1354212605 2012 History Extension Notes

History of Humanities, 2019

2011

Jewish Quarterly Review, 2004

1987

This article describes the life and collection of the famous historian Leopold von Ranke, whose collection is now housed in the Syracuse University Special Collections. Von Ranke was instrumental in developing what he saw as the most objective form of history possible, adhering to primary sources and straying from moral judgments. The thousands of documents that make up the Ranke Library are an invaluable source for the study of history.

From 1827 to 1831 the German historian Leopold von Ranke travelled through Germany, Austria, and Italy, hunting for documents and archives. During this journey Ranke developed a new model for historical research that transformed the archive into the most important site for the production of historical knowledge. Within the archive, Ranke claimed, the trained historian could forget his personal predispositions and political loyalties, and write objective history. This essay critically examines Ranke's model for historical research through a study of the obstacles, frustrations, and joys that he encountered on his journey. It shows how Ranke's archival experiences inspired him to re-evaluate his own identity as a historian and as a human being, and investigates some of the affiliations between his model for historical research and the political realities of Prince Metternich's European order. Finally, the essay compares Ranke's historical discipline to other nineteenth-century disciplines, such as anthropology and archaeology.

The 19 th century is being regarded as the golden age of facts. It's also the century that gave birth to history as an academic field of study. These significant feats were made possible through the works of German historians, notably Leopold von Ranke. Ranke made popular some thesis and theories in history which helped shape it as an academic field of study. His achievements also carved out a respectable profession out of history. The aim of this paper is to discuss these methods and teachings of Ranke and how they transformed the study of modern history. The paper adopts the thematic historical method of research with effective use of secondary and tertiary source of data collection.

Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 1993

I DIFFERENTIATE between historiogruphy, the written product of historians (Historie in German); and history, the collective past of humanity and the subject matter of historiography (Geschichte in German). This is an essay about a theory of historiography. The minimum task of historiographic literature is to produce true statements about history.' Naive empiricist historians prided themselves on being the mouthpieces of the historical past, writing 'just what happened'. The historical past was supposed to be the author of historiography, while the historian presumed to be the living hand of the dead past. The reliability of historiographic accounts was supposed to be the product of the reliability of the evidence. Modern, called by its practitioners 'scientific', historiography was founded by Ranke who went beyond the previous critical reading of narrative accounts, written by contemporaries of the studied period, into reading original non-narrative documents in European archives. Ranke's assumption was that the best historical evidence comes from primary sources, not distorted by being put into sometimes misleading narrative form. Contemporary Histoire des Mentalit&, as has been developed mainly in the Annales school, attempts, in a sense, to be more Rankeian than Rankeian classical historiography by studying those aspects of the past that were repressed and thus maintained their pristine undistorted truth: histories of madness, untruth, taboo, automatisms of behavior, thoughts and actions regarding life and death, beliefs and rituals.* Nagele points to the similarity between the historian and the psychoanalyst in their relationship to the evidence: both share a free 'hovering' attention to the evidence, a total ideological suppression, at the price of eliminating a *My research has been helped by a grant from the Research Support Scheme of the Prague Central European University.'