just as mankind went through four stages of character during each rise and fall of history so did government . They considered democracy and monarchy as
2813-453: The Jiahu symbols ( c. 6600 BCE ), Vinča signs ( c. 5300 BCE ), early Indus script ( c. 3500 BCE ) and Nsibidi script ( c. before 500 CE ). There is disagreement concerning exactly when prehistory becomes history, and when proto-writing became "true writing". However, invention of the first writing systems is roughly contemporary with the beginning of
2910-536: The Mediterranean Sea as "hero" of history and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 's history of climate were inspired by this school. Karl Marx is often thought to be an exponent of economic determinism . For him social institutions like religion, culture and the political system were merely by-products of the underlying economic system . However, he did not see history as completely deterministic. His essay The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon contains
3007-631: The Renaissance , historians' focus alternated between subjects designed to improve mankind and a devotion to fact. History was composed mainly of hagiographies of monarchs and epic poetry describing heroic deeds such as The Song of Roland —about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass (778) during Charlemagne 's first campaign to conquer the Iberian Peninsula . In the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun , whom George Sarton considered one of
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3104-486: The Sumerians , which emerged independently of each other from roughly 3500 BCE. Earliest recorded history, which varies greatly in quality and reliability, deals with Pharaohs and their reigns , as preserved by ancient Egyptians . Much of the earliest recorded history was re-discovered relatively recently due to archaeological dig sites findings. A number of different traditions have developed in different parts of
3201-881: The decline of the Roman Empire . Machiavelli 's Discourses on Livy (1513–1517) provide an example. The notion of Empire contained in itself ascendance and decadence , as in Edward Gibbon 's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), which the Roman Catholic Church placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books). During the Age of Enlightenment , history began to be seen as both linear and irreversible. Condorcet 's interpretations of
3298-495: The problem of evil with the existence of God—providing a global explanation of history with belief in a progressive directionality organized by a superior power, leading to an eschatological end, such as a Messianic Age or Apocalypse . However, this transcendent teleological approach can be thought as immanent to human history itself. Augustine of Hippo , Thomas Aquinas , Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet , in his 1679 Discourse On Universal History , and Gottfried Leibniz , who coined
3395-575: The "father of history" composing his The Histories from the 450s to the 420s BCE. However, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 460 BCE – c. 400 BCE) is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in his work the History of the Peloponnesian War . Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as being the product of the choices and actions of human beings, and looked at cause and effect, rather than as
3492-464: The 18th century, philosophers began focusing on contextual factors contributing to the course of history. Historians of the Annales School , founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch , were a major landmark in the shift from a history centered on individual subjects to studies concentrating in geography , economics, demography , and other social forces. Fernand Braudel 's studies on
3589-501: The 2000s this was done using analogue recording methods such as cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes . With the onset of new technologies, there are now digital recordings , which may be recorded to compact disks. Nevertheless, historical record and interpretation often relies heavily on written records, partially because it dominates the extant historical materials, and partially because historians are used to communicating and researching in that medium. The historical method comprises
3686-403: The 20th century, academic historians began focusing less on epic nationalistic narratives, which often tended to glorify the nation or great men , to attempt more objective and complex analyses of social and intellectual forces. A major trend of historical methodology in the 20th century was a tendency to treat history more as a social science rather than as an art , which traditionally had been
3783-779: The Fremantle Whaling Company was based here. This company, which included investors in Liverpool, had mixed fortunes as the market collapsed in 1840. However the company did build a whaling station at Bathers Beach. The station included the tunnel and a number of buildings and a jetty where whales could be processed. Scott rented this station in the 1840s and he also operated a number of whaling ships including Napoleon and Merope . The whaling business does not appear to have been driven hard and Scott sold up his whaling boats and equipment in 1850. The Fremantle Whaling Company also ceased to operate that year. (Scott's new task
