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History

History is the study of the human past as it is described in the written documents left by human
beings. The past, with all its decisions completed, its participants dead and its history told, is
what the general public perceives as the immutable bedrock on which we historians and
archaeologists stand. But as purveyors of the past, we recognize that the bedrock is really
quicksand, that bits of the story are yet untold, and that what has been told comes tainted by the
conditions of what we are today. That's my opinion, of course—here are a collection of others.

History Definitions

John Jacob Anderson (1821–1906)


"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."—1876. A Manual of General History.

W.C. Sellar (1890–1951) and R.J. Yeatman (1897–1968)


"History is not what you thought. It is what you remember. All other history defeats itself."—
1930. Preface, 1066 and All That.

James Joyce (1882–1941)


"History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."—.Ulysses. 1922(1988)
Published by Oxford University Press. P. 34

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975)


"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."—April 17, 1955. NBC television broadcast.

Herodotus
Sometime around the year 425 B.C., the writer and geographer Herodotus published his
magnum opus: a long account of the Greco-Persian Wars that he called The Histories.
(The Greek word “historie” means “inquiry.”) Before Herodotus, no writer had ever made
such a systematic, thorough study of the past or tried to explain the cause-and-effect of
its events. After Herodotus, historical analysis became an indispensable part of
intellectual and political life. Scholars have been following in Herodotus’ footsteps for
2,500 years.

The Early Life of Herodotus

Herodotus was born in about 485 B.C. in the Greek city of Halicarnassus, a lively
commercial center on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor. He came from a wealthy
and cosmopolitan Greek-Carian merchant family. (The Carians, of Minoan descent, had
arrived in that part of Asia Minor before the Greeks had.) In the middle of the 6th century
B.C., Halicarnassus became a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire and was
ruled by the tyrant Lygdamis. Herodotus’ family opposed Lygdamis’ rule and was sent
into exile on the island of Samos. When he was a young man, Herodotus returned briefly
to Halicarnassus to take part in an abortive anti-Persian rebellion. After that, however,
the writer never returned to his home city again.

Origins of the Histories

Instead of settling in one place, Herodotus spent his life traveling from one Persian
territory to another. He crossed the Mediterranean to Egypt and traveled
through Palestine to Syria and Babylon. He headed to Macedonia and visited all the
islands of the Greek Archipelago: Rhodes, Cyprus, Delos, Paros, Thasos, Samothrace,
Crete, Samos, Cythera and Aegina. He sailed through the Hellespont to the Black Sea
and kept going until he hit the Danube River. While he traveled, Herodotus collected
what he called “autopsies,” or “personal inquiries”: He listened to myths and legends,
recorded oral histories and made notes of the places and things that he saw. When
Herodotus was not traveling, he returned to Athens; there, he became something of a
celebrity. He gave readings in public places and collected fees from officials for his
appearances. In 445 B.C., the people of Athens voted to give him a prize of 10 talents –
almost $200,000 in today’s money–to honor him for his contributions to the city’s
intellectual life. The Histories

Herodotus spent his entire life working on just one project: an account of the origins and
execution of the Greco-Persian Wars (499–479 B.C.) that he called The Histories. (It is
from Herodotus’ work that we get the modern meaning of the word “history.”) In part, T he
Histories was a straightforward account of the wars. “Here is the account,” the work
begins, “of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus in order that the deeds of men not
be erased by time, and that the great and miraculous works–both of the Greeks and the
barbarians–not go unrecorded.” It was also an attempt to explain the conflict –“to show
what caused them to fight one another,” Herodotus said–by explaining the Persians’
imperial worldview. The Histories also incorporated observations and stories, b oth
factual and fictional, from Herodotus’ travels.

Earlier writers had produced what Herodotus called “logographies”: These were what we
might call travelogues, disconnected tales about places and people that did not cohere
into a narrative whole. By contrast, Herodotus used all of his “autopsies” to build a
complete story that explained the why and the how of the Persian Wars.

After Herodotus died, editors divided his Histories into nine books. (Each was named
after one of the Muses.) The first five books look into the past to try to explain the rise
and fall of the Persian Empire. They describe the geography of each state the Persians
conquered and tell about their people and customs. The next four books tell the story of
the war itself, from the invasions of Greece by Persian emperors Darius and Xerxes to
the Greek triumphs at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale in 480 and 479 B.C.Herodotus’
encyclopedic method did not leave much room for analysis. He treats every piece of his
narrative, from the main themes to the digressions and from the facts to the fictions, with
equal importance. He shows how Persian hubris led to the downfall of a great empire,
but he also places a great deal of stock in gossipy tales of personal shortcomings and
moral lessons.

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