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University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential A
by pron 6y ago
University-level history is much more like this, at least these days, than "important people doing important things," perhaps partly thanks to the influential Annales school [1], although that probably varies by country. Lots of economic and social structures, plus lots of documents, mostly court documents, that tell the lives of ordinary people. I took a class just on the everyday "things" of people in early-modern Europe -- what they ate and how, what they wore etc.
What ultimately killed it for me was that after a few short years, when you get to the research level, the work becomes so hyper-focused, like shipbuilding in 17th century Spain or weddings in late-medieval Germany, that you don't have the chance to look at the bigger picture until you're an established professor and I didn't have the patience for it.
But I was happy to put the skills I had learned into a personal project a few years ago, and composed an anthology of primary sources on the history of logic, algebra and computation, that I published -- in a rather crudely edited form -- as a series of blog posts: https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra https://pron.github.io/computation-logic-algebra (although intellectual history is often about "important people").
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annales_school
- jmalicki 6y agoThis sentence was quite the meta-contradiction: "Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866-1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988)." - in other words, the Annales school was made up of important people doing important things :)
- pron 6y agoI guess Annales is not a suitable genre for an encyclopaedia :) But it also doesn't focus on intellectual history, which it itself is part of.
- pasabagi 6y agoI think there's a difference: the sentence is basically a reading list so you can get familiar with the school. You can't really read Napoleon or Caesar, because the first didn't write much, and the second only wrote PR fluff pieces. Thinkers are influential to schools of thought in a way more concrete way than individuals are to the course of history. It's easy to imagine a modern world without Napoleon (the French army was already kicking ass before he turned up, even if he turned it up to 11). It's not easy to imagine modern philosophy turning out how it has without Kant.
- nigerian1981 6y agoThis looks fantastic. I’ve always wanted to understand the history of mathematics better