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Title: From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods by Walter Prevenier, Martha C. Howell ISBN: 0-8014-8560-6 Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Summary: Always check out your source of information
Comment: History writing is usually considered to have begun with the Greek Herodotus in the 4th century BC with his efforts to distinguish between myth and verifiable stories and that has been the basic problem of writing history ever since. In his history of the Gallic Wars Julius Caesar celebrated the military power of the Romans, along with his own formidable talents as a military leader. Livy fed Roman chauvinism with a history that celebrated eight proud centuries of the Roman past. Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Plutarch and Suetonius each brought their own approach or treatment of characters. Augustine portrayed history as an enactment of God's plan. Others wrote accounts to convince readers of the justice of a cause while Guibert of Nogent painted Mohammed in the worst possible light, not caring if the tales were true but only if they helped his case. Matthias Flacius Illyricus's chief purpose was to demonstrate that the Roman Church's claim to be the direct heir of first-century Christianity had no historical basis. Medieval historiography was designed to serve Christianity and in the Middle Ages historians entered the service of lords, monarchs and the state where their primary task was to create glorious pasts, fabricate evidence or select information to give legitimacy to the elite to whom it was offered.
Leopold von Ranke is credited with the founding of the scientific method of history writing but even so he betrays an unclerical ideology and a commitment to the national state so historians must always consider the conditions under which a source was produced, the intentions that motivated it and the reliability of that source. They must also consider the historical context in which it was produced - the events that preceded it, and those that followed, for the significance of any event recorded depends as much on what comes after as it does on what comes before. Had the Boston Tea Party of 1773 not been followed by the American Revolution, it would have had considerably less significance than historians have since given it, and the very same newspaper report of the uprising, in the very same archive, would have had a very different status from the one it actually acquired. Thus, historians are never in a position - and should never imagine themselves being in a position - to read a source without attention to both the historical and the historiographical contexts that give it meaning.
Recording history today has become more complicated because we have such a wealth of information such as television recordings, audiotapes, and videos from the man in the street and not just the written word. This book was written as a guide on how to handle this overload of information and to provide ethical ground rules so that we have the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
But the deeper underlying significance of this book is something that all of us must reflect on because we receive viewpoints from different sides of a conflict or different political views and we must understand that any report may also have a hidden agenda or bias. We may not have received the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If we then go back in history, our beliefs may be founded on the "truths" handed down to us by the victorious faction and may not truly reflect the real truth. As the authors point out: "It is thus one of the primary responsibilities of the historian to distinguish carefully for readers between information that comes literally out of the source itself (in footnotes or by some other means) and that which is a personal interpretation of the material. For the literal content of a citation - what is transcribed from the source itself - historians have no ethical responsibility; for the meaning they impart to that material, of course, they are entirely responsible."
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Title: Historian's Handbook: A Key to the Study and Writing of History by Wood Gray ISBN: 0881336262 Publisher: Waveland Press Pub. Date: October, 1991 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: The Craft of Research (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by Wayne C. Booth, Joseph M. Williams, Gregory G. Colomb ISBN: 0226065685 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Writing History: A Guide for Students by William Kelleher Storey ISBN: 0195166094 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: July, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: A Short Guide to Writing About History (4th Edition) by Richard A. Marius, Melvin E. Page, Richard Marius ISBN: 0321093003 Publisher: Longman Pub. Date: 05 November, 2001 List Price(USD): $25.20 |
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Title: A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing) by Kate L. Turabian ISBN: 0226816273 Publisher: University of Chicago Press (Trd) Pub. Date: March, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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