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一.历史的定义:
The term "history" has now come to be applied to accounts of events that are narrated in a chronological order, and deal with the past of mankind.
Learning by inquiry about the past of mankind was later developed into a discipline by the Greek historians Thucydides and Heredeotus (who is popularly known as the father of History? E. H. Carn defined history as an "unending dialogue between the present and the past." Jawaharlal Nehru observed that man’s growth from barbarism to civilization is supposed to be the theme of history." Will Durant called history "a narrative of what civilized men have thought or done in the past time."
World history is primarily concerned with the evolution of mankind. It traces the whole story of man as well as of his progress in civilization a culture from the dim past up to the present day. It indicates his failures and his successes, describes his laws and his wars, and reveals his religions and his arts. It gives an account of the significant developments that took place in the past with reference to the countries and the men and women who played a noteworthy part. Thomas Carlyle, a famous historian of the French revolution regards world history as the "biography of great men."
The importance of history is in its capacity to help one to draw conclusions from the past events. It may be said that history is to the human race, what memory is to each man. It sheds the light of the past upon the present, thus helping one to understand oneself, by making one acquainted with other peoples. Also, as one studies the rise and fall of empires and civilizations, the lessons of the past help one to avoid the pitfalls of the present.
History makes one life richer by giving meaning to the books one reads, the cities one visits or the music one hears. It also broadens one outlook by presenting to one an admixture of races, a mingling of cultures and a spectacular drama of the making of the modern world out of diverse forces.
Another importance of history is that it enables one to grasp one relationship with one past. For example if one wonders why the U.S. flag has 48 stars or why Great Britain follows monarchy, one has to turn to history for an answer.
History is of immense value to social scientists engaged in research. Thus the political scientist doing research on the parliamentary form of government, has to draw his materials from the treasure trove of history.
It preserves the traditional and cultural values of a nation, and serves as a beacon light, guiding society in confronting various crises. History is indeed, as Allen Nerins puts it, "a bridge connecting the past with the present and pointing the road to the future."
二.历史的价值:
THE VALUE OF HISTORY IS NEITHER THAT WHICH IS PRESERVED NOR THAT WHICH IS WRITTEN. RATHER, THE VALUE OF HISTORY IS THAT WHICH SERVES TO IMPROVE OUR LOT IN THE FUTURE.
三.历史的重要性:
The Importance of History
A couple of years ago, my father had come down to visit us for the week, and he and I were having breakfast at a local restaurant. The waitress brought me a stack of three pancakes and I got down to business. I started by lifting up the top two pancakes and buttering the bottom pancake. Then I let the middle pancake drop on to the bottom pancake and buttered the middle pancake. Then I let the top pancake drop on top of the middle pancake and buttered the top pancake. Having completed this task, I poured syrup over the stack of pancakes until it almost came over the side of the plate.
By the time I had finished this operation, my dad was laughing out loud. "That's exactly the same way your mother always had to eat her pancakes!"
I have to confess that in the 42 years I got to spend on this planet with my mother, I had never once thought of her as a pancake eater. Over the years, I am sure I have eaten hundreds and hundred of pancakes that my mom fixed me, but I can't ever recall seeing her eat pancakes. Of course, we were just doing our jobs; moms fix pancakes and kids eat the pancakes. I am also sure that Mom never taught me how to eat pancakes, the way she taught me how to tie my shoes, and how to drive a car. No, I have to perform this operation each and every time I eat a stack of pancakes strictly because I can't help being my mother's son.
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In much the same way, we can say that a nation behaves the way it does because it can't help its own ancestry, geographical location, and history.
The colonists who founded the United States of America were mostly descended from white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. These ancestors had come to the different colonies for various reasons, but almost always of their own free will. Some, though, had come as indentured servants and some had been brought from Africa to serve as human slaves. Some of the first Americans' ancestors had lived in North America for centuries: the so-called Indians. From the early 1800s on, people from all around the world poured into the United States to become Americans, throwing their stock into the great American melting pot. We live today in an America which rightly celebrates and nurtures its diversity. But we cannot help the fact that our nation was founded by a very un-diverse group of men with very specific ideas. Some of these ideas were pretty awful: the tolerance for human slavery, the absence of women's rights, the belief that the Indians were not quite human. We are still fighting the consequences of these wrongs today. Still, by far the greater part of our Founders' ideas were almost miraculously constructive: the first great experiment in government that actually worked as designed.
The United States did not always extend from sea to shining sea. As originally founded, America's western boundary was actually the Mississippi River; Canada was to the north and Spanish Florida was to the south. Unsurprisingly for a nation of immigrants, the American people was restless. Even before the American Revolution, colonists looking for new land defied British laws and settled on the west side of the Allegheny Mountains. Sometimes the boundaries were expanded by purchase, sometimes through diplomacy, and sometimes through the use of raw force. The United States was pretty much granted a free hand in this process because North America was too far away from Europe for the British, French, or Spanish to have any real clout. The Americans began to see their nation as having a "manifest destiny" to civilize North America, but the definition of "civilized" was open to question. More than anything else, the American Civil War arose from a dispute over whether the new territories to the west would become free or slaveholding states; once slavery was abolished and the Union restored, the Indians bore the brunt of the Americans' drive westward. And once the western frontier closed, America began to look outward.
