Definitions, famous, of History
John Jacob Anderson
"History is a narration of the events which have happened among mankind, including an account of the rise and fall of nations, as well as of other great changes which have affected the political and social condition of the human race." (John Jacob Anderson)
W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman
"History is not what you thought. It is what you remember. All other history defeats itself." (1066 and All That)
James Joyce
"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." (Ulysses)
Arnold J. Toynbee
"History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff well, it might as well be dead."
The Psycho-Historian
Between 1942 and 1944, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote the first short stories which were to become the basis for the Foundation trilogy. The main concept of the Foundation Trilogy is that if you are a good enough mathematician, you can accurately predict the future, based on the record of the past. Asimov read very widely indeed, so it should come as no surprise that his ideas were based on the writings of other historians.
"If a science of history were achieved, it would, like the science of celestial mechanics, make possible the calculable prediction of the future in history. It would bring the totality of historical occurrences within a single field and reveal the unfolding future to its last end, including all the apparent choices made and to be made. It would be omniscience. The creator of it would possess the attributes ascribed by the theologians to God. The future once revealed, humanity would have nothing to do except to await its doom."
Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges
"History is and should be a science ... History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies."
"The first foundations of all history are the recitals of the fathers to the children, transmitted afterward from one generation to another; at their origin, they are at the very most probable, when they do not shock common sense, and they lose one degree of probability in each generation." (The Philosophical Dictionary)
Edward Hallett Carr
"History is ... a dialogue between the present and the past. (originally: Geschichte ist ... ein Dialog zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit.)" (What Is History?)
"The major lessons of history? There are four: First, whom the gods destroy they first make mad with power. Second, the mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceeding small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flower it robs. Fourth, when it is dark enough you can see the stars." (Attributed to historian Charles Austin Beard, but this version is the one Martin Luther King used in "The death of evil upon the seashore")
A Pack of Tricks
Not everyone likes the study of history or finds it useful. Henry Ford was a prime example of that and so was Henry David Thoreau, what may be one of the very few things those two gentlemen had in common.
Voltaire
"History is nothing but a pack of tricks we play on the dead." (French original) "J'ay vu un temps où vous n'aimiez guères l'histoire. Ce n'est après tout qu'un ramas de tracasseries qu'on fait aux morts ... "
"As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs." (Walden)
"History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all—it is very tiresome." (Northanger Abbey)
Ambrose Bierce
"HISTORY, n. An account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools: Of Roman history, great Niebuhr's shown 'Tis nine-tenths lying. Faith, I wish 'twere known, Ere we accept great Niebuhr as a guide, Wherein he blundered and how much he lied." (Devil's Dictionary)
"A race of people is like an individual man; until it uses its own talent, takes pride in its own history, expresses its own culture, affirms its own selfhood, it can never fulfill itself."
The Passage of Time
Whether you like history or not, there's no denying the impact it leaves on us.
Henry David Thoreau
"Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate." (A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.)
Gusti Bienstock Kollman
"You know, it's so strange, I've lived through four forms of government in my life: monarchy, republic, Hitler's Reich, American democracy. The [Weimar] republic was only ... 1918 to 1933, that's fifteen years! Imagine that, only fifteen years. But, then, Hitler was going to last a thousand years and he lasted only ... 1933 to 1945 ... twelve, twelve years only! Hah!"
Plutarch
"So very difficult a matter it is to trace and find out the truth of anything by history." (Plutarch's Lives)
Douglas Adams
"The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry, and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question "How can we eat?" the second by the question "Why do we eat?" and the third by the question "Where shall we have lunch?" (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe)
T.S. Eliot
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors
And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,
Guides us by vanities. Think now
She gives when our attention is distracted
And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions
That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late
What's not believed in, or if still believed,
In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon
Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with
Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think
Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.
What are the Important Definitions of History? – Answered!
Some of the important definitions of history given by different historians are given below:
The English word ‘History’ is derived from their Greek noun ‘Historia’. ‘History’ or ‘Historia’ simply means ‘enquiry’ or ‘research’.
The term ‘History’ has been taken from the German word ‘Geschichle’ means an intelligible and significant narration of the past events.
In fact development of history started with the ancient Greek historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides.
