Politics Of Indian History -2

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CABE adopts New Curriculum Framework

Special Correspondent

Recommendation for making Standard X board examination optional

NEW DELHI: The Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE) on Wednesday adopted the National Curriculum Framework-2005 and work will now begin in right earnest to bring out new textbooks in time for the next academic session. This was the second time CABE deliberated upon the NCF — drawn up by the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) — which was revised after the first meeting in June to factor in some of the concerns raised by members.

With reservations being expressed by many a member over some of the recommendations made in the NCF — particularly pertaining to making the Class X board examination optional, stress on local knowledge and the three-language formula — Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh said all the views aired at the CABE meeting would be taken into consideration while drawing up the syllabus and writing the textbooks.

To monitor the exercise of syllabus preparation and textbook writing, the Minister also announced that a monitoring committee.

Such a monitoring committee had been suggested by Mr. Singh on the opening day of the two-day CABE meeting itself as education ministers of BJP-ruled States walked out protesting against NCF being put to discussion without incorporating their suggestions.

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Here is a link to an essay What is History? from 11th edition of Encyclopedia Brittanica (1911 edition) before it got Americanized. I think its good to read to understand the thrust of politics of history. This was written when Britannia ruled the waves.

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What is History?
An Essay from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

The word history is used in two senses. It may mean either the record of events, or events themselves. Originally (see below) limited to inquiry and statement, it was only in comparatively modern times that the meaning of the word was extended to include the phenomena which form or might form their subject. It was perhaps by a somewhat careless transference of ideas that this extension was brought about. Now indeed it is the commoner meaning. We speak of the history of England without reference to any literary narrative. We term kings and statesmen the makers of history, and sometimes say that the historian only records the history which they make. History in this connection is obviotisly not the record, but the thing to be recorded. It is unfortunate that such a double meaning of the word should have grown up, for it is productive of not a little confusion of thought.

History in the wider sense is all that has happened, not merely all the phenomena of human life, but those of the natural world as well. It includes everything that undergoes change; and as modern science has shown that there is nothing absolutely static, therefore the whole universe, and every part of it, has its history. The discovery of ether brought with it a reconstruction of our ideas of the physical universe, transferring the emphasis from the mathematical expression of static relationships to a dynamic conception of a universe in constant transformation; matter in equipoise became energy in gradual readjustment. Solids are solids no longer. The universe is in motion in every particle of every part; rock and metal merely a transition stagc between crystallization and dissolution. This idea of universal activity has in a sense made physics itself a branch of history. It is the same with the other sciencesespecially the biological division, where the doctrine of evolution has induced an atttudc of mind which is distinctly historical.

But the tendency to look at things historically is not merely the attitude of men of science. Our outlook upon life differs ir just this particular from that of preceding ages. We recognize tht unstable nature of our whole social fabric, and are therefore more and more capable of transforming it. Our instittitions are no longer held to be inevitable and immutable creations. We do not attempt to fit them to absolute formulae, but continually adapt them to a changing environment. Even modern architecture, notably in America, reflects the consciousness of change. The permanent character of ancient or medieval buildings was fitted oniy to a society dominated by static ideals. Now the architect builds, not for all time, but for a set of conditions which will inevitably cease in the not distant future. Thus our whole society not only bears the marks of its evolution, but shows its growing consciousness of the fact in the most evident of its arts. In literature, philosophy and political science, there is the same historical trend. Criticism no longer judges by absolute standards; it applies the standards of the authors own environment. We no longer condemn Shakespeare for having violated the ancient dramatic laws, nor Voltaire for having objected to the violations. Each age has its own expression, and in judging each we enter the field of history. In ethics, again, the revolt against absolute standards limits us to the relative, and morals are investigated on the basis of history, as largely conditioned by economic environment and the growth of intellectual freedom. Revelation no longer appeals to scientific minds as a source of knowledge. Experience on the other hand is history. As for political science, we do not regard the national state as that ultimate and final product which men once saw in the Roman Empire. It has hardly come into being before forces are evident which aim at its destruction. Internationalism has gained ground in Europe in recent years; and Socialism itself, which. is based upon a distinct interpretation. of history, is regarded by its followers as merely a stage in human progress, like those which have gone before it. It is evident that Freemans definition of history as past politics is miserably inadequate. Political events are mere externals. History enters into every phaseof activity, and the economic forces which tirge society along are as much its subject as the political result.

In short the historical spirit of the age has invaded every field. The world-picture presented in this encyclopaedia is that of a dynamic universe, of phenomena in process or ceaseless change. Owing to this insistent change all things which happen, or seem to happen, are history in the broader sense of the word. The encyclopaedia itself is a history of them in the stricter sense, the description and record of this universal process. This narrower meaning is the subject of the rest of this article.

