Livy's Alexander Digression (9.17–19): Counterfactuals and Apologetics

2002 ◽  
Vol 92 ◽  
pp. 62-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Morello
Keyword(s):  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Professional Interest ◽  
Ab Urbe Condita ◽  
Opportune Time ◽  
Consequent Effect ◽  
Counterfactual History ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Orthodox historians have tended to dislike attempts to think counterfactually about the past, on the grounds that ‘virtual history’ offers little more than entertainment and degenerates too easily into banal trivialities. In addition, it provokes fears about the offending historian's commitment to the truth and the consequent effect on his readers’ historical memories; a recent essay in the New Statesman, deploring the increasing presence of counterfactual history in the syllabus for national exams in British schools, condemned it as an agent of ‘collective amnesia’. E. P. Thompson was more trenchant: ‘unhistorical shit’. Yet popular and professional interest in counterfactual history continues to grow, spawning a recent radio series and a number of books on the ‘what if?’ theme. It seems, then, an opportune time to reconsider the famous passage of counterfactual history in Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, the Alexander digression at 9.17–19, a passage which, it so happens, one popular website lists as the first example of the genre. This paper offers, after a brief survey of previous scholarship (Section II), an account of Livy's allusions both to his sources and predecessors and to his own text (Section III), followed by an integrated reading (Section IV) which will argue more fully that the passage embodies central Livian ideas about the utility of historical writing, that it is thematically tightly woven into its place in Book 9, and, finally, that it offers a powerful critique of one-man rule which has important consequences for our understanding of the historian's view of Augustus.

RUNTUHNYA KHILAFAH TURKI UTSMANI 3 MARET 1924

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miftahul Jannah
Keyword(s):  
Third World ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Republic Of Turkey

<p align="center"><strong>Abstrak</strong></p><p>Tulisan dalam jurnal ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui proses runtuhnya Khilafah Turki Ustmani tanggal 3 maret 1924 dan dampaknya terhadap kehidupan umat Islam. Metode yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah metode sejarah. Metode sejarah adalah prosedur sejarawan Untuk melukiskan kisah masa lampau berdasarkan jejak-jejak yang ditinggalkan pada masa lampau dengan langkah-langkah penulisan sejarah sebagai berikut: (1) heuristik, (2) kritik, (3) interpretasi dan (4) historiografi. Berdasarkan penelitian yang dilakukan maka dapat ditarik kesimpulan bahwa: Khilafah Turki Ustmani dihancurkan dengan cara menghapus sistem kekhilafahan dan menggantinya dengan sistem republik oleh seorang keturunan yahudi yaitu Mustafa Kemal Attatur. Selama 14 abad kaum muslimin hidup dalam pemerintahan Islam yang mana diterapkan hukum-hukum Islam dalam seluruh aspek kehidupan. Namun sayangnya hari itu tepatnya 3 maret 1924 secara resmi dengan bantuan Inggris, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk mengubah khilafah dengan sistem Repulik Turki dan sampai hari ini sistem tersebut masih berjalan. Runtuhnya khilafah menyebabkan munculnya persoalan kaum muslimin mulai dari kolonialisme, konflik di Negara dunia ketiga, persoalan ekonomi,politik dan sosial budaya.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Kata Kunci:</strong> Khilafah Turki Ustmani, 3 maret 1924</p><p> </p><p align="center"><strong><em>Abstract</em></strong></p><p><em>The writing in this journal aims to find out the process of the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate on March 3, 1924 and its impact on the lives of Muslims. The method used in this study is the historical method. Historical method is the procedure of historians to describe the story of the past based on traces left in the past by the steps of historical writing as follows: (1) heuristics, (2) criticism, (3) interpretation and (4) historiography.</em></p><p><em>Based on the research conducted, it can be concluded that: the Ottoman Caliphate was destroyed by removing the Caliphate system and replacing it with a republic system by a descendant of the Jews namely Mustafa Kemal Attatur. For 14 centuries the Muslims lived in an Islamic government which applied Islamic laws in all aspects of life. But unfortunately that day to be exact 3 March 1924 officially with the help of Britain, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk changed the Caliphate with the system of the Republic of Turkey and to this day the system is still running. The collapse of the Caliphate caused the emergence of problems of the Muslims ranging from colonialism, conflict in third world countries, economic, political and socio-cultural issues</em><em>.</em></p><p><em> </em></p><strong><em>Keywords:</em></strong><em> the Caliphate of Turkish Ottoman, March 3, 1924</em>

Epilogue: On the Current and Future State of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allan Megill
Keyword(s):  
Historical Writing ◽  
Conceptual Difficulty ◽  
Universal History ◽  
The Past ◽  
Initial Decision ◽  
Future State ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of

This epilogue argues that historians ought to be able to produce a universal history, one that would ‘cover’ the past of humankind ‘as a whole’. However, aside from the always increasing difficulty of mastering the factual material that such an undertaking requires, there exists another difficulty: the coherence of universal history always presupposes an initial decision not to write about the human past in all its multiplicity, but to focus on one aspect of that past. Nevertheless, the lure of universal history will persist, even in the face of its practical and conceptual difficulty. Certainly, it is possible to imagine a future ideological convergence among humans that would enable them to accept, as authoritative, one history of humankind.

