30 Great Books That Made History (eBook)

Jaume Aurell (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025
339 Seiten
Polity (Verlag)
978-1-5095-6242-8 (ISBN)

Infos

Today, many readers could easily list thirty classic authors, or thirty classic works of art, literature, music, philosophy, or science. But would they be able to name thirty classic works of history? In spite of history's outsized influence in the world of ideas, the books that made - and-remade - the history we know so well are often forgotten.

In this panoramic book, distinguished historian Jaume Aurell sets out to introduce readers to a new canon of historical writing. Taking a global approach, he places the work of Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Michelet and Braudel alongside masterpieces from a myriad of periods and civilizations, from Sima Qian, Anna Komnene, al-Masudi and Fukuzawa Yukichi to Edmundo O'Gorman, C. L. R. James and Natalie Zemon Davis. At the same time, Aurell argues that we should not see these books as a definitive canon - instead, any canon should be seen as a list-in-progress to be contested and debated anew with each generation. It is only by being exposed to these diverse and deeply significant works that we can fully perceive the shape of the discipline, and carve out a new appreciation for the art of history writing.

Jaume Aurell is Professor of Medieval History at the Department of History at the University of Navarra.

Textauszug

1
Greek Ethnography
Herodotus’ Histories

Herodotus is, together with Ranke, one of the two founding heroes of Western historical consciousness. Classics are classics because of their resistance to time, but also because they are pioneers and they carry “the penalty of taking the lead,” in Thorstein Veblen’s phrase. Since Cicero gave Herodotus the title of “father of history,” the histories of Western historiography – and some others, such as Byzantine and Islamic historiography – have him as their original point of reference. All of them recognize him as the first investigator (that means historien in Ionian) of the facts of the past. His most important work, the Histories, was published around 450 bce and narrates the war between Persia and Greece, as a decisive confrontation of barbarism and civilization, of the East and West – a dialectical that is still present. Herodotus is a master at dramatizing stories, simplifying them between two opposing poles: this is the decisive plot of his Histories. Herodotus is to history what Homer is to literature, and the dramatic and narrative structure of the Histories and the Iliad have much in common.

Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus (present-day Bodrum in western Turkey) around 484 bce. During childhood, he familiarized himself with Persian culture, since his hometown was under its domination, and he must have heard the stories of the Persians’ preparations to invade Macedonia and Greece. His family fled Persian oppression and settled on the island of Samos. There he learned Ionian, the language in which earlier historians (known as logographers) had written, which he adopted to write his Histories. In his youth, thanks to his parents’ social standing, he traveled to Egypt, Syria, and Babylon, acquiring experiences that he later poured into his Histories. In his more mature years, he moved to Athens, where he enjoyed the cultural conditions he had always admired and wanted to reflect on his Histories. He experienced the period of greatest splendor of classical Greece, from the battle of Salamis in 480 bce to the beginning of the outcome of the Peloponnesian War around 440 bce. His status as an insider-outsider of Athens, coming from a region that had oscillated between the Persian Empire and the Greek colonies, allowed him a more objective view of the great confrontation between the two civilizations. But he stayed in Athens only a short time. He moved to Thurii, in present-day Calabria, alternating with stays in Pella, Macedonia. He died in one of these two cities, when he was barely forty years old, around 425 bce.

Herodotus’ Histories, whose main subject is the confrontation between Athens and Persia, contains nine parts, each dedicated to one of the inspirational muses of Greek art and literature. This structure was introduced by a later hand, probably to adapt the different scrolls of the manuscripts to the shelves format and preservation requirements of the libraries where many scholars consulted it. This structure proved effective and attractive from early times, so no one has ever tried to change it.

In the first book, the author reveals the purpose of his narrative and the methodology to be followed. Since the dawn of their discipline, and unlike literature, historians have been obsessed with questions of method. The recovery of the past is an operation of such complexity that it requires explaining the rules of the game of its authors:

These are the researches [historien] of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due need of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud. (Herodotus 1996, 1: § 1)

The three keywords to linger on here are: rational inquiry or research into the past; the preservation of forgetting the past; and the prevention of losing the fame of heroes. Since Herodotus, inquiring, preserving, and preventing is the basis of any historical narrative and an essential part of the vocation of every historian. The first is the most specific and gives rise to the name of the discipline, history, a Greek transposition of the word inquiry. The second, to preserve, is part of the aspiration of most people persuaded that tradition does not consist in worshipping the ashes, but in fanning the fire, in Gustav Mahler’s wise formulation. The third, preventing the forgetting of the memory of heroes, presents a clear analogy to the epic literature so dear to the Greeks and illustrates the everlasting attraction of the literature of great characters.

