Essay #1: Should historians judge the past according to the morality of the present? Never judging a book by its cover is always a good rule to have, however, how harshly should we judge the actual book? In today’s world, we have certain moral judgments that have changed over time. The morals that we have today are drastically different from the morals of someone who lived in the 20th or 19th century. The morals we have can be directly applied to history that is written or that is created by historians. It is human nature to do so, kind of similar to a gag reflex, historians can’t help it. John Lewis Gaddis believes that “You can’t escape thinking about history in moral terms.” Both John Lewis Gaddis and Herbert G. Gutman use their moral judgements …show more content…
Robert Darnton, a historian who wrote the book The Great Cat Massacre, looks at a particularly strange event in eighteenth-century France. The story of the Great Cat Massacre is about one strange and abnormal day at a printing shop where multiple workers killed many cats during the night. The workers were fed up with the fact that the cats of the bourgeois and his wife were being treated better than the workers. So they came up with a plan where they would “... howling and meowing so horribly that the bourgeois and his wife did not sleep a wink.” For several nights they did this until the master told the workers to deal with the noise, so the workers went out and killed several cats that night. The workers had fun with this task as well, understanding that the wife of the bourgeois was having an affair with the priest, the workers reenacted the scenes of an encounter with the wife and priest. This laughter and joyful time with the workers lasted for many nights as they killed multiple cats, including the one the wife found most precious. When looking at this story from a small historical perspective, similar to the Martin Guerre story, we can learn about society and information about this historical period from the background information. Darnton describes the premise of his book as seeing “how they thought, how they constructed the world. Instead of following the high …show more content…
When historians can zoom in on a historical event, usually looking at one specific part of an event, a deeper understanding and different perspectives can be born from it. We can learn about the people behind these historical events and learn more about the ordinary rather than the abnormal. From Martin Guerre's book, we can learn how medieval families and peasants lived from day to day. Darntons book on the Great Cat Massacre can teach us about the cultural and social structure of eighteenth-century France. By highlighting the lesser-known facts, we can get a better understanding of how the ordinary people of history or the abnormal people of history went about daily life. Also, big history can be overgeneralized; through small history, we can find smaller details that would be skipped over through the big history method. Instead of looking at the “line of best fit”, micro historians focus on the events that are furthest from this line and try to understand what makes them so different from the rest of the historical
It is no surprise then that with such heavy issues weighing on the minds of the peasantry, that there was such a surge of violence with the murder of Monéy. When the town of Hautefaye began to celebrate the commemoration of the First Empire on August 15th, drinking became the main activity causing the celebration to become a likely place for violence. Corbin suggests that what makes the murder of Monéy distinguishable from other acts of violence, was that the event was past the French period where such violence was common, as well as it was unusual for the crime to take place at the time of day that it did. Ultimately, given the amount of heavy issues weighing on the minds of the peasantry at a time when France was in such turmoil, it’s logical that a surge of violence occurred within the town of Hautefaye.
The study of past events have been a common practice of mankind since the verbal telling of stories by our ancestors. William Cronon, in his article “Why the Past Matters,” asserts that the remembrance of the past “keeps us in place.” Our individual memories and experiences shape how we act in our daily lives. In addition to influencing us at an individual level, our collective history binds us together as a society. Without knowing where we have been or what we have experienced, it is nearly impossible to judge progress or know which courses of action to pursue. The goal of the historian is to analyze and explain past events, of which they rarely have firsthand memory of, and apply the gained knowledge to make connections with current and future events.
In early modern Europe, the 16th century presented a turning point in history where identities and values were challenged. Given the fluctuating state of identities, could the crisis of power centralization precipitate skepticism on the heroes of The Return of Martin Guerre? Can the monumental epistemological changes of the time (e.g. The Reformations and Counter Reformation, the rise of Protestantism, rational individualization in thought) be adequately conveyed or fully reflected using micro-histories?
To study history, the facts and information must be passed down. To do so, historians record the information in textbooks and other nonfiction works. Whether or not the historians retell facts or construct their own version of history is debatable. History can be percieved as being “constructed” by the historians due to their bias, elimination of controversy, strive for entertainment, and neglect to update the information.
The book itself looked at history in a different way and it made it extremely difficult to compare or contrast it with another source.
