Dao Academy

CoursesCourse 26

The historical gaze

What history is and how to see it whole. History is not the past but a reconstruction of it: a selection from what survives, arranged by cause, told in a form. This course follows how people have done that, from Herodotus and Sima Qian to the Annales school, then stretches the frame to the whole 13.8 billion years of big history, and ends with the story about the story: what makes an event a fact, and what happens when a historian chooses a plot.

Start lesson 1

Lessons

  1. 1 What history isTwo founding books, written at opposite ends of Eurasia, began from one question: how to keep what people did from being lost. What counts as a historical past, how historians weigh cause against sequence, and whose story gets told. 22 minCompleted
  2. 2 How the past has been writtenFrom a plague in Athens to a prisoner’s school notebooks in a German camp: how Greeks, Chinese, medieval Christians, Renaissance humanists, and the Annales school each arranged the past, and why Braudel gave history three clocks. 24 minCompleted
  3. 3 The longest storyA historian of Russia began a course at the Big Bang. How big history tells 13.8 billion years in eight thresholds, what Goldilocks conditions and energy flow add, what is known about our own species, and where critics push back. 21 minCompleted
  4. 4 The story about the storyIn 1819 a pamphlet argued that Napoleon never existed. What makes an event a fact, what Hayden White’s Metahistory claimed, what a 2000 libel trial showed, and what it means to see the past whole. 23 minCompleted

You’ll be able to

  • Explain what historians mean by the historical past, why it is a selection from what survives, and why sequence is not cause.
  • Compare how Herodotus and Thucydides, Sima Qian and Sima Guang, Augustine and the Renaissance humanists, and Ranke and Braudel arranged the past.
  • Describe big history’s eight thresholds, Goldilocks conditions, and energy flow, and say which of its claims are settled, which are estimates, and which are contested.
  • Say what makes an event a historical fact, state fairly what Hayden White argued and what his critics said, and describe the main attempts to see history whole.

About this course

This course covers 历史的凝视 (The Historical Gaze), the question of what history is and how to see it whole. It takes up where Course 1, Why science began in Greece, began: with the Greek habit of asking, which gave us the word history itself. The cosmic, living, and earthly parts of the long story that this course calls big history are told in full in Course 7, We are stardust, Course 8, The journey of life, and Course 20, Thinking about the Earth. Here they appear as steps in a larger story, and their numbers are the ones used there.

The argument and the examples lead. Around them we add what is ours: dates, names, and quotations checked against sources (several familiar lines turned out to have other origins, such as “history is written by the victors,” “history rhymes” as Mark Twain’s, and “events are not facts” as Hayden White’s), background for readers in China and the United States, hands-on activities, and an honest “Another view” in every lesson. Where this course offers a reading of its own, it says so.