Hot answers tagged historiography
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The Ancient Spartan society was based around the laws of Lycurgus, the rhetrae1, that were passed down through oral tradition. A possible explanation of why the laws were not written, and why Spartans didn't keep records in general, comes from Plutarch's The Life of Lycurgus:
[Plut. Lyc. 13.1] None of his laws were put into writing by Lycurgus, indeed, ...
4
My understanding is that both schools are "broad" interpretive frameworks. The obvious deficiencies of "intentionalism" are clear—we can clearly demonstrate the plurality of emergent genocidal conducts, and these cross German and NSDAP racial categories. The POW origins of systematic camp based killing should be sufficient indication.
Goldhagen posits ...
3
Edward Gibbon, in "the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," lists the following reasons (among others):
The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:
Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;
Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;
Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and
original;
Widening disparity ...
3
As the end of the war was approaching, we see more and more effort on the part of at least the people in the field towards eliminating evidence of their actions. This led to prisoners (both Jews, other concentration camp inmates, and prisoners of war) being transported (often on foot for lack of trains and trucks, as well as to kill them through exhaustion) ...
2
The question is wrong in a number of major respects.
Prior to the Rankean transformation of historiography, "history" as we know it was not written at all. Prior to Ranke, and his contemporaries, people wrote largely fanciful reports of the past, drawn from documentary records and beliefs (such as the "Whig" interpretation of history) that lay outside of ...
1
According to your link, Nicholas Taafe was not promoted to Major General until 1739, a year after the battle of Belgrade.
Basically, he was not a senior enough officer in 1738 to have won the battle by himself. What MAY have happened was that he displayed exceptional bravery/skill that won him the 1739 promotion despite the Austrians' having lost the ...
1
According to WP, the book concentrated almost wholly on the Peloponnesian War:
The first book of the History, after a brief review of early Greek history and some programmatic historiographical commentary, seeks to explain why the Peloponnesian War broke out when it did and what its causes were. Except for a few short excursuses (notably 6.54-58 on the ...
1
Jared Diamond, a cross-discipline scholar who's work more or less accurately reflects modern thinking in History, Sociology and human evolution and biology, makes a detailed review of their work here. He's pretty enthusiastic about it overall, but he does note some problems. Here's the summary:
My overall assessment of the authors’ argument is that ...
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