Herodotus popularly known as the ‘Father of History’ wrote about the Graeco-Persian wars this contains a mine of information including those relating to the ancient Egyptians and Persians. Thucidides developed this subjects on scientific lines. He wrote the “Pelopenesian Wars’ on the basis of evidence and showed the relation between causes and effects or results.
Thomas Charlyle “World History is a biography of great men”.
Prof. Renier: “History is the memories of societies.”
E.H. Carr: “History is an unending dialogue between the present and the past and the chief function of A historian is to master and understand the past as a key to the understanding of THE present.”
Prof. G.R. Elton: “History is concerned with all those human sayings, thoughts, deeds and sufferings which occurred in the past and have left present deposit; and it deals with them from the point of view of happening change and particular.”
Lord Acton: History is the unfolding story of human freedom.”
Prof. A.L. Rowse: “History is essentially the record of the life of men in societies in their geographical and their physical environments. Their social and cultural environments arises from the interaction of the one with the other, the society and its geographical condition.”
Prof. Carl G. Gustavson: “History is a mountain top of human knowledge from whence the doings of our own generation may be scanned and fitted into proper dimensions. History enables a person to see himself as part of that living process of human growth which has emerged out of the past and will inexorably project itself out beyond our own life-time. We are the product of the past but not the complete product.”
According to an article titled “7 Elements of Historical Fiction”, in general writers of fiction must address seven crucial elements: character, dialogue, setting, theme, plot, conflict, and world building.
Great examples of historical fiction in literature include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden, and The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates.
Historical Fiction is a story that takes readers to a time and place in the past. How far back in time does an author have to go for their work to be considered Historical Fiction? ... Historical Fiction is set in a real place, during a culturally recognizable time.
Historical fiction transports readers to another time and place, either real or imagined. Writing historical fiction requires a balance of research and creativity, and while it often includes real people and events, the genre offers a fiction writer many opportunities to tell a wholly unique story.
Reading historical fiction allows us to be moved by what happened. ... The historical novelist exposes the reader to the inner lives of people across time and place, and in doing so illuminates history's untold stories, allowing the reader to experience a more complex truth.
Scaramouche.
1. The need for historical fiction by sensitive writers is what I want to stress. Dickens' Hard Times is an example. Hard Times was not Historical Fiction when it was written. Tale of Two Cities was. but want to start with the startling assumption that what we write today is historical fiction in a sense, as it will be seen as that by future generations.
2. While reading Historical fiction we negotiate between the particular and the universal. Thus the biographical interpretation becomes relevant.
3. The second kind of interpretation that is needed is the historical interpretation. This also brings in the political, the economic, the psychological, the philosophical, the religious, the social or sociological, the cultural, the anthropological, the textual etc.
"A historicist critic is one who seeks to place a text in its context, to reveal the embeddedness of, for example, Shakespeare's Macbeth in the witch-hunting mania of King James I's early reign. Historicists might use what we know about social customs, economics, politics, or religion to read a text. They might also do primary research in a historical archive, uncovering documents that shed new light on something about the text that a reader at several centuries' removed from the text's original publication previously could not see.
We weighed opposing viewpoints on the "author problem," viewpoints that either place more value on the author's intention or on the reader's reaction. Parts 2 and 3 explore a parallel "problem" in literary studies: what we might call the "time problem." Opposing viewpoints on the time problem lean toward historicist or presentist readings of texts, placing more value on the historical embeddedness we were describing above or, conversely, the modern relevance of a text."
"A presentist critic is one who seeks to place a text in a modern context, to reveal the relevance, for example, of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew to ongoing conversations about women's rights in the United States. When writing about Shakespeare, presentists might apply a modern theory or idea to the plays to see how they stack up, or they might use the plays as examples to make a point. Of course, we can also think of performances of Shakespeare's plays as interpretations in their own right. When performing Shakespeare, a presentist interpretation might set the play in a new geographical location, have characters performed in a way that aligns them with certain recognizable groups or types, or use other elements to emphasize a resonant theme."
"The plays’ ethical tally is always double-entry, with each positive balanced by a negative in another column. In this reckoning, Shakespeare is, irreducibly, both for and against Brexit."
"Reading for present relevance."
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