Warring States Project
History

History aims to discover the truth about the past. Methods have been worked out for getting at historical truth. Some basic principles - objectivity, honesty, preference for the earliest sources - many of them known in antiquity, are presently associated in the West with the name of Leopold von Ranke. And deservedly. Some of Ranke's maxims are here combined a quick introduction to the study of the past. These methodological dos and don'ts look to just one thing: recovering the past, in Ranke's words, "as it really was."

• Method
  • Ranke's Maxims
  • Outline of Procedure
• Errors
• Solipsism: Denying the World
• The Lisbon Earthquake: Disconnecting Events
• Buckingham Palace: Trusting the Awesome
• Lincoln and Lee: Trusting the Myth
• The Horn Papers: Trusting the Fraud
• William Tell: Trusting the Romantic
• The Marco Polo Bridge: Trusting Government Documents
• Boris Gnedenko: How Not to Make an Error
• Difficulties
• Stanley Fish: A Spokesman for Postmodernism
  • Again Stanley Fish: The Real Beliefs of a Postmodernist
• The Attack on History: Postmodernism Rampant
• Two Kinds of History: A Footnote to Postmodernism
• Dating a Text: Two Ways of Arguing
• Antiquity Frenzy: History and Chauvinism
• The Anyway Club: History without Philology
• The Discipline: How Not to Structure Inquiry
• The F-Word: How to Structure Inquiry
  
• Ethics
  • Fraud
• Getting Started
• Advice to Students (and a few others)
• The Last Horizon
• Comparative History

17 Jan 2004 / Contact The Project / Exit to Home Page