Glossary

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There are certain terms or phrases you will hear time and time again in your studies. Make sure you know what they mean in this glossary section.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A

Annales, Annales ‘School’: Annales is the historical journal founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, and given a new lease of life after 1945 when it was associated with the prestigious Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (to give the institution its most recent name. Annales, the journal, and the ‘school’ loosely associated with it, and the Ecole, are characterised above all by an insistence that history should make use of the discoveries of the social sciences and incorporate social science methods. The approach (which in fact is far more diverse than usually assumed) has been described as structural functionionalist, and certainly Annales historians, strongly influenced by structuralism in anthropology, place great emphasis on what they perceive to be underlying structures in history.

Arts: in British universities a Faculty of Arts usually includes such subjects as English (or Literature), Philosophy, Art History, and also History. Sometimes ‘The Arts’ connotes these various disciplines; on other occasions it means the ‘creative’ arts – that is to say, painting, poetry, sculpture and so on.

Assimilationist: the view that history should be assimilated to the methods of the natural sciences.

Autonomous: when applied to history means that history is not part of literature, or the sciences, or of cultural studies, but has its own specialist methodology.

C

Capitalism: used in a general way by historians to describe the kind of economic system that has existed for at least the last 100 or 200 years in ‘the West,’ very definitely from the time of industrialisation, and with respect to important elements, since the commercial developments of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Marxist discourse there is a more precise meaning, Marxism postulating that capitalism is the social order, which succeeds feudalism, having overthrown it, and is now, in the contemporary period, subject to overthrow by working class or socialist revolution.

Class: as generally used by historians, it means the broad aggregations of families and individuals into which modern societies divide, these aggregations falling into a rough hierarchy according to the wealth, influence, power or whatever possessed individuals within each aggregation, and generally characterised by common lifestyles, patterns of behaviour and so on. Such historians would see classes as coming into existence only in, say the later eighteenth century, under the impetus of industrialisation and the political upheavals of the time. Marxists however, apply the term to all periods of history, and in a precise technical way. According to Marxism a person’s class is determined by their relationship to the dominant mode of production, and in every ‘stage’ of history one class will dominate – for example the bourgeois, or capitalist, class in the age of capitalism.

Class consciousness: this is a specifically Marxist term and occurs, or is alleged to occur, when member of a class become aware of the way in which their interests are in conflict with those of another class and are prepared to take action in pursuit of their interests.

Comparative history: history which, by fixing on like or analogous institutions or practices in different countries, produces comparisons and contrasts between these countries.

Counter-factual history: a form of history in which the historian works out what would have happened if one particular factor or decision had been different. At its most impressive in econometric history where, for instance, one economic development is removed (for example, the building of the railways in the United States)

Cultural history: an approach to the study of the arts which stresses the importance of the social and historical context, and in particular, the power structure, and is based on Marxist assumptions about class, ideology, and the dialectic.

D

Discourse theory: an approach, which posits language as the central (and in same cases only) subject for academic study. All primary sources, it is alleged, embody one or more discourses, which are seen as expressing the structure of power in a particular society; rather than divide sources into different discourses. Heavily dependent on Marxist assumptions about dominance and ideology. ‘Discourse’ also has a neutral meaning as the distinctive mode of communicating and expressing the ideas of a particular group, as in, say, postmodernist discourse – embracing the fancy jargon, rhetoric, and so on – or feminist discourse.

E

Exemplar history: history designed to teach potential members of the ruling elite how to govern.

F

Feudalism: the term was invented in the seventeenth century to describe the legal and social order prevailing in most European countries in the Middle Ages: originally, its essential feature was that men held land from their superiors by virtue of performing for them some designated service (for example, military service). In Marxist discourse the term has a more precise connotation as defining the ‘stage’ in the ‘unfolding of history’, which preceded capitalism.

H

Hegemony: in traditional history this simply meant the power or influence exercised over several countries by one country: for instance in pre-war 1914 European history one might talk of German hegemony over eastern Europe. However, in contemporary Marxist cultural theory (developed from the work of Gramsci) hegemony refers to the cultural monopoly allegedly exercised by the dominant class: thus it is alleged that working-class cultural practices (such as reading books by right-wing authors) are not really ‘genuinely’ working-class at all, but simply part of a bourgeois hegemony.

