Essay #1: Should historians judge the past according to the morality of the present? Never judging a book by its cover is always a good rule to have, however, how harshly should we judge the actual book? In today’s world, we have certain moral judgments that have changed over time. The morals that we have today are drastically different from the morals of someone who lived in the 20th or 19th century. The morals we have can be directly applied to history that is written or that is created by historians. It is human nature to do so, kind of similar to a gag reflex, historians can’t help it. John Lewis Gaddis believes that “You can’t escape thinking about history in moral terms.” Both John Lewis Gaddis and Herbert G. Gutman use their moral judgements …show more content…
Robert Darnton, a historian who wrote the book The Great Cat Massacre, looks at a particularly strange event in eighteenth-century France. The story of the Great Cat Massacre is about one strange and abnormal day at a printing shop where multiple workers killed many cats during the night. The workers were fed up with the fact that the cats of the bourgeois and his wife were being treated better than the workers. So they came up with a plan where they would “... howling and meowing so horribly that the bourgeois and his wife did not sleep a wink.” For several nights they did this until the master told the workers to deal with the noise, so the workers went out and killed several cats that night. The workers had fun with this task as well, understanding that the wife of the bourgeois was having an affair with the priest, the workers reenacted the scenes of an encounter with the wife and priest. This laughter and joyful time with the workers lasted for many nights as they killed multiple cats, including the one the wife found most precious. When looking at this story from a small historical perspective, similar to the Martin Guerre story, we can learn about society and information about this historical period from the background information. Darnton describes the premise of his book as seeing “how they thought, how they constructed the world. Instead of following the high …show more content…
When historians can zoom in on a historical event, usually looking at one specific part of an event, a deeper understanding and different perspectives can be born from it. We can learn about the people behind these historical events and learn more about the ordinary rather than the abnormal. From Martin Guerre's book, we can learn how medieval families and peasants lived from day to day. Darntons book on the Great Cat Massacre can teach us about the cultural and social structure of eighteenth-century France. By highlighting the lesser-known facts, we can get a better understanding of how the ordinary people of history or the abnormal people of history went about daily life. Also, big history can be overgeneralized; through small history, we can find smaller details that would be skipped over through the big history method. Instead of looking at the “line of best fit”, micro historians focus on the events that are furthest from this line and try to understand what makes them so different from the rest of the historical
Audrey Chapman HIST 297 March 14, 2017 The Great Cat Massacre Debate History is a discipline based on textual accounts of the past however it became necessary to look closer. A group of French historians watched as countless historians drew the same conclusions from the same experiences time after time, divorcing themselves from the “new social scientist adventuring among the economies and societies of the present.” The Annales school is interested in a science of humanity, human activities. “The
The Great Cat Massacre written by Robert Darnton in 1984 makes a point of the history of ordinary people’s mentalities as the concept and argues that the mentalities strongly influenced people’s behaviour and thinking in eighteenth century France, so this book can be classified into l’histoire des méntalites. For example, in “The Great Cat Massacre”, the title essay, Darnton picks up a French printer, Nicolas Contat’s memoirs as sources, deals with the event in the memoirs that some printers executed
The Great Cat Massacre with out a doubt has one of the most unusual titles ever created especially for a book about history. Now this unusual title perhaps fits this book better than any other straight - forward title Mr. Darnton could have conjured. You see the text contained in the book isn’t just your standardized, boring, and redundant view of history. Most historical text looks at history from a political standpoint, of which king did what and what were the political effects of a war; then what
As said by Johnson in a character analysis of Lady Macbeth, “Lady Macbeth fulfills her role among the nobility and is well respected like Macbeth. King Duncan calls her "our honored hostess."” (Johnson) She is a very loving woman to her husband, and she is also very concerned with his success
explores all the possibilities in between. In fact, death often seems to be a paradoxical vehicle through which life and love are manifested and asserted. The notion that death may overcome the borders between life and afterlife suggests a deeper analysis of the concept of liminality.
Kurt Vonnegut – The Man and His Work One of the best, most valuable aspects of reading multiple works by the same author is getting to know the author as a person. People don't identify with Gregor Samsa; they identify with Kafka. Witness the love exhibited by the many fans of Hemingway, a love for both the texts and the drama of the man. It's like that for me with Kurt Vonnegut, but it strikes me that he pulls it off in an entirely different way. Kafka's work is a reaction to his mental