Recent comments in /f/history

trenzterra t1_iyu32dd wrote

Reply to What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

I was also wondering what people study in history now compared to, say, 15 or 20 years ago. When I was studying history in school in 2007, the syllabus went up to the end of the Cold War. I think the previous syllabus (introduced in 2002) also touched on the Cold War, which was amazingly current given that 1991 was just a decade or so ago.

Yet, when I look up the current syallabus today, the coverage is still up until the end of the Cold War (30 years ago). Sure, the topics covered have changed (now they learn about Dutch colonialism and French Indochina instead of the Russian and Chinese revolutions) but it seems that no one is willing to touch events in the 21st century just yet.

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Grey_spacegoo t1_iyu0sef wrote

Reply to What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

History isn't a specific class. It is part of the education of the elites or those who want to join the elites. Researching the education system of each civilization would give more insight. There are lots of primary sources on the Roman, Greek, and Chinese education system from the ancient world.

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sigmonater t1_iytxz46 wrote

Reply to What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

I think everyone else hit the nail on the head as far as the wealthy being educated. History as an educational subject in school is relatively modern. I’ve seen my grandparent’s history textbooks from the 30s and 40s since they kept them. They focused primarily in European and American history, but they aren’t nearly as detailed as the stuff I learned in my APUSH and AP Euro classes 10-12 years ago. Modern communication has helped piece together primary and secondary sources to tell a more complete narrative of what has happened. I have a friend with a PhD in archaeology, and she says what we know about history is constantly changing with the more we uncover. She is a mummy doctor, so you gotta believe her after all.

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fussnik t1_iytstt5 wrote

Reply to comment by fussnik in Simple/Short/Silly History Questions Saturday! by AutoModerator

Zelensky shows me that charismatic leaders can, indeed, spring forth to defend a nation.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/king-arthur-real-person-180980466/

At a time when most Britons were struggling to find cooking utensils,
Tintagel’s inhabitants were using crucibles to forge metal, inscribing
slabs with Celtic writing, and controlling agricultural production
across substantial territory. The settlement would have been well
defended against the marauding bands that plagued the mainland: Geoffrey
of Monmouth noted that just a handful of warriors positioned at the
narrow neck could have staved off an army. It is not difficult to
envision a charismatic leader rising here to defend northern Cornwall
from Saxon invaders, says Scutt, or to imagine that his feats would
enter sixth-century folklore and be passed down by storytellers to
Geoffrey and other chroniclers. “We know this was a center of power,” he
says. “But whose power was it? It’s always going to remain a mystery.”

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VacatedDosVile t1_iytruy6 wrote

Reply to comment by Constant_Count_9497 in What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

The /r/askphilosophy sub is pretty great, lot of very knowledgeable users there, similar to the /r/askhistory sub

I wouldn't recommend starting with Kant, but if you're interested in early modern philosophy to Enlightenment stuff (roughly 1400s-1700's) I'd start with Descartes and work your way from there, he sort of lays the groundwork and context for a lot of thinkers past him. You probably won't agree with him, and almost everyone who responds to him has major criticisms, but it's a pretty good starting point because it's a clean break and highly influential at the time with many philosophers of the era directly responding to his ideas.

Rough sort of cartoon timeline is you have Descartes who advocates philosophy called rationalism, which is advocated and modified by certain people and critiqued by empiricists. Kant comes along and attempts to synthesis both of these schools into one and largely succeeds in doing so, Hegel follows up and radically complicates things but borderline creates a functioning "system of all systems," that is still pretty debated and relevant today. Things are a bit muddier than this, but it's helpful to have a broad idea I find when navigating this stuff.

This is also a highly useful website as well: https://plato.stanford.edu/

It can help with reading and provides pretty broad overviews and introductions to a lot of different ideas and works. Last bit of advice is people on youtube (i.e. "The School of Life" and other such vids), especially highly rated channels tend to be pretty wrong about a lot of philosophy lol, so tread carefully there, although there is absolutely great stuff here and there, it can just be hard to tell the difference early on.

Best of luck!

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VacatedDosVile t1_iytqnop wrote

Reply to comment by Constant_Count_9497 in What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

Nice, it's some of the most rewarding reading you'll ever do, and really helps to complement historical reading too as a lot of these people didn't make the rigid distinctions between fields like philosophy/physics/science we make today. Like reading about the enlightenment after reading people like Kant and Locke gives you an entirely other perspective on the entire era. German Idealism and structuralism ended up being my jam, Kant and Hegel are just once in a generation geniuses, but it's great because the field itself just spills out in so many different directions.

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IAmA-StrageLoop t1_iytos82 wrote

Reply to What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

[meta, I'm am not a historian] That depends on the history you're talking about right? Every class had [a book] books, or a single speaker if we're talking about the [data] days before books.

Edit: a reminder to expand... Since I want to explore this question more fully and not just answer with a question (and an answer?)... But I don't know if anybody's listening.

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La_danse_banana_slug t1_iytoivd wrote

Reply to What was history class like before the modern era? by SunsetShoreline

As many have already said, only the privileged classes would go out of their way to learn historic things (perhaps monks and nuns might have access to written histories, or someone wealthy enough to be literate might read something like Herodotus). But most people told histories through myths, legends, rhymes, and ghost stories, often for entertainment.

Aboriginal people in Australia pass(ed) history down as oral tradition, and my shallow understanding is that their histories are incredibly detailed and lengthy, and the teaching is extremely rigorous and rigid, so they are passed on exactly as before; they apparently map well to natural history going back an astonishing amount of time.

A farmer in what is now rural England may perhaps have passed on legends about local history, or may have learned about it in song. Medieveal Europeans often memorialized notable local royalty through song and legend, such as "Good King Wenceslas" or the story of Lady Godiva. Traveling entertainers or troupes might tell fun stories, alongside actual historic recountings, in verse. That's partly why so many poets in centuries past wrote their epic stories in rhyme: there was a tradition of people, likely illiterate, memorizing and reciting the entire thing for audiences. The practice of history through song was something people took up again during the labor movements of the early 20th Century in the US; as the stories and histories were suppressed officially, people wrote folk songs about coal town battles, union leaders, awful bosses, and what life was like for workers. And, of course, a lot of history that people learned was religious.

In Tibet people have been passing histories of monks and monasteries down for a long time but I'm not sure how far it goes back. Because of the tradition of locating the reincarnation of a specific monk or teacher in every generation, naturally the history of that person through the centuries would be relevant. So, the stories of monks and monasteries was one possible subject of history.

A look through Shakespeare's oeuvre shows that in the late 1500s people in London were watching plays about famous ancient Romans and famous English Kings. In the late 1300s Chaucer was also writing Classical histories (mixed with mythology) and histories of notable nobles and church officials (not always complimentary) in verse. His audience would have been noble men and women, as well as the rising upper middle class people and merchants.

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