History: A Very Short Introduction

 Arnold, John H. History: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

chap 1

History: a true story of sth that happened long ago, retold in the present.

chap 2

Agustine of Hippo describes history for faith so as to gain authority.

In the Middle Ages, rhetoric stayed present in historiography.

Modern virtues of historians: critical and suspicious.

Jean Bodin. Methodological book. methodological book, Bodin argued that history was essential for educating society about the correct conduct of warfare, affairs of the state, and government.

chap 3

Leopold von Ranke, the father of modern historiography. He demands historians could and should produce a scientific and objective history.

Lorenzo Valla proved "Donation of Constantine" was a forgery. He reintroduced the study of language and culture into history. 

"A historian, Baudouin suggested, should be like a lawyer balancing conflicting accounts, trying to establish the exact sequence of events, treating 'witnesses' (documents) with dispassionate and objective suspicion."

"Enlightenment historians were interested not simply in the decisions made by ruling elites, but by geography, the climate, economics, the composition of society, the characteristics of different peoples." 

Some historians abandoned "providence", but they still need a theory of causation. Two models appeared, chance and Great Men.

chap 4

History begins with sources. 

Historians make use of paleography to date old documents by patterns of writing.

Sources have voices and silence.

chap 5

"Every history is provisional, an attempt to say something in the face of impossible complexity. There is a weight of responsibility here on the historian: never to try to claim that his or her account is the only way of telling the story. But there is responsibility for the reader also: not to discount histories, because they are imperfect, but to engage with them as the true stories they can only be."

chap 7

"Historians must stick with what the sources make possible, and accept what they do not. They cannot invent new accounts, or suppress evidence that does not fit with their narratives."

Three reasons for doing philosophy: (1)enjoyment; (2)sth to think; (3)"think differently about oneself, to gather something of how we 'come about' as individual human beings, is also to be made aware of the possibility of doing things differently."