The word history comes from the Gr. lo-ropta, which was used by the lonians in the 6th century s.c. for the search for knowledge in the widest sense. It meant inquiry, investigation, not narrative. It was not until two centuries later that the historikos, the reciter of stories, superseded the /iistoren (to-rop~wv), the seeker after knowledge. Thus history began as a branch of scientific research,much the same as what the Athenians later termed philosophy. Herodotus himself was as much a scientific explorer as a reciter of narrative, and his life-long investigation was histori in his lonian speech. Yet it was Herodotus himself who first hinted at the new use of the word, applied merely to the details accumulated during a long search for knowledge. It is not until Aristotle, however, that we have it definitely applied to the literary product instead of the inquiry which precedes it. From Aristotle to modern times, history (Lat. historic) has been a form of literature, it is only in the scientific environment of to-day that we recognize once more, with those earliest of the forerunners of Herodotus, that history involves two distint operations, one of which, investigation, is in the field of science, while the other, the literary presentation, is in the field of art.

The history of history itself is therefore two-fold. History as art flourishes with the arts. It calls upon the imagination and the literary gifts of expression. Its history does not run parallel with the scientific side, but rather varies in inverse ratio with scientific activity. Those periods which have been dominated by the great masters of style have been less interested in the criticism of the historians methods of investigation than in the beauty of his rhetoric. The scientific historian, deeply interested in the search for truth, is generally but a poor artist, and his uncoloured picture of the past will never rank in literature beside the splendid distortions which glow in the pages of a Michelet or Macaulay. History the art, in so far as it is conditioned upon genius, has no single traceable line of development. Here the product of the age of Pericles remains unsurpassed still; the works of Herodotus and Thucydides standing along with those of Pheidias as models for all time. On the other hand, history the science has developed so that it has not only gained recognition among historians as a distinct subject, but it has raised with it a group of auxiliary sciences which serve either as tools for investigation or as a basis for testing the results. The advance in this branch of history in the 19th century was one of its greatest achievements. The vast gulf which lies between the history of Egypt by Herodotus and that by Flinders Petrie is the measure of itsachievement. By the mechanism now at his disposal the scienti~c explorer can read more history from the dust-heaps of Abydos than the greatest traveller of antiquity could gather from the priests of SaIs. In tracing the history of history we must therefore keep in mind the double aspect.

History itself, this double subject, the science and the art combined, begins with the dawn of memory and the invention of speech. It is wrong to term those ages pre-historic whose history has not come down to us, including in one category the pre-literary age and the literary whose traces have been lost. Even the pre-literary had its history, first in myth and then in. saga. The saga, or epos, was a great advance upon the myth, for in it the deeds of men replace or tend to replace the deeds of the gods. But we are stiji largely in the realm of imagination. Poetry, as Thucydides complained, is a most imperfect medium for fact. The bard will exaggerate or distort his story. True history, as a record of what really has happened, first reached maturity in prose. Therefore, although much of the past has been handed down to us in epic, in ballad and in the legends of folk-lore, we must turn from them to what became history in the narrower sense.

The earliest prose origins of history are the inscriptions. Their inadequacy is evident from two standpoints. Their permanence depends not upon their importance, but upon the durability of the substance on which they are inscribed. A note for a wedding ring baked into the clay of Babylon. has been preserved, while the history of the greatest events has perished. In the second place they are sealed to all but those who know how to read them, and so they lie forgotten for centuries while oral tradition flourishes,being within the reach of every man. It is only recently that archaeology, turning from the field of art, has undertaken to interpret for us this first written history. The process by which the modern fits together all the obtainable remains of an antiquity, and reconstructs even that past which left no written record, lies outside the field of this article. But such enlargement of the field of history is a modern scientific product, and is to be distinguished from the imperfect beginnings of historl~-writing which the archaeologist is able to decipher.

Next to the inscriptions,sometimes identical with them, are theearly chronicles. These are of various kinds. Family chronicles preserved the memory of heroic ancestors whose deeds in the earliest age would have passed into the keeping of the bards. Such family archives were perhaps the main source for Roman historians. But they are not confined to Rome or Greece. Genealogies also pass from the bald verse, which was the vehicle for oral transmission, to such elaborate tables as those in which Manetho has preserved the dynasties of Egyptian Pharaohs.

In this field the priest succeeds the poet. The temple itself became the chief repository of records. There were simple religious annals, votive tablets recording miracles accomplished at a shrine, lists of priests and priestesses, accounts of benefactions, of prodigies and portents. In some cases, as in Rome, the pontiffs kept a kind of register, not merely of religious history, but of important political events as well. Down to the time of the Gracchi (131 B.C.) the Pontifex Maximus inscribed the years events upon annual tablets of wood which were preserved in the Regia, the official residence of the pontiff in the Forum. These pontifical annals thus came to be a sort of civic history. Chronicles of the Greek cities were commonly ascribed to mythical authors, as for instance that of Miletus, the oldest, to Cadmus the inventor of letters. But they were continued and edited by men in. whom the critical spirit was awakening, as when the chroniclers of lonian towns began the criticism of Homer.

