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What is the point of history? What lessons can be drawn from it? How is history interpreted and understood? Is it an indicator of the future? Can it produce more than just stories—can it offer knowledge?
If these questions fascinate you as they have intellectuals of the last three centuries, then Professor Darren Staloff's lectures are the synthesis of relevant scholarly literature that you've been seeking.
This is not a course about dates and events, but one that presents key theories, interpretations, techniques, and visions of the past, leaving you free to select and apply a perspective you feel gives meaning to history.
An Intellectual Journey: Comprehend the Present by Unraveling the Past
Professor Staloff achieves this by examining the ideas of key thinkers from the last 275 years. The result is a course that traces modern man's struggle to comprehend his place in the world by unraveling the past.
"History is both the events and developments of the past as well as the accumulated efforts of historians to recover that past and retell it for a contemporary audience," states Dr. Staloff.
"That dual character is what makes history both problematic and fascinating. It is problematic because we were not eyewitnesses to past events, and it is therefore a challenging task to reconstruct, as accurately as we can, what happened in the past from the scattered pieces of evidence which happen to have survived. And it is fascinating not only because the study of history introduces us to the full range of human passions, remarkable individuals, and startling events, but because it goes straight to the heart of human activity on this planet."
The intellectuals you examine range from historians to philosophers to sociologists:
- Mircea Eliade
- Giambattista Vico
- Immanuel Kant
- G. W. F. Hegel
- Karl Marx
- Friedrich Nietzsche
- Max Weber
- Arnold Toynbee
- R. G. Collingswood
- Carl Hempel
- Arthur Danto
- Fernand Braudel
- Hayden White
- William Hardy McNeil.
The reason this course focuses on the last three centuries, according to Dr. Staloff, is because before that point (roughly the onset of the Enlightenment) few people thought history could really disclose the significance of the human experience; rather, that was the function of religion, philosophy, or even poetry.
"Only with the more recent and specifically Western idea of linear, secular time (rather than a cyclical pattern), first embraced in the 18th century, did it make sense to investigate the past in a more critical spirit to illuminate its significance," Dr. Staloff states.
Dr. Staloff is an Associate Professor of History at the City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received his B.A. from Columbia College and his M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Professor Staloff is the recipient of a National Endowment of Humanities Fellowship, the President's Fellowship at Columbia University, and the Harry J. Carman Scholar at Columbia University. He has published numerous papers and reviews on the subject of early American history and is the author of The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (1998).
Explore How Best to View History
These 16 lectures discuss, in depth:
- whether the human past discloses broader patterns or meanings in our existence, or the possibility that it is a nightmare from which we take refuge in comforting myths
- how we can be sure that we have recovered a true version of the past, and that history as a discipline is in some way verifiable and scientific
- how the choices we make in describing and analyzing that history inevitably shape not just the views of the past but of our likely future as well.
An introductory lecture sets out the major issues: how scientific history might be, how we might explain it, its value, and the fundamental questions that philosophers and historians confront when analyzing broad patterns of historical development. You see how Mircea Eliade, one of the 20th century's most renowned historians of religious ideas, traced the origins, meanings, and subsequent development of the concepts of cyclical and linear history.
Then you turn to the major thinkers in roughly chronological order, providing "a history of history, so to speak," says Dr. Staloff.
The next two lectures, on Vico and Kant, illustrate the Enlightenment's search for the growth of reason through history and their confidence that rational study of the past could accelerate that progress.
The next four lectures cover the 19th century and range across four intellectual giants (all German):
- Hegel believed that historical change could not be explained in terms of mechanistic theory or natural laws; rather, rationality, human spirit, and human culture had their play.
- Marx focused on the economic arrangements of society that revealed the character of each epoch.
- Nietzsche, pointing out man's knowledge of history and the need to follow his own instincts and wills, argued that while history inspired man to do great actions, it could also destroy man's ability to grow and change.
- Max Weber, formulated ideas about the nature and practice of Herrschaft (authority) in societies. Weber developed three specific forms of domination and offered new insight into the relationship between figures of authority, their staffs, and the individuals who obey them.
These four thinkers exemplify the continuing tension between attempts to identify ideas and the growth of consciousness as the motive power of history and other contrary emphases on the environment and material forces as more influential. But all shared the inclination to take a broad view of history and to devise ways (such as laws or principles) to categorize it.
The remaining lectures explore the efforts of prominent 19th-century scholars to address the meaning of history. Certain familiar themes recur, as in the conflicting assessments of the relative weight of ideas and environmental factors, not to mention a continuing concern over the degree to which history approximates science:
- British historian Toynbee examined 6,000 years of history to conclude that despite the upheavals of war, Western civilization was not declining.
- Collingwood's influential "Idea of History" argued that with its focus on ideas and reflective action, history was different from natural science and offered the best approach to understand human nature.
- Carl Hempel believed if history was to have any real meaning, it had to be capable of producing persuasive and verifiable explanations of historical events in a way consistent with the scientific method.
- Danto's observations illustrate the importance of perspective in historical writing, and they illuminate what is distinctive about history as an explanatory art.
- Braudel's emphasized structural analysis by following historical developments over longer periods to assess their impact.
- White focused on the mediating role of language itself in shaping both the historian's view of how the world works and how to convey the significance of events.
- McNeill believed the influence of Plague and other diseases often had a significant impact on political hierarchy and cultural domination.
"One can detect, perhaps in the wake of such appalling world wars, even more introspection on the part of the theorists as they reappraised just how historical explanations worked and how they retained validity," notes Dr. Staloff.
Nonetheless, from whatever perspective they emerge, all agree in the end on the central importance of history in making sense of our place in the world, and it is on that note that the course concludes.
Available on Audiotape
This course is available on audiotape only.
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