History and time are considered to be cultural formations since a History cannot be detached from the culture in which it is produced and received. It is through culture that a historical sense is achieved and in fact, each culture experiences History in a different way leading us to the current perception of History as not being one, but many histories depending on the cultural groups involved. Historians have fought throughout the centuries on whether such thing as “objective History” can exist but in the end, even materialist historians will admit that the reality of History is so complicated and contradictory that no single version could possibly represent the truth; consequently different interpretations are inevitable.
This is where Peter Greenaway comes in with his trilogy The Tulse Luper Suitcases in which the eponymous suitcases (of which there are 92) contain the collected memories of Tulse Luper, a manic collector of forgotten records and other evidence of the twentieth century. Devised as a trilogy, Peter Greenaway’s multimedia project concentrates on a period between 1928, the year in which the element uranium was discovered in Colorado, and 1989, the year when the Berlin wall came down and the Cold War came to an end. The two central events of the past one hundred years – the confrontation between East and West and the threat of atomic warfare – have left their mark on writer and realizer of projects Tulse Luper, who spends most of his time detained in some form of prison or another. Luper’s role is hard to define: his many encounters, the injuries he has sustained and fragments of sentences that surface from his memory, all combine to produce a complex weave or structure that includes both various periods in time a...
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...aware of in his film, through the opposition between the reality of History on the one hand and the fiction of the Luper project on the other, the truth and stability of what really happened and the playful construction presented by Greenaway, the unincarnated omniscience of reality and the awkward contextualization provided by the Luper point-of-view. According to Greenaway, History does not exist in an absolute, unmediated form, but will always be filtered through the perceptions, interpretations and values of subjects as experiencers, filing instances, historians and readers. The event "as it was" thus can never be recovered in an absolute form and that is why “there is no such thing as History, [but] only historians” whose collective work only, can serve as a somewhat effective record of History.
It is approximated that the Australopithecus, a hominid, lived approximately four to one million years ago. From that point in time, the world history of humans has been an exhaustive, arduous task to document. With that in mind, world historians attempt to capture the events most important to the development of contemporary humanity. In fact, Tamim Ansary states that “World history, after all, is not a chronological list of every damn thing that ever happened; it’s a chain of only the most consequential events, selected to reveal the arc of the story-it’s the arc that counts.” Some have taken a European approach to the restrictions, but in response to such thought, Tamim Ansary’s Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes presents a sequential restating of history through an Islamic viewpoint. From the beginning of Islam with Muhammad to recent happenings, like 9/11, Ansary presents Islamic history in a larger context to commendably combine said history with world history. Furthermore, Ansary claims that Islamic history has often been seen as a side to Western history, as Western history has “prevailed and churned” Islamic history, although it has it is crucially significant in the larger context of world history. In the larger sense, Ansary proves his argument that Islamic history has developed independently and is important, but he does not project the importance of the Islamic history over European history.
The impact of discovering something for the first time can often broaden our understanding and lead to new innovations. In Simon Nasht’s documentary; Frank Hurley: The Man Who Made History, Hurley spent most of his life trying to capture the beauty of nature as well as capture photos of war to create emotion and illustrate the hardships that was experienced in WWI and WWII. Representations of discovery can vary one’s understanding of the physical aspects encountered in the process of discovering and this has been portrayed through the montage in the early scenes of the documentary. The combination of archival footage with non-diegetic
When listening to the song both reflectively and analytically did put a dapper on the initial meaning behind listening to the song, however, the song’s influence and history with my Child Hood prevented this assignment from completely taking my enjoyment and engagement of the song. Through this assignment I have found a new respect for the song and its simplicity and overall appeal with the vocaloid culture that I am involved in both as a listener and an artist. Through this assignment I have also been given a deeper insight into Deco*27 as an artist and how he effectively conveys his music as an art through both the vocaloid system and, in this case, through his own talents as a singer.
Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History by historian David Christian explores a “modern creation myth” (2). Christian takes his readers from the big bang to modern day in a technical and historical narrative. He believes that big history is a new, yet important, area of history ignored by historians. Christian tells us big history is “a coherent story about the past on many different scales, beginning, literally, with the origins of the universe and ending in the present day” (2). The strength in Christian’s argument is in that he carefully takes his readers through each stage in history, much like a textbook, using charts, graphs, pictures, and the language for each area, like astronomy or biology. However, Christian’s goal is not complete. Christian, at multiple points, tells his readers there are many more details and theories that surround any one of his given subjects. Although his book is a great overall coverage for a topic as large as big history, his readers may wonder if such the idea of big history is a good one.
Time persistently progresses forward unimpeded. With each elapsing second the present moment changes into the past and creates history. History is filled with a plethora of events, people, and concepts that have left an enduring influence. Society has developed many components which became foundational to Western culture from the Mesopotamian civilizations to the emergence of the Romans. The contributions of a variety of cultures shaped the course of Western history.
The purpose of this essay is that history is a result of point of view.