The first historians were the logographi of these lonian cities; men who carried their inquiry (histori) beyond both written. record and oral tradition to a study of the world around them. Their saying (logos) was gathered mostly from contemporaries; and upon the basis of a widened experience they became critics of their traditions. The opening lines of Hecataeus of Miletus begin. the history of the true historic spirit in words which read like a sentence from Voltaire. Hecataeus of Miletus thus speaks: I write as I deem true, for the traditions of the Greeks seem to me manifold and laughable. Those words mark an epoch in the history of thought. They are the introduction to historical criticism and scientific investigation. Whatever the actual achievement of Hecataeus may have been, from his time onward the scientific movement was set going. Herodotus of Heraclea struggled to rationalize mythology, and established chronology on a solid basis. An.d finally Herodotus, a professional story-teller, rose to the height of genuine scientific investigation. Herodotus inquiry was not simply that of an idle tourist. He was a critical observer, who tested his evidence. It is easy for the student now to show the inadequacy of his sources, and his failure here or there to discriminate between. fact and fable. But given the imperfect medium for investigation and the absence of an archaeological basis for criticism, the work of Herodotus remains a scientific achievement, as remarkable for its approximation to truth as for the vastness of its scope. Yet it was Herodotus chief glory to have joined to this scientific spirit an artistic sense which enabled him to cast the material into the truest literary form. He gathered all his knowledge of the ancient world, not simply for itself, but to mass it around the story of the war between the east and west, the Greeks and the Persians. He is first and foremost a story-teller; his theme is like that of the bards, a heroic event. His story is a vast prose epos, in which science is to this extent subordinated to art. This is the showing forth of the Inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, to the end that neither the deeds of men may be forgotten by lapse of time, nor the works, great and marvellous, which have been produced, some by Hellenes, some by Barbarians, may lose their renown, and especially that the causes may be remembered for which these waged war with one another (i.e. the Persian war).

In Thucydides a higher art than that of Herodotus was combined with a higher science. He scorned the story-teller who seeks to please the ear rather than to speak the truth, and yet his rhetoric is the culmination of Greek historical prose. He withdrew from vulgar applause, conscious that his narrative would be considered disappointing to the ear, yet he recast the materials out of which he constructed it in order to lift that narrative into the realm of pure literature. Speeches, letters and documents are reworded to be in tone with the rest of the story. It was his art, in fact, which really created the Peloponnesian war out of its separate parts. And yet this art was merely the language of a scientist. The laborious task of which he speaks is that of consulting all possible evidence, and weighing conflicting accounts. It is this which makes his rhetoric worth while, an everlasting possession, not a prize competition. which is heard and forgotten. -

From the sublimity of Thucydides, and Xenophons straightforward story, history passed with Theopompus and Ephorus into the field of rhetoric. A revival of the scientific instinct of investigation is discernable in Timaeus the Sicilian, at the end of the 4th century, but his attack upon his predecessors was the text of a more crushing attack upon himself by Polybius, who declares him lacking in critical insight and biased by passion. Polybius comments upon Timaeus reach the dignity of a treatise upon history. He protests against its use for controversial pamphlets wh.ich distort the truth. Directly a man assumes the moral attitude of al-i historian he ought to forget all considerations, such as love of ones friends, hatred of ones enemies.... He must sometimes praise enemies and blame friends. For as a living creature is rendered useless if deprived of its eyes, so if you take truth from History, what is left but an improfitable tale (bk. xii. 14). These are the words of a Ranke. Unfortunately Polybius, like most modern scientific historians, was no artist. His style is the very opposite of that of Isocrates and the rhetoricians. It is often only clear in the light of inscriptions, socloselydoes it keeptothe sources. Thestyle found noim,itator; history passed from Greece to Rome in the guise of rhetoric. In Dionysius of Halicarnassus the rhetoric was combined with an extensive study of the sources; but the influence of the Greek rhetoricians upon Roman prose was deplorable from the standpoint of science. Cicero, although he said that the duty of the historian is to conceal nothing true, to say nothing false, would in practice have written the kind of history that Polybius denounced. He finds fault with those who are non exornalores rerum sed tantum narralores. History for him is the mine from which to draw argument in oratory and example in education. It is not the subject of a scientific curiosity.

It should be noted before we pass to Rome that with the expansion of Hellenism the subject of historians expanded as well. Universal history was begun by Ephorus, the rhetorician, and formed the theme of Polybius and Deodorus. Exiled Greeks were the first to write histories of Rome worthy of the name. The Alexandrian Eratosthenes placed chronology upon the scientific basis of astronomy, and Apollodorus drew up the most important chronica of antiquity.

History-writing in Rome,except for the Greek writers resident there,was until the first half of the 1st century B.c. in the form of annals. Then came rhetorical ornamentation,and the Ciceronian era. The first Roman historian who rose to the conception of a science and art combined was Sallust, the student of Thucydides. The Augustan age produced in Livy a great popular historian and natural artist and a trained rhetorician (in the speeches),but as uncritical and inaccurate as he was brilliant. From Livy to Tacitus the gulf is greater than from Herodotus to Thucydides. Tacitus is at least a consummate artist, His style ranges from the brilliancy of his youth to the sternness and sombre gravity of age, passing almost to poetic expression in its epigrammatic terseness. Yet in spite of his searching study of authorities, his keen judgment of men, and his perception of underlying principles of moral law, his view was warped by the heat of faction, which glows beneath his external objectivity. After him Roman history-writing speedily degenerated. Suetonius Lives of the Caesars is but a superior kind of journalism. But his gossip of the court became the model for historians, whose works, now lost, furnish the main source for the Historic Augusta. The importance to us of this uncritical collection of biographies is sufficient comment on the decline of history-writing in the latter empire. Finally, from the 4th century the epitomes of Eutropius and Festus served to satisfy the lessening curiosity in the past and became the handbooks for the middle ages. The single figure of Ammianus Marcellinus stands out of this age like a belated disciple of Tacitus. But the world was changing from antique to Christian ideals just as he was writing, and with him we leave this outline of ancient history.

