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ISSUE48 - "The study of history places too much emphasis on individuals. The most significant events and trends in history were made possible not by the famous few, but by groups of people whose identities have long been forgotten."
WORDS: 599
Were the most significant events and trends in history made possible by the famous individuals and not the groups of people whose identities have long been forgotten?Giving a hasty reply like "Yes" or "No" is at stake,oversimpliyies this issue and conceals the intesting connotation far above who is the maker.
A few individuals do contribute a lot in siginificant events even sometimes play a key role in the attainments, such point of view occupied our mind for a long time. I concede that when we refer to the renaissance painters in Europe during the medieval period, Michaelongelo and Leonardo Da Vinci always came into our mind immediately,because of their excellent achivements in this realm; when we came to the discussion about the great names in the physics, Albert Einstein and Issac Netwon are always the first canditates, because of their foundational status in this field.Thomas Carlyle (1795 ­— 1881) , a Scottish essayist, satirist, and historian, whose work was highly influential during the Victorian era, once side (and I paraphrase): "The world history is just the biographies of the famous few. " This illustrates the point that the destiny of the human beings is in the grip of the famous individuals. But with the more resources of history available, this viewpoint is more contraversail.
The great man theroy, today, is out of date as the singular explanation for why things happen. Historiants look at other factors such as the economic, societal, techonolgical and enviromental which is just as or more significant to historical change. Historiants belive that a history which only follows the significant person, especially they standing in a political status,is a shallow view of the past, ignoring the entire goup of people as the part of the history. In fact, the early historiants in the 1950's who studied the prehistorial Europe shifed their focus on the political and social elite, which group maintain more than ninety percent of the records chronicled by contemporaries, to the large numbers in the society. Historiants can only base on the limited resources: birth, marriage, and death records. However, the descendants of them never give up this tantanic project and make more efforts to study the populace instead of individuals. Let's bring our discussion here to a more present and practical context, it can be given a concrete example: The historiants in Russia, researching the early historic details in their nation, began to take the masterpieces of Leo Tolstoy(1828-1910), such as "War and Peace" and " Anna Karenina"which are vivid depictions of Russian life in 19thcentury, at the very peak of realist fiction。
Finally,in this era of rapid social and technological change, the users of the internet has altered the essence of this informational history, controling the mass media and building a totally new democratic society on the net. Therefore,this tendency has led us to an epoch that common people can influence our world more easily. In 2006,all of the internet users defeated the American president George W. Bush and current President of theIslamic Republic of Iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ,winning the honor of the " Person of The Year" of TIME. Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace established by the users, present the upsurge of originative website. So I argue that history in the future will place much emphasis on the masses, who are the creators of our history.
In conclusion, we can never forget the factor that it is the group effort that made the difference during the process of the history. Any ignorance of the people's history or trampling over masses may narrow the view of the history study.
前一次段落有点没分好,大家辛苦了哦?
我发现自己例子中的名字,下次就又不会拼了。
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