Tag: Western Civilization Is Destroying Its Historical Heritage

Fernand Braudel, widely regarded as the greatest historian of the twentieth century.

5,627 words

Part 6 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 5 here, Part 7 here)

The “Grand Liberal Narrative” of the Twentieth Century

Despite a wide variety of historical schools, a centrist liberal historiography committed to the ideals of rationalism, meritocracy, and the global spread of human rights dominated the writing of history until about the 1980s — while subsequently integrating within its fold the more progressive schools of New Left, feminist, multicultural, and postmodernist historians via a “new liberalism” determined to ensure equal rights for everyone against the continuing racism, sexism, and ignorance of old liberals. (more…)

A medieval depiction of the Emperor of China.

5,586 words

Part 3 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 4 here)

The Stalled Development of Chinese and Islamic Historiography

Did the modern Chinese write better histories than ancient Europeans? Hegel said that “no other people has had a series of historical writers succeeding one another in such close continuity as the Chinese.” (more…)

Justus of Ghent, Saint Augustine, c. 1475

4,344 words

Part 2 of 7 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)

The Emerging of a Christian Historical Consciousness

For all we have said about Greek and Roman historiography (and there were other historians, such as Suetonius, Appian, and Casius Dios), contemporary scholars invariably agree that the ancients remained a “non-historical” people. Herbert Butterfield is convinced “the Greeks did not achieve historical mindedness, and never could have achieved it, because they had the wrong view of time and the time process.” The Greeks “only knew of a comparatively short history behind them — they thought that the historical past extended back for only a very few hundred years.” (more…)

Theodoros Pelecanos, Ouroboros (1478)

6,611 words

Part 1 of 7 (Part 2 here)

One of the most startling historical truths is that Europeans invented the writing of history as “a method of sorting out the true from the false,” as a conscious search for a rational explanation of the causes of events, while rendering the results of their investigations in sustained narratives of excellent prose. The other peoples of the world, including the Chinese who maintained for centuries a tradition of chronological writers, barely rose above annalistic forms of recording the deeds of rulers or the construction of genealogies devoid of reflections on historical causation. This would not have been judged a controversial view a few decades ago. (more…)