Social history

To this day, the battle and the histories associated with the Alamo continue to generate feelings of courage, endurance, heroism, and patriotism in those who learn about the battle. Via analysis of the following sources gathered, I will investigate the ways in which modern historians explain how myths, legends, and stories of the Alamo influence American memory and culture. Cultural historians have approached this topic by analyzing the portrayals of the Alamo in popular culture such as TV shows…

History is the study of the human past. It is defined as a series of discourses about the world. Based on careful analysis of surviving primary or secondary texts and artifacts (objects made by humans), the historian attempts to reconstruct the past events and processes which have created the current world. Voltaire, a formidable satirist and polemicist, rejected the proposition of a divine providence in history. His quote “history is the common lie agreed upon” is a product of the times in…

modern historians, distancing oneself from the source material and becoming “objective” in a subjective world has been a struggle for decades now. While many historians, try as they might, attempt to provide a well-rounded, even-handed account of history through their eyes albeit in the proper historical context, those such as Peter Novick believe many of their efforts to have been in vain. Historian Peter Novick tackles the question of objectivity in his book, That Noble Dream: the “Objectivity…

is not Always Bliss In “High School Students Demand Wars in Easier-to-Find Countries” the author uses satire to describe their discontent with high school students who simply do not want to put in the effort to study and learn about geography and social studies. Many students who are cited in this essay complain about wars being fought in foreign places they have never heard of, but then one student mistakes “Macedonia” for “Massachusetts” which does not help their argument (SatireWire.com). It…

Renfrew and bahn chapter one: The main focus and summary of this chapter is about the history of archaeology, as well as its present form. Archaeology has gone from discovering and finding archaeological material, to developing/applying methods to answer questions about our human past. Thomas Jefferson was the first to have a recorded excavation in 1784. By using methods such as stratigraphy and deductive reasoning, archaeologists of this time were able to touch on the deeper questions of our…

significant value in the study of design history. Unfortunately, at a time when incredible value is placed on novelty and individual creativity, the narratives of the past often fall on deaf ears, written off as mere nostalgia (Hunt 2014, 1). Focusing on landscape architecture, this essay will defend the presence of history in contemporary thought and promote an active and critical engagement with the antecedents of design. It will be argued that the study of design history provides valuable…

2. What programs and services does your agency provide and which of those does the County fund? Cortland County Historical Society serves as a repository for information related to the history of Cortland County its residents, industries, government and more. We host special events including our 18 lecture Lunch & Learn speaker series, an attic treasure sale, as well as bus trips of historical interest. Cortland County Historical Society also produces publications including: a quarterly…

hopefully for the better the social, political, and environmental actions we take today. By studying the past we learn how and why people lived as they did throughout the world and the changes and causes of such changes, that occurred within these cultures. We study the past to acquire a broader and richer understanding of our world today and our place in it. Archaeology is the study of the ancient and recent human past through material remains. Archaeology talks about human history and culture…

The historian/critic is trapped in his own ‘historicity’. No one can rise above his own social formations, his ideological upbringing in order to understand the past on its terms. What new historicists are concerned with is the recovery of the original ideology which gave birth to the text and which the text in turn helped to disseminate throughout a culture. New historicism is a collection of practices rather than a school or a method. To further buttress this, Stephen Greenblatt who is…

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…