History: A Very Short Introduction by John H. Arnold

L. P. Hartley: the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Douglas Adams: the past is truly a foreign country, they do things just like us. Somewhere between these two propositions is the elusive element that attracts us to the past, and prompts us to study history.

Being critical and suspicious are the two modern 'virtues' of historians.

History is to society what memory is to the individual.

Philology: criticize a document from its natural characterisitcs; tell us that language altered from historical period to historical period.

Historians constantly wavering back and forth between 'truth' and 'story-telling'.

Causation: Providence? Chance? or Great Man?

Gibbon marks the start of history as a vocation, Ranke establishes history as a profession.

History: A sense of closeness and an 'origin'

With 'bias', there would be no need for historians. So 'bias' is not something to find and eradicate, but rather something to hunt and embrace.

Arhives must burn down for history to happen. We must have sources, but we must have silences too.

History is, as Marx said, made by people in circumstances beyond their own choosing. But they affect those circumstances, in the lives they lead. 'Circumstances', 'history', and 'people' are not different things. They go on and on together, awaiting the historian who chooses to draw one pattern from the rest.

Unintended consequences: most of what happens is hte result of people trying to achieve certain ends, but never possessing the perspective to see what the effect will be.

Annales: shift from political events to quesitons of economy, society and culture - long term search for deep - rooted currents in the past.

Mentalite' is born from a sense that the past is very differnt from the present, thus inspiring sociology and anthropology.

Thucidides divides the history of the Peloponnesian War into 'winter' and 'summer', which is differnt fom Confucius's 'Spring' and 'Autumn'.

Against the grain: from 'what' people thought to 'how' they did their thinking.

Texts have lives that continue to change and alter after the death of the author, whether or not historians get involved.

To describe something 'as people in the past would have understood it' really means to describe events as particular historical people understood them, or wished them to be understood.

It has been suggested that despite changes over time, there are certain things which all human beings experience throughout history, which therefore link us together.

Two kinds of knowledge: a truth that is grounded in meaning and perception, and a truth that is based on inert fact and prosaic 'reality'.

We can lay clain to the past for part of our identity, but to become imprisoned by the past is to lose something of our humanity, our capacity for making different choices and choosing different ways of seeing ourselves.

It is also sometimes thought that history can show us some deep, fundamental insights into the human condition; that sifting through the past we may discover some intrinsic thred to our lives.

Doing history: 1, Enjoyment in studying the past; 2, Making us more aware of our own lives and contexts. To study history is to study ourselves, not because of an elusive 'human nature' to be refracted from centuries gone by, but because history throws us into stark relief. Visiting the past is something like visiting a foreign contry: they do some things the same and some things differntly, but above all esle they make us more aware of what we call 'home'; 3, the possibility of doing things differently. History provides us with the tools to dissent.

Reader, this is history; history, this is reader.

But this is true too: stories can save us.