Focusing on the criticisms of the Annales School, this work delves into the perspectives of those who have challenged this influential historiographical movement. Through extensive analysis of archival and published sources, it provides a fresh insight into the debates surrounding this pivotal chapter in modern intellectual history, highlighting the significance of dissenting voices in shaping historical discourse.
Turner's much-anthologized 1893 essay argues that the vast western frontier shaped the modern American character-and the course of US history. Interacting with both the wilderness and Native Americans, settlers on the frontier developed institutions and character traits quite distinct from Europe.
The bizarre story of Martin Guerre-a peasant who disappears from a small village in sixteenth-century France and whose place is taken by an imposter- has captivated historians for centuries.
A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood, an important example of the critical thinking skill of interpretation in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large.
A critical analysis of Centuries of Childhood , in which the French historian Philippe Aries offers a fundamentally fresh interpretation of what childhood is and what the institution means for society at large. Aries's core idea is that ‘childhood,’ as we understand it today – a special time that requires special efforts and resources – is an invention of the 19th century, and that before that date children were in effect thought of as small adults. This led him to a re-evaluation of sources that suggested a second, crucial, the idea that these competing visions of childhood were the products of two very different conceptions of human society. An earlier, essentially communal, social ideal, Aries wrote, had been supplanted by a society far more family-centric and hence inward-facing. In his view, moreover, this increased focus on childhood posed a direct challenge to a well-entrenched social order. ‘One is tempted to conclude,’ he wrote, ‘that sociability and the concept of the family were incompatible, and could develop only at each other's expense.’ This revolutionary thesis, which has inspired and infuriated other historians in roughly equal measure, was made possible by Aries's determination to understand the meaning of the evidence available to him and highlight problems of definition that others had simply glossed over, making Centuries of Childhood an important example of the critical thinking skill of interpretation.
What is the past and what can we really know about it? Relying on his groundbreaking technique championing 'problem-based history, ' Febvre explores whether 16th-century French writer François Rabelais was he really one of France's first atheists. Febvre's thorough research on Rabelais and the times he lived in challenges this accepted view.