Warring States Project
Methodology

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 - are associated in the West with Leopold von Ranke. They are here combined with other maxims into a handbook for 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
• Difficulties
• The Attack on History
• Two Kinds of History: A Footnote to Postmodernism
• Dating a Text: Two Ways of Arguing
• Errors
• Solipsism: Denying the Past
• The Lisbon Earthquake: Disconnecting Events
• Buckingham Palace: Mistaking Awesome for Ancient
• The Marco Polo Bridge: Trusting Government Documents
• William Tell: Trusting Romantic Legends
• Delusions
• Antiquity Frenzy: Chauvinism vs History
• The Anyway Club: History without Philology
• Ethics
• Getting Started
• Advice to Students (and a few others)

History cannot be done unless the sources for history have first been understood. This is the domain of philology:

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