History, Story, and Community: Representing the Past in Latin Christendom, 1050–1400

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles F. Briggs
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Accelerated Growth

This chapter looks at Latin Christendom's evolution of historical writing, which had issued forth from a few, mostly monastic, centers, and eventually swelled into a substantial river fed by many and diverse tributaries. This expansionary trend in historiography was itself but one small manifestation of a protracted phase of accelerated growth in Europe, beginning in roughly the year 1000 and continuing until the early decades of the fourteenth century. The politically atomized, sparsely populated, and economically nonintegrated society that survived the inner turmoil attending the breakup of the Frankish Empire and the incursions of peoples from North Africa, the Eurasian Steppes, and Scandinavia during the ninth through early eleventh centuries, demonstrated a renewed vitality — spurred in part by the new political and economic conditions, as well as a period of improved climate.

Islam: The Arabic and Persian Traditions, Eleventh–Fifteenth Centuries

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konrad Hirschler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practice ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Islamic Tradition ◽  
Abbasid Caliphate ◽  
Middle Period ◽  
Early Islamic

This chapter deals with how the Islamic historical writing of the Middle Period developed directly from the early Islamic tradition, and its legacy remained deeply inscribed into the ways history was written and represented between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. However, as historians started to develop new styles and new genres, they turned to previously neglected aspects of the past, their social profile changed, and the writing of history became a more self-conscious, and to some degree self-confident, cultural practice. Most importantly, those issues that had motivated earlier historians, such as the legitimacy of the Abbasid Caliphate, declined in significance and historians of the Middle Period turned to new and more diverse subjects.

The Oxford History of Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Korean Peninsula ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
North West ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

How was history written in Europe and Asia between 400–1400? How was the past understood in religious, social, and political terms? And in what ways does the diversity of historical writing in this period mask underlying commonalities in narrating the past? The volume tackles these and other questions. Part I provides comprehensive overviews of the development of historical writing in societies that range from the Korean Peninsula to north-west Europe, which together highlight regional and cultural distinctiveness. Part II complements the first part by taking a thematic and comparative approach; it includes chapters on genre, warfare, and religion (amongst others) which address common concerns of historians working in this liminal period before the globalizing forces of the early modern world.

Arab Historical Writing

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Youssef M. Choueiri
Keyword(s):  
Western Europe ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Arabic World

This chapter traces the principal historiographical developments in the Arab world since 1945. It is divided into two major parts. The first part deals with the period extending from 1945 to 1970. During this period the discourse of either socialism or nationalism permeated most historical writings. The second part presents the various attempts made to decolonize, rewrite, or theorize history throughout the Arab world. The chapter then shows how in the various states of the Arabic world—some but not all of which have become fundamentalist Islamic regimes—Western models continued to be followed, though often with a more explicitly socialist approach than would be the case in America or Western Europe. By the 1970s, well before the shake-up of radical Islamicization that has dominated the past quarter-century, the entire Arabic world began to push hard against the dominance of residual Western colonial history.

Amnesia, aphasia and amnesty: the articulations of Italian colonial memory in postwar films (1946–1960)

Modern Italy ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Gianmarco Mancosu
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Politics And Culture ◽  
National Reconstruction ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Second World ◽  
Previous Scholarship

This article aims to expose the political and cultural processes that contributed to the eradication of problematic memories of the Italian colonial period during the national reconstruction following the Second World War. It offers a systematic examination of newsreels and documentaries about the Italian former colonies that were produced between 1946 and 1960, a film corpus that has largely been neglected by previous scholarship. The article first dissects the ambiguous political scenario that characterised the production of this footage through the study of original archival findings. The footage configured a particular form of self-exculpatory memory, which obstructed a thorough critique of the colonial period while articulating a new discourse about the future presence of Italy in the former colonies. This seems to be a case of aphasia rather than amnesia, insofar as the films addressed not an absence, but an inability to comprehend and articulate a critical discourse about the past. This aphasic configuration of colonial memories will be tackled through a close reading of the voice-over and commentary. In so doing, this work suggests that the footage actively contributed to spread un-problematised narratives and memories about the colonial period, whose results still infiltrate Italian contemporary society, politics and culture.

History Teaching in Rural Areas: The University of Venda

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-23
Author(s):  
Alan Kirkaldy
Keyword(s):  
Rural Areas ◽  
Whole Body ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Social Formation ◽  
History Teaching ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The University

I would argue that history students should understand that the whole body of historical writing consists of interpretations of the past. They should be able to analyse a wide variety of texts and form their own opinions on a historical topic, and should be able to construct a coherent argument, using evidence to support their opinion. In doing so, they should be actively aware that their argument is no more “true” than that offered by any other historian. It is as much a product of their personal biography and the social formation in which they live as of the evidence used in its construction. Even this evidence is the product of other personal biographies and other social forces.

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