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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.
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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.
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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.
-
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.
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