The narrator of “The Black Cat” describes what he his telling to his readers as “mere household events”. When he describes these erratic events as everyday things, it shows us that he does not believe that these experiences are unusual. This shows the reader that he may have a mental illness showing that he does not recognize these incidents as wrong or strange.
A central tenet to Louise Erdrich’s novels are the narrators she employs to tell her stories. Each character from Nanapush to Marn Wolde offer their own perspective to the larger story as a whole and allow Erdrich to create a web of narrative complexity. Paula Gunn Allen argues in The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions that Native American storytelling and storytellers act as mediators between conflicting views or sides (75). Erdrich takes this notion to heart in her novels; they offer the full scope of a story, branching out and backwards in time to provide the necessary details for a reader to fill in the gaps of the story. An idea mentioned by E. Shelly Reid describes the idea of cohesiveness or “wholeness” of narratives and how a reader is “...encouraged to be suspicious of gaps or hesitations” (69). The Plague of Doves
“It [history] is like a river. From any vantage point, a river looks much the same day after day. But actually it is constantly flowing and changing…one day, when the banks are thoroughly weakened and the rains long and heavy, the river floods and bursts its banks, and may take a new course.” (Kay 1948)
History is a discipline based on textual accounts of the past however it became necessary to look closer. A group of French historians watched as countless historians drew the same conclusions from the same experiences time after time, divorcing themselves from the “new social scientist adventuring among the economies and societies of the present.” The Annales school is interested in a science of humanity, human activities. “The function of the historian is not to declare that such a thought is objectively right or wrong but to state, or to suggest, what circumstances, in a particular time, made it thinkable.” The scholars of the Annales school used non-historians as much
Montreal Massacre - Feminist Analysis The Montreal Massacre was a mass shooting that occurred at the École Polytechnique de Montréal in Montreal, Quebec on December 6, 1989. This tragedy resulted in 14 innocent women being murdered; another four and ten women being injured. The perpetrator, Marc Lépine, armed with a semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife, entered a mechanical engineering class and proceeded to instruct the men to leave the class but told the girls to stay on one side of the classroom. He then shot all nine women in the classroom after declaring he was “fighting feminism”.
Gargano, James W. “’The Black Cat’: Perverseness Reconsidered.” Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe’s Tales. Ed. William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971. 87-94. Print.
The presence of the two cats in the tale allows the narrator to see himself for who he truly is. In the beginning the narrator explains that his “tenderness of heart made him the jest of his companions”. (251) He also speaks of his love for animals that has remained with him from childhood into manhood. However, Poe contradicts this description of the narrator when he seems to become annoyed with the cat that he claims to love so much. While under the influence of alcohol the narrator is “fancied that the cat avoided his presence”(250) and as a result decides to brutally attack the cat. This black cat symbolizes the cruelty received by slaves from whites. The narrator not only “deliberately cuts one of the cats eyes from the sockets” (250) but he also goes on to hang the cat. Once the narrator successfully hangs the cat the tale begins to take a very dark and gothic-like turn. The racism and guilt of the narrator continues to haunt him once he has killed the black cat. Th...
Even though people say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” society still does it and
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Black Cat immerses the reader into the mind of a murdering alcoholic. Poe himself suffered from alcoholism and often showed erratic behavior with violent outburst. Poe is famous for his American Gothic horror tales such as the Tell-Tale Heart and the Fall of the House of Usher. “The Black Cat is Poe’s second psychological study of domestic violence and guilt. He added a new element to aid in evoking the dark side of the narrator, and that is the supernatural world.” (Womack). Poe uses many of the American Gothic characteristics such as emotional intensity, superstition, extremes in violence, the focus on a certain object and foreshadowing lead the reader through a series of events that are horrifying and grotesque. “The Black Cat is one of the most powerful of Poe’s stories, and the horror stops short of the wavering line of disgust” (Quinn).
In the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the themes of isolation and alienation are highly prevalent through the characters of Victor Frankenstein and his monster creation. Both characters experience self-isolation, loneliness, and separation from society. Isolation acts as a motif, and whether it is forced or chosen isolation, both victims suffer from the negative consequences which ultimately leads them to their unruly demise.