The 4th and 5th centuries saw a great revolution in the history of history. The story of the pagan past slipped out of mind, and in its place was set, by the genius of Eusebius, the story of the world force which had superseded it, Christianity, and of that small fraction of antiquity from which it sprang,the Jews. Christianity from the first had forced thinking men to reconstruct their philosophy of history, but it was only after thc Churchs triumph that its point of view became dominant in historiography. Three centuries more passed before the pagan models were quite lost to sight. But from the 7th century tc the 17thfrom Isidore of Seville and the English Bede for a thousand years,mankind was to look back along the line oi Jewish priests and kings to the Creation. Egypt was of interesi only as it came into Israelite history, Babylon and Nineveh wer to illustrate the judgments of Yahweh, Tyre and Sidon to reflect the glory of Solomon. The process by which the gentiles have been robbed of their legitimate history was the inevitable result of a religion whose sacred books make them lay figures for the history of the Jews. Rejected by the Yahweh who became the Christian God, they have remained to the present day, in Sunday schools and in common opinion, not nations of living men, with the culture of arts and sciences, but outcasts who do not enter into the divine scheme of the worlds history. When a line was drawn between pagan and Christian back to the creation of the world, it left outside the pale of inquiry nearly all antiquity. But it must be remembered that that antiquity was one in which the German nations had no personal interest. Scipio and the Gracchi were essentially unreal to them. The one living organization with which they came into touch was the Church. So Cicero and Pompey paled before Joshua and Paul. Diocletian, the organizing genius, became a bloodthirsty monster; and Constantine, the murderer, a saint.

Christian history begins with the triumph of the Church. With Eusebius of Caesarea the apologetic pamphlets of the age of persecutions gave way to a calm review of three centuries of Christian progress. Eusebius biography of Constantine shows what distortion of fact the father of Church history permitted himself, but the Ecclesiastical History was fortunately written for those who wanted to know what really happened, and remains to-day an invaluable repository of Christian antiquities. With the continuations of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, and the Latin manual which Cassiodorus had woven from them (the Historic tripart ita) , it formed the body of Church history during all the middle ages. An even greater influence, however, was exercised by Eusebius Chronica. Through Jeromes translation and additions, this scheme of this world~ chronology became the basis for all medieval world chronicles. It settled until our own day the succession of years from the Creation to the birth of Christ,fitting the Old Testament story into that of ancient history. Henceforth the Jewish past,that one path back to the beginning of the world,was marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and revelation. Jerome had marked it out; Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of St Martin, in his Historia sacra, adorned it with the attractions of romance. Sulpicius was admirably fitted to interpret the miraculous Bible story to the middle ages. But there were few who could write like him, and Jeromes Chronicle itself, or rather portions of it, became, in the age which followed, a sort of universal preface for the monastic chronicler. For a time there were even attempts to continue imperial chronicles, but they were insignificant compared with the influence of Eusebius and Jerome.

From the first, Christianity had a philosophy of history. Its earliest apologists sought to show how the world had followed a divine plan in its long preparation for the life of Christ. From this central fact of all history, mankind should continue through war and suffering until the divine plan was completed at the judgment day. The fate of nations is in Gods hands; history is the revelation of His wisdom and power. Whether He intervenes directly by miracle, or merely sets His laws in operation, He is master of mens fate. This idea, which has underlain all Christian philosophy of history, from the first apologists who prophesied the fall of the Empire and the coming of the millennium, down to our own day, received its classic statement in St Augustines City of God. The terrestrial city, whose eternity had been the theme of pagan history, had just fallen before Alari,~s Goths. Augustines explanation of its fall passes in review not only the calamities of Roman historycombined with a pathetic perception of its greatIiess,but carries the survey back to the origin of evil at the creation. Then over against this civi1a~ terrena he sets the divine city which is to be realized in Christendom. The Roman ~lmpire,the last general form of the earthly city,gives way slowly to the heavenly. This is the main thread of Augustines philosophy of history. The mathematica] demonstration of its truth was left by Augustine for his disciple, Paulus Orosius.

Orosius Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, writtes as a supplement to the City of God, is the first attempt at a Christian World History. This manual for the middle ages arranged the rise and fall of empires with convincing exactness. The history of antiquity, according to it, begins with Ninus. His realm was overthrown by the Medes in the same year in which the history of Rome began. From the first year of Ninus reign until the rebuilding of Babylon by Semiramis there were sixty-four years; the same between the first of Procas and the building of Rome. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years after each city was built, it was taken,Babylon by Cyrus, Rome by Alaric, and Cyrus conquest took place just when Rome began the Republic. But before Rome becomes a world empire, Macedon and Carthage intervene, guardians of Romes youth (tutor curatorque). This scheme of the four world-monarchies, which was to prevail through all the middle ages, was developed through seven books filled with the story of war and suffering. As it was Orosius aim to show that the world had improved since the coming of Christ, he used Trogus Pompeius war history, written to exalt Roman triumphs, to show the reverse of victory, disaster and ruin. Livy, Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius were plundered for the story of horrors; until finally even the Goths in Spain shine by contrast with the pagan heroes; and through the confusion of the German invasions one may look forward to Christendom,and its peace.

