American historians

Lumumba: Death of a Prophet explores a moderately obscure historical figure and his relation to cultural history. As the film progresses, it discusses the dominance of the elite or majority over representation, which allows the creation of an “authorized” historical perspective, leaving no room for discussion of other probable conclusions pertaining to historic events. In contrast, Lumumba: Death of a Prophet displays the uncertainty of distinctiveness that comes in relation to the accepted…

Modern historical analysis is bases its existence off of one crucial element; evidence. The First and Second World Wars provide historians with in depth hard evidence from still-existing battlefields as well as thousands of written accounts of the events of a day’s fighting. The further back in history one goes, however, the more scant this history becomes. Amongst the most difficult time periods to analyze can be found in the Classical era; with limited surviving written resources as well as…

Many things happened during the Progressive Era, and of course everyone is going to have their point of view on them. Zinn went really into detail about every single topic that he talked about, Foner on the other hand sort of skimmed through the topics but still covered them. Zinn loved to talk about the radicals during this time period as where I feel that Foner seemed to talk more from an outsiders view as where Zinn sort of tried to get us to see where the socialist and radicals were coming…

“At the stroke of midnight in Washington, a drooling red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and a head of a giant hyena crawls out of its bedroom window in the South Wing of the White House and leaps fifty feet down to the lawn…then races off into the darkness...towards the Watergate, snarling with lust, loping through the alleys behind Pennsylvania Avenue, and trying desperately to remember which one of those fore hundred identical balconies is the one outside of Martha Mitchell's apartment… But…

shows that in the 19th century, historians of the west, for the most part, had a positivist view. What this means is that they viewed historical facts as information that was not aligned with any person’s opinion. Carr noted that this view is faulty because historians choose which facts of the past are deemed historical fact if they’re important enough. For example, Carr states that millions of people crossed the Rubicon, a river in Northeast Italy, but historians picked the moment Julius Caesar…

knowledge to generations of students helps the people to understand the moral problems of what had been done in the past, and if one was to change this system, the mistakes of the past would be repeated. A prime example is the mistreatment of the Native Americans. When observed from a modern viewpoint, the oppression of the Indians by the colonizers can be seen as horrendous and a tragedy. However, as can be inferred by the accounts of Christopher Columbus, the colonizer thought nothing of their…

of the book, Grafton takes the reader backward in time to explore the various changes in history that influenced the development of the footnote. Grafton chose this unique chronology in order to help him reveal to the reader “where, when, and why historians adopted [the footnote’s] distinctive form of narrative architecture.” In choosing a non-linear chronology, Grafton is not constrained by the need to show the evolution of the footnote from a single, “primitive” form to the modern form used…

Interpretation of the past is an immense task left mostly to historians, who themselves have differing views and methods among each other. In From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier provide a history of the methodical and theoretical changes that historians have embraced and rejected. Many of these transformations were inspired by other disciplines as well as a reflection of social and political climates. Howell and Prevenier explain the…

While Foucault identifies history with the past and the documents containing such information, Taylor (n.d) identifies history as a field correlated to the trauma that forms part of human existence. According to Taylor (n.d) history is part of human existence and it should be referenced according to the events that took part in the past years. This means that it should never be separated in terms of durations of discontinuities, but it should rather form part of the existence. Unlike Foucault…

moment as if I was part of history in itself. I knew from a young age that I wanted to become an Historian when I…