History & Historians
This page features links to a number of subject areas related to History: and to the Historians who have used a rather interesting variety of approaches in their attempts to inform us about the past.
Direct Hot Links to a selection of historically related
subject areas are set out below:-
The most "original" linked historical pages that are accesssible from this page consider:-
Emerson's call for a "transcendentalist"
approach to the Study of History.
These pages attempt to explore whether there might be any validity in Emerson's assertion that the Human Mind contains a pattern that has proven to be the foundation for the Unfolding of History.
Emerson's view suggests that :-
" man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots,
whose flower and fruitage is the world. "
"There is one mind common to all individual men.
Of the works of this mind history is the record.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history.
all the facts of history pre-exist as laws. Each law in
turn is made by circumstances predominant. The creation
of a thousand forests is in one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome,
Gaul, Britain, America, lie folded already in the first man.
Epoch after epoch, camp, kingdom, empire, republic, democracy,
are merely the application of this manifold spirit to the
manifold world".
Towards the end of his Essay, History, Emerson asserts that :-
"every history should be written in a wisdom which
divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as
symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our
so-called History is".
"History is for human self-knowledge ... the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is."
R. G. Collingwood
"Whatever concept one may hold, from a metaphysical point of view, concerning the freedom of the will, certainly its appearances, which are human actions, like every other natural event, are determined by universal laws. However obscure their causes, history, which is concerned with narrating these appearances, permits us to hope that if we attend to the play of freedom of the human will in the large, we may be able to discern a regular movement in it, and that what seems complex and chaotic in the single individual may be seen from the standpoint of the human race as a whole to be a steady and progressive though slow evolution of its original endowment."
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
Or to quote Emerson, from his famous Essay ~ History more fully:-
In old Rome the public roads beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia, Spain, and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of the human heart go, as it were, highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot live without a world.
Famous Historical Personalities
From time to time individual human beings "have lived at the centre of events" such that an outline of their individual lives also tells us a something about the times in which they lived.When the wide range of aims these people individually supported are considered it tends to remind us of the perplexing reality that people often sincerely pursue goals that are definitely not shared by others.
| Otto von Bismarck | Burke |
| Count Camillo Cavour | Giuseppe Mazzini |
| Metternich | Mirabeau |
| Robert Owen | Paoli |
| Cecil Rhodes | Maximilien Robespierre French Revolution Reign of Terror |
| Abbe Sieyes | Talleyrand |
| From more recent times | |
| Konrad Adenauer | Alexander Dubcek |
| Willy Brandt | Lech Walesa |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Vaclav Havel |
| From more ancient times | |
| Charlemagne | Machiavelli |
| Confucius | Nostradamus prediction quatrains |
| Gregory Rasputin | |
| Dramatically Influential Philosophers | |
| Adam Smith | Voltaire |
| Immanuel Kant | Karl Marx |
| Charles Darwin | |
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Famous Historians
"The historian should be fearless and incorruptible; a man of independence, loving frankness and truth; one who, as the poets says, calls a fig a fig and a spade a spade. He should yield to neither hatred nor affection, not should be unsparing and unpitying. He should be neither shy nor deprecating, but an impartial judge, giving each side all it deserves but no more. He should know in his writing no country and no city; he should bow to no authority and acknowledge no king. He should never consider what this or that man will think, but should state the facts as they really occurred." ~ Lucian (A.D. 120-200)
History must at last convince of the uselessness of insensate mass movements riding roughshod, now as ever, over anonymous suffering and claiming priority in the name of some newly clothed abstraction. If it does not teach that, it does not teach anything. |
| Lord Acton | |
| Jacques Barzun | Fernand Braudel |
| Jacob Burckhardt | Thomas Carlyle |
| Niall Ferguson | |
| Edward Gibbon | |
| Herodotus | Eric Hobsbawm |
| Johan Huizinga | Isaiah Berlin |
| Thomas Macaulay | |
| Friedrich Meinecke | Jules Michelet |
| Leopold von Ranke | Simon Schama |
| A.J.P. Taylor | Antony Beevor |
| Adam Hart-Davis | |
| Edward Augustus Freeman | Edward Augustus Freeman Essay - Race and Language |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson's famous Essay ~ 'History' | |
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Philosophy of History
Many philosophers, writers, and historians, have variously attempted to discern "patterns" in History or to prescribe more effective approaches to the study of History .|