3880-518: The Great , writing that "The History of the world is but the Biography of great men." His view of heroes included not only political and military figures, the founders or topplers of states, but artists, poets, theologians and other cultural leaders. His history of great men, of geniuses, sought to organize change in the advent of greatness . Explicit defenses of Carlyle's position have been rare since
3977-665: The Inequality of the Human Races (1853–55) argued that race is the primary force determining world events, that there are intellectual differences between human races , and that civilizations decline and fall when the races are mixed. Gobineau's works had a large popularity in the so-called scientific racism theories that developed during the New Imperialism period. After the first world war , and even before Herbert Butterfield (1900–1979) harshly criticized it,
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4074-548: The Last Man . Thinkers such as Nietzsche , Michel Foucault , Althusser , or Deleuze deny any teleological sense to history, claiming that it is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales, which the Annales School claimed to have demonstrated. Schools of thought influenced by Hegel also see history as progressive, but they see progress as the outcome of a dialectic in which factors working in opposite directions are over time reconciled. History
4171-487: The Whig interpretation had gone out of style. The bloodletting of that conflict had indicted the whole notion of linear progress. Paul Valéry famously said: "We civilizations now know ourselves mortal." However, the notion itself didn't completely disappear. The End of History and the Last Man (1992) by Francis Fukuyama proposed a similar notion of progress, positing that the worldwide adoption of liberal democracies as
4268-516: The advancement of technology. History can now be recorded through photography , audio recordings , and video recordings . More recently, Internet archives have been saving copies of webpages, documenting the history of the Internet . Other methods of collecting historical information have also accompanied the change in technologies; for example, since at least the 20th century, attempts have been made to preserve oral history by recording it. Until
4365-516: The bards and artists, the worship of the Hindu god Murugan and the monasteries of Buddhism and Jainism. Indica is an account of Mauryan India by the Greek writer Megasthenes . The original book is now lost, but its fragments have survived in later Greek and Latin works. The earliest of these works are those by Diodorus Siculus , Strabo ( Geographica ), Pliny , and Arrian ( Indica ). In
4462-427: The bases of Foucault's thought—that discourse is not tied to the subject , rather the subject is a construction of discourse. Moreover, discourse is not the simple ideological and mirror reflexion of an economic infrastructure , but is a product and the battlefield of multiples forces—which may not be reduced to the simple dualist contradiction of two energies. Foucault shows that what specifies this discourse from
4559-583: The break-up of feudalism or the emergence of nationalism". Much of the historical debate about causes has focused on the relationship between communicative and other actions, between singular and repeated ones, and between actions, structures of action or group and institutional contexts and wider sets of conditions. John Gaddis has distinguished between exceptional and general causes (following Marc Bloch) and between "routine" and "distinctive links" in causal relationships: "in accounting for what happened at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, we attach greater importance to
4656-513: The case. French historians associated with the Annales School introduced quantitative history, using raw data to track the lives of typical individuals, and were prominent in the establishment of cultural history. The Zuo zhuan , attributed to Zuo Qiuming in the 5th century BCE covers the period from 722 to 468 BCE in a narrative form. The Book of Documents is one of the Five Classics of Chinese classic texts and one of
4753-412: The causes of phenomena". There is disagreement about the extent to which history is ultimately deterministic . Some argue that geography, economic systems, or culture prescribe laws that determine the events of history. Others see history as a sequence of consequential processes that act upon each other. Even determinists do not rule out that, from time to time, certain cataclysmic events occur to change
4850-461: The citizens. Finally, the third stage, German-Christian Europe, reached a level of consciousness about freedom that maintains that it no longer belonged to one or a few; on the contrary, freedom was good for all human beings. The reactions that Hegel's thesis generated have been diverse. On the one hand, it is argued that Hegel's contribution consisted of consolidating the philosophy of history as an independent and formal discipline of philosophy. On