Important as it is for us to understand who we were as Americans before we understand who we are as Americans, we tend to have a rather fuzzy sense of our nation's history. Part of the problem is the time factor. Old as I am, I'm not old enough to recall the American Revolution. At the time, my ancestors were all still either in Great Britain or in Poland, and neither side of my family made it to the United States until the 1850s. Another problem is that a historical fact can be, and often is, presented believably with two completely opposed meanings. As a kid growing up in Wisconsin, I was taught that the Civil War was fought because the Northern states wanted to free the slaves and the Southern states wanted to keep them. My wife, growing up in Tennessee, was taught that the Civil War was fought because the Southern states got tired of the Northern states lording over them. The truth lies somewhere in between: slaveowners were a minority in the South, as abolitionists were in the North, and the real source of the war was the Founders' unwillingness to take the question head on when the Constitution was drafted. Our nation's history is full of such cases where, if we really want to understand ourselves as a nation, we have to set aside what we were told or taught to believe, and re-examine critically what actually happened and why.
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Some people, myself included, love the study of history for its own sake and enjoy exploring historical parallels in detail. More than two decades of teaching college has taught me that the majority of students don't love it quite as much as I do. Some students may even feel about the study of history the way I have always felt about the study of mathematics and the natural sciences: a cruel and refined type of torment. But a historical appreciation of our nation's role in the world is not merely optional today. The United States is making history literally every day, which means that you and I are literally living history each and every day. Moreover, if we are practicing the involved level of citizenship called for by Missouri State's statewide Public Affairs Mission, our own actions and decisions are contributing to this history. We owe it to our nation and to ourselves to go about this process with the best preparation we can acquire. As you have no doubt discovered during your time at Missouri State, preparation for involved citizenship is a complex process involving the study of many different disciplines and the comparison of many different viewpoints. Still, the study of history is the cornerstone of this preparation.
Only then can we examine the stack of pancakes sitting before our nation today, and decide whether to eat them the old way or whether we need a new way.
四.历史对我们的作用:
Importance of History in Our Life
When the working day is over and you have spare time to sit in the living room in front of the TV with a cup of hot chocolate, we think about the events that happen during the day and the things that we didn’t manage to do. We may regret or file genuine happiness and satisfaction, but everything we do is in the past, its history. Nobody will reject the fact that history is one of the most important out of the other disciplines. To know other subjects we are supposed to learn history and use it to our profit and prosperity. History gives us the “today”, by which we mean all the things we use to make our lives easier and more comfortable. History is not only a college book or an article or a news paper published three hundred years ago, it is every single thing that we’ve experienced, our own history, united with others. The beginning of the history comes not only from the first record of human existence but from the first trace, a footprint of a first creature with abstract thinking.
We pose ourselves with questions daily. Where do we come from? What are we destined to do? What are me and the surrounding? These questions may sound very philosophical and practically useless, but still sometimes we lye sleepless in bed thinking about what awaits you next day. If to take a closer look at the events that we consider history, we may find these answers easily. There is a hypothesis about things running in the circle. Old things return to change something new. Here we even can apply a proverb “Something new is fairly forgotten old”. I think it is also the reason for us to learn history and to predict, or at least try, the future and your role in it. When do people usually start to learn history? Not out of the first history book of course. The learning process starts when you hear the world famous “once upon a time” from your granny or father. This is the history of your family, you are to know perfectly well and understand the importance of knowing it.
At school and at the university you learn history, weather you like it or not. Some of us become excited and read piles and piles of history books and usually get best results in writing history essays. Some consider this to be nonsense, used only to waist our time. But what is the way your outlook and your ideology were formed? According to the common sense, out of history. It is the biggest treasure of ours and we have to value it. We take lessons from famous scientists and technicians that lived even hundreds of years before our grandparents were born. Their lives are like a history essay, short revision of a nice old story. We use their experience and their inventions daily, even every hour. It is very important for us to show respect to those who left us priceless works that we enjoy every day, watching plays in theatres and reading books. We don’t want to be ungrateful for we are also to leave a trace in history. What kind of trace, will depend on our attitude towards what we do and the knowledge of history, the inheritage we are to pass to our posterities.
Tyler Benson is a senior writer of BestEssays.com - Custom Term Paper writing service. He has 17 years of experience as the professor at several universities. Tyler Benson has been providing competent assistance to students in writing history essays at during all his remarkable teaching experience. His example of a proper history essay can be found in several guides on how to write. |
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发表于 2006-8-27 17:13:31
发表于 2006-8-27 17:24:10
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