The commonest form of medieval historical writing was the chronicle, which reaches all the way from monastic annals, mere notes on Easter tables, to the dignity of national monuments. Utterly lacking in perspective, and dominated by the idea of the miraculous, they are for the most part a record of the trivial or the marvellous. Indi~iduaI historians sometimes recount the story of their own times with sober judgment, but seldom know how to test their sources when dealing with the past. Contradictions are often copied down without the writer noticing them; and since the middle ages forged and falsified so many documents,monasteries, towns and corporations gaining privileges or titles of possession by the bold use of them,the narrative of medieval writers cannot be relied upon unless we can verify it by collateral evidence. Some historians, like Otto of Freising, Guibert of Nogent or Bernard Gui, would have been scientific if they had had our appliances for comparison. But even men like Roger Bacon, who deplored the inaccuracy of texts, had worked out no general method to apply in their restoration. Toward the close of the middle ages the vernacular literatures were adorned with Villanis and Froissarts chronicles. But the merit of both lies in their journalistic qualities of contemporary narrative. Neither was a history in the truest sense.

<b>The Renaissance marked the first great gain in the historic sense, in the efforts of the humanists to realize the spirit of the antique world.</b> They did not altogether succeed; antiquity to them meant largely Plato and Cicero. Their interests were literary, and the un-Ciceronian centuries were generally ignored. Those in which the foundations of modern Europe were laid, which produced parliaments, cathedrals, cities, Dante and Chaucer, were grouped alike on one dismal level and christened the middle ages. The perspective of the humanists was only one degree better than that of the middle ages. History became the servant to literature, an adjunct to the classics. Thus it passed into the schools, where text-books still in use devote 200 pages to the Peloponnesian war and two to the Athens of Pericles.

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But if the literary side of humanism has been a barrier to the progress of scientific history, the discovery and elucidation of texts first made that progress possible. Historical criticism soon awoke. Laurentius Vallas brilliant attack on the Dona. tion of Constantine (1440), and TJlrich von Huttens rehabilitation of Henry IV. from monkish tales mark the rise of th new science. One sees at a glance what an engine of controversy it was to be; yet for a while it remained but a phase oi humanism. It was north of the Alps that it parted company witl~ the grammarians. Classical antiquity was an Italian past, thi German scholars turned back to the sources of their nationa history. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had discovere Otto of Freising and Jordanes. Maximilian I. encouraged thi search for manuscripts, and Vienna became a great humanistic centre. Conrad Celtes left his Germania illus-trata unfinished, but he had found the works of Hroswitha. Conrad Peutinger gathered all sorts of Chronicles in his room in Vienna, and published several,among them Gregory of Tours. This national movement of the 15th century was not paralleled in France or England, where the classical humanities reigned. The Reformation meanwhile gave another turn to the work of German scholars.

The Reformation, with its heated controversies, seems a strange starting-point for science, yet it, even more than the Renaissance, brought out scientific methods of historical investigation. It not only sobered the humanist tendency to sacrifice truth for aesthetic effect, it called for the documents of the Church and subjected them to the most hostile criticism. Luther himself challenged them. Then in the Magdeburg Centuries (1559-1574) Protestantism tried to make good its attack on the medieval Church by a great collection of sources accompanied with much destructive criticism. This gigantic work is the first monument of modern historical research. The reply of Cardinal Baronius (Annales ecclesiastici, I 5881697) was a still greater collection, drawn from archives which till then had not been used for scientific history. Baronius criticism and texts are faulty, though far surpassing anything before his day, and his collection is the basis for most subsequent ones,in spite of J. J. Scaligers refutation, which was to contain an equal number of volumes of the errors in Baronius.

The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard (I 5351573), Johannes Pistorius (1576-1608), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Meichior Goldast (1576-1635) and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (1670). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of correcting them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little progress,although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time.