4947-871: The concept of the Great Year , and other Greeks spoke of aeons . Similar examples include the ancient doctrine of eternal return , which existed in Ancient Egypt , in the Indian religions , among the Greek Pythagoreans ' and in the Stoics ' conceptions. In his Works and Days , Hesiod described five Ages of Man : the Golden Age , the Silver Age , the Bronze Age , the Heroic Age , and
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#17327987708185044-412: The course of history. Their main point is, however, that such events are rare and that even apparently large shocks like wars and revolutions often have no more than temporary effects on the evolution of the society. The question of neutrality concerns itself foremost with analysis of historiography and the biases of historical sources. One prominent manifestation of this analysis is the idea that "history
5141-435: The direction of progress as "from status to contract," from a world in which a child's whole life is pre-determined by the circumstances of his birth, toward one of mobility and choice. The publication of Darwin 's The Origin of Species in 1859 introduced human evolution . However, it was quickly transposed from its original biological field to the social field, in social Darwinist theories. Herbert Spencer , who coined
5238-584: The earliest narratives of China. The Spring and Autumn Annals , the official chronicle of the State of Lu covering the period from 722 to 481 BCE, is arranged on annalistic principles. It is traditionally attributed to Confucius (551–479 BCE). Zhan Guo Ce was a renowned ancient Chinese historical compilation of sporadic materials on the Warring States period compiled between the 3rd and 1st centuries BCE. Sima Qian (around 100 BCE)
5335-598: The elaboration of a common, national history. History textbooks are one way through which this common history was transmitted. Le Tour de France par deux enfants , for example, was the French Third Republic 's classic textbook for elementary school: it described the story of two French children who, following the German annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region in 1870, go on a tour de France during which they become aware of France's diversity and
5432-413: The emperor or empress, the king or queen. The rest of the individuals in these civilizations are, according to Hegel, like children under the tutelage of a father. The second stage of this transition of freedom overcame the paternal stage. Greece and Rome, civilizations where freedom no longer belonged only to the head of the state, but also to a limited number of people who met certain requirements, that is,
5529-575: The end of the nineteenth century, this discourse was incorporated by racialist biologists and eugenicists , who gave it the modern sense of race and, even more, transformed this popular discourse into a state racism in Nazism . Foucault also presents that Marxists too seized this discourse and took it in a different direction, transforming the essentialist notion of race into the historical notion of class struggle , defined by socially structured position. This displacement of discourse constitutes one of
5626-464: The fact that President Truman ordered the dropping of an atomic bomb than to the decision of the Army Air Force to carry out his orders." He has also pointed to the difference between immediate, intermediate and distant causes. For his part, Christopher Lloyd puts forward four "general concepts of causation" used in history: the "metaphysical idealist concept, which asserts that the phenomena of
5723-537: The figuration of "temporal experience." In this way narrative can "'grasp together' and integrate . . . into one whole and complete story" the "composite representations" of historical experience (Ricœur x, 173). Louis Mink writes that "the significance of past occurrences is understandable only as they are locatable in the ensemble of interrelationships that can be grasped only in the construction of narrative form" (148). Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson also analyzes historical understanding this way, and writes that "history
5820-516: The first philosophers of history, discussed his philosophy of history and society in detail in his Muqaddimah (1377). His work represents a culmination of earlier works by medieval Islamic sociologists in the spheres of Islamic ethics , political science , and historiography , such as those of al-Farabi (c. 872 – c. 950), Ibn Miskawayh , al-Dawani, and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201–1274). Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced
5917-459: The first systematic historian, and, later, Plutarch (46–120 CE) freely invented speeches for their historical figures and chose their historical subjects with an eye toward morally improving the reader. History was supposed to teach good examples for one to follow. The assumption that history "should teach good examples" influenced how writers produced history. From the Classical period to
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#17327987708186014-562: The fragile product of a historical struggle, first conceptualized as race struggle —understood not in the modern sense of biological race but closer to that of a people or nation . Boulainvilliers , for example, was an exponent of nobility rights. He claimed that the French nobility were the racial descendants of the Franks who invaded France (while the Third Estate was descended from the conquered Gauls), and had right to power by virtue of right of conquest . He used this approach to formulate