John Hersey’s book Hiroshima (first published in 1946 with only four chapters, later re-published to include a fifth chapter) documents the stories of six different survivors from the August 6, 1945 American atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima, a city with a population of 250,000 located in Japan. This was the first atomic bomb attack in history. After the attack most of the city was destroyed and thousands of the inhabitants lost their lives. Those who were injured or survived suffered the devastating effects of terrible burns, among other damages to their bodies, and radiation, as well as suffering the loss of their loved ones and their properties. This book follows the emotional lives of the six survivors following the bomb attack.
John Lewis Gaddis, in his book, The Landscape of History, generates a strong argument for the historical method by bringing together the multiple standpoints in viewing history and the sciences. The issue of objective truth in history is addressed throughout Gaddis’s work. In general, historians learn to select the various events that they believe to be valid. Historians must face the fact that there is an “accurate” interpretation of the past ceases to exist because interpretation itself is based on the experience of the historian, in which people cannot observe directly (Gaddis 10). Historians can only view the past in a limited perspective, which generates subjectivity and bias, and claiming a piece of history to be “objective” is simplistic. Seeing the world in a multidimensiona...
In a comprehensive summary and analyzation of the history of mankind’s record of affairs, Mark T. Gilderhus tackles the many aspects of the overall biography of human existence. Through scrutiny of the goals of past and present historians, a brief explanation of the origins of historiography, a thorough exploration of the philosophies behind history, and a review of the modern approach to past events, Gilderhus sums up the entirety of historical thought in one hundred and twenty-five pages. His superior knowledge is exemplified through his work which effectively conveys the full extent of historiography.
The study of history would be incomplete without the use of theoretical approaches, which historians use to analyze documents and present their evidence. How a historian analyzes a document can shift subtly or drastically depending on the theoretical lens. Social history and cultural history are two separate approaches that influenced a wide variety of other sub-theory categories and many historians today. Though the two may seem similar, cultural history was developed as a response to the limitations of social history, such as the strictness in categories and ignoring the state. In general, social history focuses on ordinary groups and how categories shaped the experience of individuals; cultural history emphasizes beliefs and assumptions,
It’s truly fascinating how there are so many different approaches to history, how so many different types of minds and schools of thought can come together to study the events of the world’s past. There are so many ways to approach what happened in our past, and the groups of historians previously mentioned are only a fraction of the actual number of different ways of researching and thinking that exists as it pertains to the study of history. History is in some ways, always a mystery, and all historians, regardless of schooling, training or biases, seek to accomplish one goal: to understand what occurred before us and why, and to use that knowledge to learn how the world was shaped into the world we live in today.
Iggers opens the book by talking about a revolutionary way that the Western world was taught about history. Throughout the book he ascertains the changes that take place throughout historiography and the nature of history itself. He also examines prior historical notions and the way that historiography was altered after World War II. History morphed from previous antiquarian teachings into a deeper, more evaluated approach. Historians gained a more intimate relationship with postmodern ideas and began looking at history in an objective manner using contemporary discipline. Iggers studies the way postmodernism was changed by new social sciences which allowed more detail into cultural influences and the problems surrounding globalization theories. He also explains the birth of microhistory which replaced macrohistory.
The Western philosophy of history has as its primary concept the concept of development, and many scholars have thus distinguished between the Western linear view of history and the non-Western cyclical one. What appears to be the case is that the dominant philosophy of history – otherwise more chillingly referred to as the ‘master-narrative’ – conceives of the history of the world as beginning with Judaism and progressing through classical antiquity and Christianity to the Enlightenment and modern liberalism.[6] What such a master-narrative leaves out, of course, is the period of the European Middle Ages (from the fifth to the fifteenth-century A.D.), a historical fact that renders more plausible – because more representative – a cyclical view of history as alternating between the Dark and the Golden Ages. Master-narratives leave no room for competing narratives, a case in point being Trevor-Roper’s statement that black Africa had no history prior to contact with the West. Trevor-Roper’s statement draws on a Hegelian relation between the concept of history and the Western concept of development. It was this Hegelian relation that allowed Hegel to essentially declare the end of history in 1806, when the Battle of Jena led to Napoleon defeating the Prussian monarchy and what Hegel presumed to be the victory of liberal democracy.[7] By the same Hegelian logic, Fukuyama was able to out-Hegel Hegel and
History is a story told over time. It is a way of recreating the past so it can be studied in the present and re-interpreted for future generations. Since humans are the sole beneficiaries of history, it is important for us to know what the purpose of history is and how historians include their own perspective concerning historical events. The purpose and perspective of history is vital in order for individuals to realise how it would be almost impossible for us to live out our lives effectively if we had no knowledge of the past. Also, in order to gain a sound knowledge of the past, we have to understand the political, social and cultural aspects of the times we are studying.
History and culture have come together for long time; they can not separate any more, the present have been had the modern culture, learning of relativity between culture and history