France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilians Renaissance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was Andr Duchesne (1584 1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (Met hodus ad facilem /zistoriarum cognitionens, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. Few of those in the audiences of Moliere, returning home under the grey walls of St Germaindes-Prs, knew that within that monastery the men whose midnight they disturbed were laying the basis for all scientific history; and few of the later historians of that age have been any wiser. But when Luc dAchery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martne, Bouquet and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product Jean Mabillons treatise, Dc re diplomatica (1681), was due tc the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose Acid Sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (1643, &c., see BOLLANDISTSJ was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebrochs criticisms of the chronicle of St Denis, Mabillon prepared thi~ manual for the testing of medieval documents. Its canons ar the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomati (q.v), the touchstone of truth for medieval research. Henceforth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rule~ by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in medieva documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon implements. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any medieval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instruments. The great glossary of Ducange is still in enlarged editions the indispensable encyclopaedia of the middle ages. Chronology and palaeography were placed on a new footing by Dom Bernard de Montfaucons Palaeographia graeca (1708), the monumental Art de verifier les dates (3rd ed., 1818 183 I, in 38 vols.), and the Nouveau Trait de diplomatique (1750-1765) of Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain. The collections of texts which the Maurists published are too many and too vast to be enumerated here (see C. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographic historique, pp. 293 if.). Dom Bouquets Historiens de la Gaule et de Ia Francethe national repertory for French historians is but one of a dozen tasks of similar magnitude. During the 18th century this deep under-work of scientific history continued to advance, though for the most part unseen by the brilliant writers whose untrustworthy generalities passed for history in the salons of the old rgime. Interrupted by the Revolution, it revived in the fgth century, and the roll of honor of the French cole des Chartes has almost rivalled that of St- Germaindes-Prs.

The father of critical history in Italy was L. A. Muratori (1672-1750), the Italian counterpart of Leibnitz. His vast collection of sources (Rerum Italicarum scriptores), prepared amid every discouragement, remains to-day the national monument of Italian history; and it is but one of his collections. His output is perhaps the greatest of any isolated worker in the whole history of historiography. The same haste, but much less care, marked the work of J. D. Mansi (d. 1769), the compiler of the fullest collection of the Councils. Spain, stifled by the Inquisition, produced no national collection of sources during the x7th and 18th centuries, although Nicolas Antonio (d. 1684) produced a national literary history of the first rank.

England in the 16th century kept pace with Continental historiography. Henry VIII.s chaplain, John Leland, is the father of English antiquaries. Three of the most precious collections of medieval manuscripts still in existence were then begun by Thomas Bodley (the Bodleian at Oxford), Archbishop Matthew Parker (Corpus Christi at Cambridge), and Robert Cotton (the Cottonian collection of the British Museum). In Elizabeths reign a serious effort was made to arrange the national records, but until the end of the 18th century they were scattered in not less than fifteen repositories. In. the 17th and 18th centuries English scholarship was enriched by such monuments of research as ~Villiam Dugdales Monasticon, Thomas Madoxs History of the Exchequer, Wilkinss Concilia, and Thomas Rymers Feed era. But these works, important as they were, gave but little idea of the wealth of historical sources which the f9th century was to reveal in England.

In the i9th century the science of history underwent a sort of industrial revolution. The machinery of research, invented by the genius of men like Mabillon, was perfected and set going in all the archives of Europe. Isolated workers or groups of workers grew into national or international associations, producing from archives vast collections of material to be worked up into the artistic form of history. The, result of this movement has been to revolutionize the whole subject. These men of the factory-devoting their lives to the cataloguing of archives and libraries, to the publication of material, and then to the gigantic task of indexing what they have produced-have made it possible for the student in an American or Australian college to master in a few hours in his library sources of history which baffled the long years of research of a Martne or Rymer. The texts themselves have mostly become as correct as they can ever be, and manuals and bibliographies guide one to and through them, so that no one need go astray who takes the trouble to make use of the mechanism which is at his hand. For example, since the papal archives were opened, so many regesta have appeared that soon it will be possible to follow the letter-writing of the medieval popes day by day for century after centttry.

The apparatus for this research is too vast to be described here. Archives have been reformed, their contents catalogued or calendared; government commissions have rescued numberless documents from oblivion or destruction, and learned societies have supplemented and criticized this work and co-ordinated the results. Every state in Europe now has published the main sources for its history. The Rolls series, the Monumenta Germaniae historica, and the Documents indits are but the more notable of such national products. A series of periodicals keeps watch over this enormous output. The files and indices of the English Historical Review, Historische Zeitsc/zrift, Revue, historique, or American Historical Review will alone reveal the strength and character of historical research in the later 19th century.

Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together again. Psychology has been drawn upon to interpret the movements of revolutions or religions, anthropology and ethnology furnish a clue to problems to which the key of documents has been lost. Genealogy, heraldry and chronology run parallel with the wider subject. But the real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those traces of the past that still exist, the science of language (philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures, and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to classify and interpret the remains of the pre-historic age.

This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history-the recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary history began. The perspective stretches out as far the other side of Homer as we are this. The old provi.. dential scheme of history disintegrates before a new interest in the gentile nations to whose high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin or Hebrew sources, and now fifty centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His discoveries, co-ordinated and arranged in vast corpora inscriptionum, stand now alongside Herodotus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism. Medieval archaeology has, since Quicherat, revealed how men were living while the monks wrote chronicles, and now cathedrals and castles are studied as genuine historic documents.

