it's history if it is a primary source, ie if it is a contemporary record or commentary, or as near as you can get to contemporary.

for example, Caesar's "Gallic Wars" are the very stuff of history, both in their use as a record of those events, and in analysis of what they tell us both explicitly and by inference about Roman society and politics. However you don't take any piece of history as "read" (no pun) because whoever wrote it always has their own agenda as well as being constrained by the strictures of their time, and by their own power of language (or lack of it)

Lord d'Acre's academic reputation was destroyed by the "Hitler Diaries" even though in every other respect he remained a sound historian. Those were easy to debunk and he should have been a lot more careful. More ancient history is harder though as the sources are fewer and there is less material to cross-refer to. Plus historians and archaeologists have a wider arsenal of tools at their disposal nowadays and certain widely held concepts that have been considered solid history have been and are being overturned or radically modified.

If you hold with the traditional view, based upon "textbook" history derived from inscriptions and other literary sources, then Egyptian civilisation dates from about 5000-4500BC. if you go off "new" geological and geophysical evidence, as well as recent archaeological works, you can add 3500 years onto that easily.

New approaches to history can work the other way too; RHM Jones wrote his now classic economic history of the late Roman Empire entirely from literary sources and deliberatley ignored physical evidence from archaeology. This allowed him and other historians to have "clear run" at the accepted views of the late Empire and thus debunked several long standing notions about the Decline (and Fall) However the limitations of this technique soon became apparent, as other evidence began to indicate that malaria played more than a subsidiary role in the economic and physical retrogression of the late Roman world.

In the 1960's professional historians and academics achieved a workaday contextualist compromise which is still the norm today, as compared to accepted "single-idea" notions that dominated historical studies in previous generations. Edward Gibbon remains the pre-eminent commentator on the late Roman Empire even today, but no-one would seek now to emulate his work or to defend his positions that arose out of his own prejudices and mental/social conditioning, as exemplified by his 18th C Age of Reason attitude that the Roman Empire was brought down by Christianity weakening the Empire's "moral fibre" and by interbreeding with inferior elements, rather than looking at mechanistic causes such as soil erosion, lack of cultivation, economic decline, disease, lack of means for succession.

My favourite historical text is Procopius' "Secret History" set in 6th C Constantinople.

..fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant..

Edited by - Tawakalna on 6/3/2004 7:46:26 AM

One of my favorite channels is the History Channel. Yesterday they had a show about the Mississippi River flood of 1927. Did you know that they had to put armed guards on the levees to keep people from dynamiting them? You see, if you blew up the levee on the other side of the river from you, it made it less likely for the river to overflow on your side. I never knew that. History is great!

Let's get those missiles ready to destroy the universe!!

The only "History" to be leary of is rivisionist history. Where someone comes along and does not think it really happened that way and rewrites it. Some text books these days are like that. What happened and was in the 50's and 60's books is now left out of current books.

You can always count on Taw to spoil the webspace with posts that have a screen-filling length with stuff that can also be found in the libary

Anyway, this post is history. In fact, you reading this post will be history even before you're done with it

-----------
Yo, Join my Army of Daftness brotha, it's tha bomb. And together with ma homies we will rule the dope world of TLR. Yo, uh huh, yeah. Peace brotha.

Edited by - Tha Nickstah on 6/3/2004 10:35:54 AM

anything written/happend before my time

pooh off, Nickless, you'd prefer 1-liner sound-bites?

..fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant..

H3y N1ck y0u m4y 5p34k 8r00klyn 8u7 1 5p34k 1337

...and are a pain up the rear with it.

well basicly, Nickless is right, the second before the current is already history. so if I were to recall what happened on the day before, I'd be historisizing (sp?)

I don't really have a favorite historical text, although I read a lot about the previous World wars and the american Civil war ("The war between the states" as some put it)

Nickless' Army of Daftness gets cooler all the time!

..fold your hands child, you walk like a peasant..

Sorry I can't really name many texts. I do like war history like Middle ages and stuff like that. So far my two favorite texts are called Armor and Secret Projects of WW2(I'm too lazy to type World War 2).

Edited by - Jagged on 6/3/2004 2:22:39 PM

No Taw, it's getting Funky

Any text can be considered a "history," so long as it actually happened. How it is interpretted is left up to the author. For example, I'm writing a paper that links canned foods to the events of 9/11 just really to see if I can (and for my history class). As long as you can make the connections, it's a history. The person's personal biases and interpretations should be noted, however. It's allright if the history textbook excludes or embellishes certain events, so long as the reader realises that the textbook isn't the absolute source on history, that is it fallible. A good teacher will suppliment the book with articles and papers that provide alternative viewpoints and more complete coverage, giving a more fair and ballance outlook on history. The history channel (god bless it) provides further backgound and alternate viewpoints, like some of the nasty stuff the US did in WWII as well as the holocaust mentioned in the books (Jappanese relocation, Unit 731, harboring ex-Nazi's). The facts are indisputable, but history is really left up to the writer. --- VH16

There are historical writings and then there are histories, at least in the classical sense of it.

A history is a deliberate attempt by the writer to recount for the record what happened at what time, and for what reasons. These are, of course, all subject to the writers biases, predispositions, education, language, cultural background, etc.

Back in the early 20th Century, German teachers of history came up with a discipline called historiography or the history of history to try to develop a more empirical method of analyzing histories and to promote a more accurate and impartial way of writing or rewriting a history.

Historical writings are, in the classical sense, writings that are contemporary to the time and which by being contemporary may prove to be evidence of an event, what happened and why for a historian to use in writing a history. Historical writings, however, also are subject to the biases, predispositions, etc., AND motives of that writer.

Well you know what they say; "history is written by the victors". That being said, it would probably be more apt to ask how accurate history is (particularly early history), rather than its definition. Yeah, yeah, it's an old one but a good one .