6111-649: The healthy régimes of the higher ages; and oligarchy and tyranny as corrupted régimes common to the lower ages. In the East, cyclical theories of history developed in China (as a theory of dynastic cycle ) and in the Islamic world in the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406). During the Renaissance , cyclical conceptions of history would become common, with proponents illustrating decay and rebirth by pointing to
6208-469: The historical subject must search in history's furor, under the "juridical code's dried blood", the multiple contingencies from which a fragile rationality temporarily finally emerged. This may be, perhaps, compared to the sophist discourse in Ancient Greece. Foucault warns that it has nothing to do with Machiavelli 's or Hobbes 's discourse on war, for to this popular discourse, the sovereign
6305-521: The juridical and philosophical discourse is its conception of truth—that truth is no longer absolute, it is the product of race struggle. History itself, which was traditionally the sovereign's science, the legend of his glorious feats and monument building, ultimately became the discourse of the people, thus a political stake. The subject is not any more a neutral arbitrator , judge, or legislator , as in Solon 's or Kant's conceptions. Therefore, what became
6402-667: The late twentieth century. Most philosophers of history contend that the motive forces in history can best be described only with a wider lens than the one he used for his portraits. A.C. Danto, for example, wrote of the importance of the individual in history, but extended his definition to include social individuals , defined as "individuals we may provisionally characterize as containing individual human beings amongst their parts. Examples of social individuals might be social classes [. . .], national groups [. . .], religious organizations [. . .], large-scale events [. . .], large-scale social movements [. . .], etc." The great man theory of history
6499-446: The limited use of written records. Moreover, human cultures do not always record all of the information which is considered relevant by later historians, such as the full impact of natural disasters or the names of individuals. Recorded history for particular types of information is therefore limited based on the types of records kept. Because of this, recorded history in different contexts may refer to different periods of time depending on
6596-709: The meaning and purpose of the historical process whereas the speculative approach studies the foundations and implications of history and the historical method . The names of these are derived from C. D. Broad 's distinction between critical philosophy and speculative philosophy. The divergence between these approaches crystallizes in the disagreements between Hume and Kant on the question of causality. Hume and Kant may be viewed in retrospect—by expressive anachronism—as analytic and speculative, respectively. Historians like Foucault or Hannah Arendt , who tend to be spoken of as theorists or philosophers before they are acknowledged as historians, may largely be identified with
6693-506: The most famous formulation of Marx's view of the role of the individual in history: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under given circumstances directly encountered and inherited from the past. The historico-political discourse analyzed by Michel Foucault in Society Must Be Defended (1975–76) considers truth as
6790-494: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the works of authors such as Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), Correa Moylan Walsh (1862–1936), Nikolay Danilevsky (1822–1885), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), and Paul Kennedy (1945– ), who conceived the human past as a series of repetitive rises and falls. Spengler, like Butterfield , when writing in reaction to the carnage of the First World War of 1914–1918, believed that
6887-432: The object of study." Historians use other types of sources to understand history as well. Secondary sources are written accounts of history based upon the evidence from primary sources. These are sources which, usually, are accounts, works, or research that analyse, assimilate, evaluate, interpret, and/or synthesize primary sources. Tertiary sources are compilations based upon primary and secondary sources and often tell
6984-495: The other hand, it is argued that Hegel's philosophy of history is an example of totalitarianism , racism , and Eurocentrism , widely debated criticisms. After Hegel, who insisted on the role of great men in history, with his famous statement about Napoleon , "I saw the Spirit on his horse", Thomas Carlyle argued that history was the biography of a few central individuals, heroes , such as Oliver Cromwell or Frederick
7081-530: The preface to his book, the Muqaddimah (1377), the Arab historian and early sociologist , Ibn Khaldun , warned of seven mistakes that he thought that historians regularly committed. In this criticism, he approached the past as strange and in need of interpretation. Ibn Khaldun often criticised "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data." As a result, he introduced a scientific method to