The immense increase in available sources, archaeological and literary, has remade historical criticism. Rankes application of the principles of higher criticism to works written since the invention of printing (Kritik neuerer Gesc/iichtsschreiber) was an epoch-making challenge of narrative sources. Now they are everywhere checked by contemporary evidence, and a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source has discredited much of what had been currently accepted as true. This is true not only of ancient history, where last years book may be a thousand years out of date, but of the whole field. Hardly an old master remains an authoritative book of reference. Gibbon, Grote, Giesebrecht, Guizot stand to-.day by reason of other virtues than their truth. Old landmarks drop out of sighte.g. the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the coming of the Greeks to Italy in 1450, dates which once enclosed the middle ages. The perspective cha~gesthe Renaissance grows less and the midrile ages more; the Protestant Revolution becomes a complex of economics and politics and religion; the French Revolution a vast social reform in which the Terror was an incident, &c., &c. The result has been a complete transformation of history since the middle of the r9th century.

In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuets Histoire universelle. Voltaires reply to it in tile 18th (Essai sur les mivurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupesthe real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (16681 744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labors leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the i9th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heerens own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyles great man theory of history is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is Gods revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of eachJudaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity lovedoes not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal Which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.

In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritismrecognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws, and the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents. Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those historians whose indolence of thought or natural incapacity prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckles too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however Buckles theory received but little favor for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the economic theory of history. Accepting with reservation Feuerbachs attack on the Hegelian absolute idea, based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misre de la philosophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.

The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.

This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer vttempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operativethe Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambauds Histoire gnerale, or Lavisses Histoire de France, like Hunt and Pooles Political History of England, and Onckens Aligemeine Geschiclzte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and artsa tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaphsi historiam requiris, circumspice.

In the 17th century the Augustinian scheme of world history received its last classic statement in Bossuets Histoire universelle. Voltaires reply to it in tile 18th (Essai sur les mivurs) attacked its limitations on the basis of deism, and its miraculous procedure on that of science. But while there are foreshadowings of the evolutionary theory in this work, neither the philosophe historians nor Hume nor Gibbon arrived at a constructive principle in history which could take the place of the Providence they rejected. Religion, though false, might be a real historic force. History became the tragic spectacle of a game of dupesthe real movers being priests, kings or warriors. The pawns slowly acquired reason, and then would be able to regulate the moves themselves. But all this failed to give a satisfactory explanation of the laws which determine the direction of this evolution. Giovanni Battista Vico (16681 744) was the first to ask why there is no science of human history. But his lonely life and unrecognized labors leave him apart from the main movement, until his works were discovered again in the i9th century. It was A. L. H. Heeren who, at the opening of the 19th century, first laid that emphasis upon the economic factors in history which is to-day slowly replacing the Augustinian explanation of its evolution. Heerens own influence, however, was slight. The first half of the century (apart from the scientific activity of Pertz, Guizot, &c.) was largely dominated by the romanticists, with their exaggeration of the individual. Carlyles great man theory of history is logically connected with the age of Scott. It was a philosophy of history which lent itself to magnificent dramatic creations; but it explained nothing. It substituted the work of the genius for the miraculous intervention of Providence, but, apart from certain abstract formulae such as Truth and Right, knew nothing of why or how. It is but dealing in words to say that the meaning of it all is Gods revelation of Himself. Granting that, what is the process? Why does it so slowly reveal the Right of the middle ages (as in slavery for instance) to be the Wrong to-day? Carlyle stands to Bossuet as the sage to the myth. Hegel got no closer to realities. His idealistic scheme of history, which makes religion the keynote of progress, and describes the function of eachJudaism to typify duty, Confucianism order, Mahommedanism justice, Buddhism patience, and Christianity lovedoes not account for the facts of the history enacted by the devotees. It characterizes, not the real process of evolution, but an ideal Which history has not realized. Besides, it does not face the question how far religion itself is a product or a cause, or both combined.

In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritismrecognizing that life is conditioned by an environment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, developing through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminishing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws, and the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents. Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those historians whose indolence of thought or natural incapacity prevented them from attempting more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Now that the controversy has cleared away, we see that in spite of Buckles too confident formulation of his laws, his pioneer work in a great field marks him out as the Augustine of the scientific age. Among historians, however Buckles theory received but little favor for another generation. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the economic theory of history. Accepting with reservation Feuerbachs attack on the Hegelian absolute idea, based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensch ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the causes of that process of growth which constitutes the history of society are to be found in the economic conditions of existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misre de la philosophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relationships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its importance was borne in upon continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.

The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. It was so in Herodotus and in medieval chronicles. Modern historians began with politics. But as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy, the economic or sociological history gained ground. Histories of commerce and cities now rank beside those on war and kings, although there are readers still who prefer to follow the pennants of robber barons rather than to watch the slow evolution of modern conditions. The drum-and-trumpet history has its place like that of art, jurisprudence, science or philosophy. Only now we know that no one of these is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.

This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Historians no longer attempt to write world histories; they form associations of specialists for the purpose. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operativethe Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambauds Histoire gnerale, or Lavisses Histoire de France, like Hunt and Pooles Political History of England, and Onckens Aligemeine Geschiclzte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. The Cambridge history passes for the most part along the political crust of society, and seldom glances at the social forces within. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and artsa tendency noted before, to which this edition of the Encyclopaedia is itself a notable witness. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the warp and stress of change, one might adapt a famous epitaphsi historiam requiris, circumspice.