Historicism: an approach which sees history as an absolutely central discipline because it postulates that everything is explained by its past development, while at the same time insisting that each age has unique characteristics, and a unique value of its own (the word was incorrectly used by Karl Popper to refer to grand-scale theorising about history)

Historiography: the systematic study of historians’ writings about the past.

History: the most concise definition is:

The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of and teaching about that knowledge.

I

Ibid (as used in footnote references): means that the source is exactly the same as the one given in the previous footnote.

Imperialism: the system of thought and action pertaining to the support of the idea of empire, that is to say one country ruling over, and exploiting others. In Marxist thought imperialism is seen as an advanced stage of capitalism, and as belonging specifically to the period after 1880. Other historians would argue that imperialism can happen in many different ages.

Interdisciplinary: There are many problems in the sciences, in the humanities, in social life and politics, which cannot be solved by one discipline alone; sometimes interdisciplinary approaches, combining several disciplines, are required. Most academic and educational institutions nowadays offer some ‘interdisciplinary’ courses, which bring together several disciplines: chemistry, biology and physics for example, or history politics and sociology, or philosophy, literature, art history, music and history. The idea is to show where certain disciplines overlap with and reinforce each other. But if taught rigorously, these courses will also bring out the distinctive differences between different disciplines.

M

Marxism: the approach to history developed by Karl Marx and refined by his followers, stressing that ‘history,’ conceived as a process, unfolds in a series of stages, which after the current phase of bourgeois capitalism will lead to the triumph of the proletariat and the classless society, that the dialectic (the existing mode of production coming into conflict with an emergent mode of production) is central to this process of unfolding, and that class conflict is the motor of history, classes being determined by their relationship to the dominant mode of production.

Metahistory: grand-scale theorising in history, as in Marxism, or the writings of Spengler or A.J. Toynbee.

Middle Ages: the term originates in the Renaissance and applies to the period of history between classical times and the Renaissance: it is important to note the phrase can only be applied to European history, and has no meaning for most of the rest of the world.

Modernisation: used to describe the whole complex network of developments, which are held to be characteristic of the modern world, e.g. ‘disenchantment,’ exploitation of technology, economic growth, mass society and so on.

Myth: a version of the past which usually has some element of truth in it, but which distorts what actually happened in support of some vested interest.

P

Postmodernism: according to its protagonists, a completely new way of looking at the world, academic study, philosophy, artistic production etc, arising from the ‘discoveries’ of Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard (in France) and Jameson (in America) and the so-called ‘linguistic turn,’ supposed to have happened in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and maintaining in essence that ‘everything is constructed with language,’ that is to say that outside language there is really no reality. Postmodernism derives its view of the world from Marxism and maintains that the societies we live in, being bourgeois, are evil; while some postmodernists take up an entirely nihilistic position, most support radical political action and aim at the destruction of all traditional or modern modes of thought and study (dismissed as ‘grand narratives). In reality, postmodernism is a totalising belief system based on faith alone. It is distinguished by elaborate rhetoric and a specialised jargon, which fails to conceal the essential naivety of its basic ideas, derived from a discredited Marxism. It often sounds like nonsense that is because it is nonsense.

R

Radical: literally ‘from the roots’ i.e. an extreme reformer; but the word has taken on various inflections of meaning, and in late nineteenth-century usage, for example, actually meant a rather moderate liberal reformer. The extreme connotation returned from the 1960s onwards.

Renaissance: literally ‘rebirth;’ usually applied to the period of change (perhaps lasting several centuries) in which, to express matters in a rather unsatisfactory cliché, the medieval or feudal world in Europe came to an end. The essential original characteristic was the revival or rebirth of classical learning.

Revolution: overthrowing of existing system or set of ideas: in political history means more than a simple coup d’etat or change of ruler, and always implies some change affecting more groups in society than simply the ruling family.

S

Serial history: history based on the premise that statistical series (of landholding, prices, and so on) provide a firm structural base to which other social phenomena can be related.

Source, primary: a relic of a past age (document, artefact etc), which originated in that age.

Source, secondary: a contribution to knowledge about a past age written up later, suing (if a serious historical work) primary sources.

T

Total history: history which endeavours to integrate together all aspects of human society, aesthetic and cultural, as well as social, economic and political, private as well as public.

W

Whig interpretation of history: the view, prevalent in nineteenth-century Britain, that history was the record of steady progress towards liberal ideas and institutions.

This content has been taken from The New Nature of History by Arthur Marwick.