7178-620: The prestigious Ban family of the Eastern Han dynasty era. In Sri Lanka , the oldest historical text is the Mahavamsa ( c. 5th century CE). Buddhist monks of the Anuradhapura Maha Viharaya maintained chronicles of Sri Lankan history starting from the 3rd century BCE. These annals were combined and compiled into a single document in the 5th century by the Mahanama of Anuradhapura while Dhatusena of Anuradhapura
7275-618: The result of divine intervention. History developed as a popular form of literature in later Greek and Roman societies in the works of Polybius , Tacitus and others. Saint Augustine was influential in Christian and Western thought at the beginning of the medieval period. Through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, history was often studied through a sacred or religious perspective. Around 1800, German philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought philosophy and
7372-413: The single accredited political system and even modality of human consciousness would represent the " End of History ". Fukuyama's work stems from a Kojevian reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Unlike Maurice Godelier who interprets history as a process of transformation, Tim Ingold suggests that history is a movement of autopoiesis A key component to making sense of all of this
7469-637: The speculative approach whereas generic academic history tends to be cleave to analytic and narrative approaches. In his Poetics , Aristotle (384–322 BCE) maintained the superiority of poetry over history because poetry speaks of what ought or must be true rather than merely what is true. Herodotus , a fifth-century BCE contemporary of Socrates , broke from the Homeric tradition of passing narrative from generation to generation in his work "Investigations" (Ancient Greek: Ἱστορίαι; Istoríai), also known as Histories . Herodotus, regarded by some as
7566-429: The strength of regional and academic influences, to the schism in commitments between analytic and continental philosophy wherein the analytic approach is pragmatic and the speculative approach attends more closely to a metaphysics (or anti-metaphysics) of determining forces like language or the phenomenology of perception at the level of background assumptions. At the level of practice, the analytic approach questions
7663-464: The study of history, and he often referred to it as his "new science". His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state , communication , propaganda and systematic bias in history, and he is thus considered to be the "father of historiography" or the "father of the philosophy of history". While recorded history begins with the invention of writing, over time new ways of recording history have come along with
7760-520: The techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history . Primary sources are first-hand evidence of history (usually written, but sometimes captured in other mediums) made at the time of an event by a present person. Historians think of those sources as the closest to the origin of the information or idea under study. These types of sources can provide researchers with, as Dalton and Charnigo put it, "direct, unmediated information about
7857-546: The term " survival of the fittest ", or Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877) developed evolutionist theories independent from Darwin's works, which would be later interpreted as social Darwinism. These nineteenth-century unilineal evolution theories claimed that societies start out in a primitive state and gradually become more civilised over time, and equated the culture and technology of Western civilisation with progress. Arthur Gobineau 's An Essay on
7954-408: The term, formulated such philosophical theodicies. Leibniz based his explanation on the principle of sufficient reason , which states that anything that happens, does happen for a specific reason. Thus, if one adopts God's perspective, seemingly evil events in fact only take place in the larger divine plan . In this way theodicies explained the necessity of evil as a relative element that forms part of
8051-403: The topic. The interpretation of recorded history often relies on historical method , or the set of techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write accounts of the past. The question of what constitutes history, and whether there is an effective method for interpreting recorded history, is raised in the philosophy of history as
8148-468: The unfolding of history, Herbert Spencer wrote "You must admit that the genesis of the great man depends on the long series of complex influences which has produced the race in which he appears, and the social state into which that race has slowly grown. . . . Before he can remake his society, his society must make him." Inspired by the Enlightenment's ideal of progress, social evolutionism became
8245-456: The universe are products of or emanations from an omnipotent being or such final cause"; "the empiricist (or Humean ) regularity concept, which is based on the idea of causation being a matter of constant conjunctions of events"; "the functional/teleological/consequential concept", which is "goal-directed, so that goals are causes"; and the "realist, structurist and dispositional approach, which sees relational structures and internal dispositions as
