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Date: 2015-10-07; view: 466.

... The author of a general historical book is bound to take arbi­trary decisions about what to put in and what to leave out, where to begin and where to end. Some of the gaps are the result of my own ig­norance, of physics for example, or of technical economic history. Other gaps are the result of lack of space: in discussing intellectual and artistic developments 1 have limited myself to those which seem to me to have affected or reflected the quality of European society and the presuppositions of its members. And the result has been that some of the greatest imaginative writers, painters and musicians, as well as the most original natural scientists, have not been mentioned. On the other hand, I have tried to relate these developments to the political and social history of the period, rather than treating them separately.

All books reflect the interests and tastes of the writer, but they are also, especially if dealing with contemporary history, influenced by the author's social, economic and national status... Yet one of the jus­tifications for any kind of historical writing is that it enable the writer and the reader to make the effort to transcend his own limitations. History, like art, offers us an opportunity to enlarge our own experi­ence.

But if history is like art, it is also like psycho-analysis. Just as the psycho-analyst helps us to face the world by showing us how to face the truth about our own motives and our own personal past, so the contemporary historian helps us to face the present and the future by enabling us to understand the forces, however shocking, which have made our world and our society what it is.

Finally any general work which attempts a broad synthesis of a long and crowded period of history inevitably imposes a pattern on what he describes. Each sentence must compress, and so distort the events and ideas which it summarises. Moreover, it is impossible to avoid what W. Llanger has called “the greatest mistake the historian could make... to construct a neat, logical pattern when in actual fact everything was confusion and contradiction^”... And these confusion and contradiction are even more noticeable a feature of contempo­rary history than of earlier history. Every day new evidence becomes available, and new research is being published disapproving our as­sumptions and forcing us to revise our ideas.

... For the more recent past we do not know the outcome of histor­ical events in which we are still personally involved. At least we can be aware of the endlessly unpredictable and surprising turns which histo­ry can take and share the excitement of feeling that we too are part of history, and whether we like it or not we are caught up in the events as important as any in the European past.

Compiled from " Europe Since 1870'' by James Joll

1.7 Summarize the text in a paragraph of about 200 words or speak on the topic "The methods and sources of historiography".