Famous quotations and quotes about Learning from History |
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| Emerson's call for a transcendentalist approach to the study of History |
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosophy of History |
| Oswald Spengler Decline of the West |
Karl Marx Historical Materialism |
| R G Collingwood philosophy of history |
Wilhelm Dilthey Introduction to the Human Sciences |
| Arnold Toynbee A Study of History |
The Whig Interpretation of History |
| Philosophy of History index |
|
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Alternate History
Many writers, and some historians, have speculated over the momentous "What Ifs" of history and have attempted to depict the resulting scenario if "this" had happened rather than "that" at key turning points of history.| Alternate History scenarios | |
| Niall Ferguson & Virtual History | |
| Alternate History | |
| Counterfactual History |
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Some fascinating
The links below lead to some variously insightful, wise and entertaining quotes about history.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson on History |
Historians on History |
| Metternich on history | |
| Wisdom about History | Cynical Quotes About History |
| Famous, Popular Entertaining, Controversial Quotes About History |
Quotes About Historical Insight |
| The lessons of history famous quotations and quotes |
The writing of history Historiography |
| Some random quotes about history | |
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Original Source Documents
| Act of Abjuration Dutch Independence Declaration 1581 |
The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 1789 |
| Archduke Charles proclamation To the German Nation - April 1809 |
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| The Statuto Constitution of the Kingdom of Sardinia 1848 |
Letter from Palacky to the Frankfurt Parliament 1848 |
| Papal Allocution of 1848 | Prague Slav Congress 1848 Manifesto : Austro-Slavism |
| Italian Unification Map Italy as formed during the Risorgimento |
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| David Lloyd George Mansion House Speech 1911 |
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| The Austro-Hungarian Ultimatum to Serbia July 1914 |
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Emerson, Transcendentalism,
and the Unfolding of History
The Transcendental Idealism of Immanuel Kant was adopted and
adapted by many other people in Europe and the Americas, one of
the more interesting instances of these adoptions / adaptions
being that of the New England Transcendentalists.Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the most far-seeing of the New England Transcendentalists, he came to believe that all people share a 'commonality of mind' and that it is this mind that acts as a foundational pattern for historical developments.
"A man is a bundle of relations, a knot of
roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson
|
Emerson's call for a "Philosophical Approach" to the appreciation of History |
- The European Revolution of 1848 begins
- A broad outline of the background to the onset of the turmoils and a consideration of some of the early events.
- The French Revolution of 1848
- A particular focus on France - as an Austrian foreign minister said "When France sneezes Europe catches a cold".
- The Revolution of 1848 in Germany and central Europe
- the Germanies - Germany - had a movement for a single parliament in 1848 and many central European would-be "nations" attempted
to assert a distinct existence separate from the dynastic sovereignties they had been living under.
- The "Italian" Revolution of 1848
- A "liberal" Papacy after 1846 helps allow the embers of an "Italian" national aspiration to rekindle across the Italian Peninsula.
- The European Revolutions - reactionary aftermath 1848-1849
- Some instances of social and political extremism allow previously pro-reform liberal elements to join conservative elements in supporting
the return of traditional authority. Such nationalities living within the Habsburg Empire as the Czechs, Croats, Slovaks, Serbs and Roumanians,
find it more credible to look to the Emperor,
rather than to the democratised assemblies recently established in Vienna and in Budapest as a result of populist agitation, for the future protection
of their nationality.
The Austrian Emperor and many Kings and Dukes regain political powers. Louis Napoleon, (who later became the Emperor Napoleon III), elected as President in France offering social stability at home but ultimately follows policies productive of dramatic change in the wider European structure of states and their sovereignty.
- Some detailed historical background to the European Revolutions of 1848
- Some quite detailed background information relating to the historical situation just prior to the onset of the European Revolutions of 1848 is available on this linked page.
| Italian Unification Cavour, Garibaldi and Risorgimento Italy |
Otto von Bismarck & The Wars of German Unification |
| Italian unification map Risorgimento Italy |
Map of German unification |
| The Ems Telegram | |
| The Zimmermann Telegram | |
| President Woodrow Wilson Fourteen Points Speech |
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| Lenin's New Economic Policy | |
| European Union Integration | |
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