With this triple objective in mind, Herodotus gives meaning to the past, investigates the causes (aitíai) of the events, and verifies their effects. The Ionian word historien refers to the verbs to wonder, question, inquire, seek, and investigate. He undertook a rigorous investigation of the past and made his “histories” distinguishable from mythological and legendary Homeric narratives. But he preserved their same dramatic structure, simplifying the plot and polarizing the narratives. Yet, Herodotus changed the form of his narrative to distinguish history from literature: prosification. Epic poems were always presented in poetry to be declaimed or sung and thus to be more easily fixed in the memory. Herodotus’ historical narrative is presented in prose because the complex operation of reproducing historical reality requires nuances that are difficult to fit into rigid rhythmic verse.

His method proceeds from the description of the most visible aspects such as physical geography and climatic conditions to the analysis of cultural aspects such as traditions, rituals, and customs. He proceeds by collecting data in situ (“Men trust their ears less than their eyes,” Herodotus 2005, 1: § 8) and interviews with the protagonists. For this reason, his research is limited to the historians’ lifetime or, at most, to one or two generations ago. For better or worse, he bequeathed to Western historiography a more presentist projection than Jewish, Hindu, or Chinese historiography whose original narratives go back many centuries. The longue durée would not take hold in the West until a few centuries later, with the narration of the origins of Rome by Titus Livy (Ab Urbe Condita), and would be sublimated in the twentieth century by Braudel’s Mediterranean.

After the introduction, from the first to the fourth book, Herodotus combines the description of historical events and the examination of the cultural conditions of the nations that appear in the action. He shows himself halfway between history and ethnography when he describes the geography and culture of such diverse nations as Lydia, Egypt, and Persia, as well as some of the peoples adjoining Persia such as Ethiopia, India, Arabia, Scythia, and Babylonia. From the fifth book onwards, the action moves to Macedonia and Thrace, invaded by the Persians with the threat to the Attic and Peloponnesian cities, civilization, and culture. Athens and Sparta come to the aid of Miletus, which allows the author to delve into the history and culture of these two cities, and enter the central core of his narration: the war between the Greeks and the Persians. It is a conflict that goes beyond the battlefield since what is really at stake is the competition between civilizations: yesterday and today. Herodotus then narrates three of the founding battles of the historical consciousness of the West: the battle of Marathon (490 bce), the heroic defeat of Thermopylae (480 bce), and the battle of Salamis (480 bce). The Persian emperor Xerxes retires to Lydia and waits for his moment, which will not come. The last book narrates the defeat of the Persians in Plataea, after having taken refuge in Thebes, and the Greek victory in the battle of Mycale.

Herodotus shows us that when historians deal with the origins of peoples and civilizations they often generate myths and legends, even if they do not intend to. He has always been taken as the beginning of the historical consciousness of the West, and his stories as heroic role models. For example, the battle of Salamis has been imprinted for many centuries in the collective memory of the West as the triumph of civilization over barbarism. Yet, Herodotus was more interested in ethnography, daily life, and cultural issues than in the heroism of battles, political power struggles, and imperial hegemonies. This makes him a champion of interdisciplinarity: geographers and ethnographers of all time have considered him one of the founders of their discipline. His sources are closer to the fieldwork of modern social scientists – especially cultural and symbolic anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz – than to archival historians.

What were Herodotus’ sources of inspiration? In the first place, he drew on (and at the same time wanted to distinguish himself from) his predecessors in the past narrative, whom he somewhat ironically considered the “makers of history” (logographers) such as Hecataeus of Miletus. Herodotus sought to surpass them by replacing a mythical history with one based on facts...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.11.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeines / Lexika
• Schlagworte: al-Masudi • Anna Komnene • books that changed the world • Carl Christian Reindorf • Carolyn Steedman • chinese dynasties • classic works of history • C. L. R. James • Edmundo O’Gorman • Edward Gibbon • Edward Thompson • Eusebius • Fernand Braudel • Francesco Guicciardini • Fukuzawa Yukichi • global canon • greatest books in history • great historical thinkers • Greek ethnography • Gu Jiegang • Hayden White • Henry Adams • Herodotus • historical canon • Historiography • history of ideas • Indian Genealogies • influential historical books • is there a historical canon • James I of Aragon • Jawaharlal Nehru • Jewish Drama • Johan Huizinga • Jules Michelet • Leopold von Ranke • Marc Bloch • Natalie Zemon Davis • Ranajit Guha • Seminal Works • Sima Qian • Snorri Sturluson • Thomas Macaulay • Thucydides • what is the historical canon
• ISBN-10: 1-5095-6242-7 / 1509562427
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6242-8 / 9781509562428