8342-530: The various "stages of humanity" and Auguste Comte 's positivism were among the most important formulations of such conceptions of history, which trusted social progress . As in Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's Emile (1762) treatise on education (or the "art of training men"), the Enlightenment conceived the human species as perfectible: human nature could be infinitely developed through a well-thought pedagogy . Cyclical conceptions continued in
8439-467: The works of historians, rests on the fact that the German philosopher sought to determine what the teleology of history was, particularly what the end of history was, and how that process would develop. With this end in mind, Hegel applied his philosophical system, both metaphysical and logical, to develop the thesis that the history of humanity consists of a rational process of constant progress towards freedom. According to Hegelian philosophy, reason made
8536-427: The world as to how to interpret these ancient accounts. Dionysius of Halicarnassus knew of seven predecessors of Herodotus , including Hellanicus of Lesbos , Xanthus of Lydia and Hecataeus of Miletus . He described their works as simple, unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends. Herodotus (484 BCE – c. 425 BCE) has generally been acclaimed as
8633-487: The writing of a culture is not understood. Protohistory refers to the transition period between prehistory and history, after the advent of literacy in a society but before the writings of the first historians . Protohistory may also refer to the period during which a culture or civilization has not yet developed writing, but other cultures have noted its existence in their own writings. More complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing . Early examples are
8730-418: Was accommodating convicts that year.) Due to the range of activities since the 1820s, including whaling, the area adjacent to the beach has attracted archaeological interest. 32°03′31″S 115°44′30″E / 32.0585°S 115.7418°E / -32.0585; 115.7418 Recorded history Recorded history or written history describes the historical events that have been recorded in
8827-566: Was best seen as directed by a Zeitgeist , and traces of the Zeitgeist could be seen by looking backward. Hegel believed that history was moving man toward civilization , and some also claim he thought that the Prussian state incarnated the end of history . In his Lessons on the History of Philosophy , he explains that each epochal philosophy is in a way the whole of philosophy; it
8924-522: Was dug in five months and completed in January 1838. This rapid progress was possible because prisoners from the Round House were used, the rock was capable of being mined with a pick axe, and the work was overseen by Henry Willey Reveley . Today the tunnel is only 45 metres (148 ft) long as the cliffs were cut back some time after 1880. There were two local whaling companies started in 1836 but
9021-525: Was most popular with professional historians in the nineteenth century; a popular work of this school is the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911), which contains lengthy and detailed biographies about the great men of history. After Marx 's conception of a materialist history based on the class struggle , which raised attention for the first time to the importance of social factors such as economics in
9118-490: Was relayed by Rousseau's Emile: Or, On Education (1762), a counterpart to The Social Contract (1762). Public education has been seen by republican regimes and the Enlightenment as a prerequisite of the masses' progressive emancipation, as conceived by Kant in Was Ist Aufklärung? ( What Is Enlightenment? , 1784). Modern education systems, instrumental in the construction of nation states , also involved
9215-710: Was ruling the Anuradhapura Kingdom . It was written based on prior ancient compilations known as the Atthakatha , which were commentaries written in Sinhala. An earlier document known as the Dipavamsa (4th century CE) "Island Chronicles" is much simpler and contains less information than the Mahavamsa and was probably compiled using the Atthakatha on the Mahavamsa as well. A companion volume,
9312-642: Was the first in China to lay the groundwork for professional historical writing. His written work was the Records of the Grand Historian , a monumental lifelong achievement in literature. Its scope extends as far back as the 16th century BCE, and it includes many treatises on specific subjects and individual biographies of prominent people, and also explores the lives and deeds of commoners, both contemporary and those of previous eras. His work influenced every subsequent author of history in China, including
9409-569: Was the local harbour master, businessman and chair of the town council, made substantial investment in the Fremantle Whaling Company in 1837. An impressive investment was made when the company created a 57-metre-long (187 ft) tunnel that linked the beach to the High Street , allowing easy access for transporting heavy equipment or products. The tunnel was built underneath the substantial Round House without damage. It
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