• Complain

Reg Grant - The History Book

Here you can read online Reg Grant - The History Book full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2016, publisher: Dorling Kindersley Ltd, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Reg Grant The History Book

The History Book: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The History Book" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

Discover the key themes and big ideas behind more than 80 of the worlds most important historical events - from the dawn of civilization to the 21st century.From the origins of Homo sapiens to the Space Race, and from the French Revolution to the Digital Revolution, this instalment in the bestselling Big Ideas series offers an essential exploration of the human timeline up to and including the rise of modern Islam, the world wide web, and the global financial crisis.Making big historical ideas accessible and easy to understand, with stunning visuals and memorable quotes, The History Book is perfect for students, adults, or anyone who wants to travel back in time and understand the fascinating past of mankind.

Reg Grant: author's other books


Who wrote The History Book? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The History Book — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The History Book" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make
DK London Project Editors Alexandra Beeden SamKennedy Senior Editor - photo 1
DK London Project Editors Alexandra Beeden SamKennedy Senior Editor - photo 2

DK London

Project Editors Alexandra Beeden, SamKennedy

Senior Editor Victoria Heyworth-Dunne

Editorial Assistant Kate Taylor

Project Art Editor Katie Cavanagh

Designer Vanessa Hamilton

Design Assistant Renata Latipova

Managing Art Editor Lee Griffiths

Managing Editor Gareth Jones

Art Director Karen Self

Associate Publishing Director Liz Wheeler

Publishing Director Jonathan Metcalf

Jacket Designer Natalie Godwin

Jacket Editor Claire Gell

Jacket Design Development Manager Sophia MTT

Producer, Pre-Production Robert Dunn

Senior Producer Mandy Inness

Illustrations James Graham, Vanessa Hamilton

DK Delhi

Editors Deeksha Miglani, Neha Samuel

Art Editor Kshitiz Dobhal

Picture Researchers Aditya Katyal, DeepakNegi

Picture Research Manager Taiyaba Khatoon

Jacket Designer Dhirendra Singh

Senior DTP Designer Harish Aggarwal

Managing Jackets Editor Saloni Singh


Co-produced with

SANDS PUBLISHING SOLUTIONS

4 JENNER WAY, ECCLES,

AYLESFORD, KENT ME20 7SQ


Editorial Partners David and Sylvia Tombesi-Walton

Design Partner Simon Murrell


original styling by

STUDIO8 DESIGN

DK Digital Publishing Team

Senior Digital Producer Miguel Cunha

Head of Digital Operations, Delhi Manjari Hooda

Senior Editorial Manager Lakshmi Rao

Assistant Producer Suruchi Kakkar

Software Engineer Rachana Ravindran

AV Media Manager Nain Rawat

Operations Assistant Tauhid Nasir

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Dorling Kindersley Limited, 80 Strand,London, WC2R 0RL Penguin Group (UK)

Copyright 2016 Dorling Kindersley Limited

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writtenpermission of the copyright owner.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 9780241225929

This digital edition published 2016 - ISBN: 9780241285411

A WORLD OF IDEAS:

SEE ALL THERE IS TO KNOW

www.dk.com

INTRODUCTION The ultimate aim of history is human self-knowledge In the words - photo 3
INTRODUCTION

The ultimate aim of history is human self-knowledge. In the words of20th-century historian R G Collingwood: The value of history is that it teachesus what man has done and thus what man is. We cannot hope to understand ourlives without it.

History itself has a history. From earliest times, all societies literate orpre-literate told stories about their origins or their past, usuallyimaginative tales centring around the acts of gods and heroes. The first literatecivilizations also kept records of the actions of their rulers, inscribed on claytablets or on the walls of palaces and temples. But at first these ancient societiesmade no attempt at a systematic enquiry into the truth of the past; they did notdifferentiate between what had really happened and the events manifest in myth andlegend.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

George Santayana
The Life of Reason (1905)

Ancient historical narrative

It was the Ancient Greek writers Herodotus and Thucydides in the 5th centuryBCE who first explored questions about the past through the collection andinterpretation of evidence the word history, first usedby Herodotus, means enquiry in Greek. Herodotuss workstill contained a considerable mixture of myth, but Thucydides accountof the Peloponnesian War satisfies most criteria of modern historical study. Itwas based on interviews with eyewitnesses of the conflict and attributed eventsto human agency rather than the intervention and actions of the gods.

Thucydides had invented one of the most durable forms of history: the detailednarrative of war and political conflict, diplomacy and decision-making. Thesubsequent rise of Rome to dominance of the Mediterranean world encouragedhistorians to develop another genre of broader scope: the account of howwe got to where we are today. The Hellenic historian Polybius(200118 BCE) and the Roman historian Livy (59 BCE17 CE) bothsought to create a narrative of the rise of Rome a bigpicture that would help to make sense of events on a large timescale.Although restricted to the Roman world, this was the beginning of what issometimes called universal history, which attempts to describeprogress from earliest origins to the present as a story with a goal, giving thepast apparent purpose and direction.

At the same period in China, historian Sima Qian (c.14586 BCE) wassimilarly tracing Chinese history over thousands of years, from the legendaryYellow Emperor (c.2697 BCE) to the Han dynasty under Emperor Wu (c.109BCE).

Moral lessons

As well as making sense of events through narratives, historians in theancient world established the tradition of history as a source of moral lessonsand reflections. The history writing of Livy or Tacitus (56117 CE), forinstance, was in part designed to examine the behaviour of heroes and villains,meditating on the strengths and weaknesses in the characters of emperors andgenerals, providing exemplars for the virtuous to imitate or shun. Thiscontinues to be one of the functions of history. French chronicler JeanFroissart (13371405) said he had written his accounts of chivalrousknights fighting in the Hundred Years War so that brave menshould be inspired thereby to follow such examples. Today, historicalstudies of Lincoln, Churchill, Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr perform thesame function.

The Dark Ages The rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire fundamentally - photo 4
The Dark Ages

The rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire fundamentally changed theconcept of history in Europe. Historical events came to be viewed by Christiansas divine providence, or the working out of Gods will. Sceptical enquiryinto what actually happened was usually neglected, and accounts of miracles andmartyrdoms were generally accepted as true without question. The Muslim world,in this as in other ways, was frequently more sophisticated than Christendom inMedieval times, with the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun (13321406) railingagainst the blind, uncritical acceptance of fanciful accounts of events thatcould not be verified.

Neither Christian nor Muslim historians produced a work on the scale of thechronicle of Chinese history published under the Song dynasty in 1085, whichrecorded Chinese history spanning almost 1,400 years and filled 294volumes.

Renaissance Humanism

Whatever the undoubted merits of other civilizations traditions ofhistory writing, it was in Western Europe that modern historiography evolved.The Renaissance which began in Italy in the 15th century, then spreadthroughout Europe, lasting until the end of the 16th century in some areas centred upon the rediscovery of the past. Renaissance thinkers found afertile source of inspiration in classical antiquity, in areas as diverse asarchitecture, philosophy, politics, and military tactics. The humanist scholarsof the Renaissance period declared history one of the principal subjects intheir new educational curriculum, and the antiquary became a familiar figure inelite circles, rummaging among ancient ruins and building up collections of oldcoins and inscriptions. At the same time, the spread of printing made historyavailable to a much wider audience than ever before.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The History Book»

Look at similar books to The History Book. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The History Book»

Discussion, reviews of the book The History Book and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.