BIBLIOGRAPITY.See Ch. V. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique (2 vols., 1904). This forms the logical bibliography of this article. It is a general survey of the whole apparatus of historical research, and is the indispensable guide to the subject. Similar bibliographies covering sections of history are noted with the articles where they properly belong, e.g. in English medieval history the manual of Chas. Gross, Sources and Literature of English History; in German history the Quellenkunde of Dahlmann-Waitz (7th ed); for France the Bibliographie de lhistoire de France of C. Monod (antiquated, 1888), or the Sources de lhistoire de France so ably begun by A. Moliniers volumes on the medieval period. Perha1.s the sanest survey of the present scientific movement in history is the clear summary of Ch. V. Langlois and Ch. Seignobos, Introduction to the Study of History (trans. with preface by F. York Powell, London, 1898). Much more ambitious is E. Bernheims Lehrbuch der historischen Methode und der Geschichts philosophic mit Nac/jwejs der wjchti~sten Quellen und Ililfsmittel zum Studium der Geschichte (3rd and 4th ed, Leipzig, 1903). (J. F. S.)

[ramana]

Herodotus was a narrator (like Alberuni and others) while Thucydides was an analyst. As you can see Thuycidides writing the history of the Peloponnesian War lifted it from the fragmentary accounts and brought out the importance of that war in Greek hisory and the evloution of the city state of Athens and the later rise of Alexander.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->In Thucydides a higher art than that of Herodotus was combined with a higher science. He scorned the story-teller who seeks to please the ear rather than to speak the truth, and yet his rhetoric is the culmination of Greek historical prose. He withdrew from vulgar applause, conscious that his narrative would be considered disappointing to the ear, yet he recast the materials out of which he constructed it in order to lift that narrative into the realm of pure literature. Speeches, letters and documents are reworded to be in tone with the rest of the story. <b>It was his art, in fact, which really created the Peloponnesian war out of its separate parts.</b> And yet this art was merely the language of a scientist. The laborious task of which he speaks is that of consulting all possible evidence, and weighing conflicting accounts. It is this which makes his rhetoric worth while, an everlasting possession, not a prize competition. which is heard and forgotten. -
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Simlarly it was Savarkar who studied the events of 1857 and categorized it as the First War of Indian Independence. Why is that Thuycides is studied while Savarkar is reviled? This is the political question that has to be addressed by Indians and their well wishers.

Another section
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Christian history begins with the triumph of the Church. With Eusebius of Caesarea the apologetic pamphlets of the age of persecutions gave way to a calm review of three centuries of Christian progress. Eusebius biography of Constantine shows what distortion of fact the father of Church history permitted himself,</b> but the Ecclesiastical History was fortunately written for those who wanted to know what really happened, and remains to-day an invaluable repository of Christian antiquities. With the continuations of Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret, and the Latin manual which Cassiodorus had woven from them (the Historic tripart ita) , it formed the body of Church history during all the middle ages. <b>An even greater influence, however, was exercised by Eusebius Chronica. Through Jeromes translation and additions, this scheme of this world~ chronology became the basis for all medieval world chronicles. It settled until our own day the succession of years from the Creation to the birth of Christ,fitting the Old Testament story into that of ancient history. Henceforth the Jewish past,that one path back to the beginning of the world,was marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and revelation. Jerome had marked it out; Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of St Martin, in his Historia sacra, adorned it with the attractions of romance. Sulpicius was admirably fitted to interpret the miraculous Bible story to the middle ages. But there were few who could write like him, and Jeromes Chronicle itself, or rather portions of it, became, in the age which followed, a sort of universal preface for the monastic chronicler. For a time there were even attempts to continue imperial chronicles, but they were insignificant compared with the influence of Eusebius and Jerome.</b>

<b>From the first, Christianity had a philosophy of history. Its earliest apologists sought to show how the world had followed a divine plan in its long preparation for the life of Christ. From this central fact of all history, mankind should continue through war and suffering until the divine plan was completed at the judgment day. The fate of nations is in Gods hands; history is the revelation of His wisdom and power. Whether He intervenes directly by miracle, or merely sets His laws in operation, He is master of mens fate. This idea, which has underlain all Christian philosophy of history, from the first apologists who prophesied the fall of the Empire and the coming of the millennium, down to our own day, received its classic statement in St Augustines City of God. </b>The terrestrial city, whose eternity had been the theme of pagan history, had just fallen before Alari,~s Goths. Augustines explanation of its fall passes in review not only the calamities of Roman historycombined with a pathetic perception of its greatIiess,but carries the survey back to the origin of evil at the creation. Then over against this civi1a~ terrena he sets the divine city which is to be realized in Christendom. The Roman ~lmpire,the last general form of the earthly city,gives way slowly to the heavenly. This is the main thread of Augustines philosophy of history. The mathematica] demonstration of its truth was left by Augustine for his disciple, Paulus Orosius.

<b>Orosius Seven Books of Histories against the Pagans, writtes as a supplement to the City of God, is the first attempt at a Christian World History.</b> This manual for the middle ages arranged the rise and fall of empires with convincing exactness. <b>The history of antiquity, according to it, begins with Ninus. His realm was overthrown by the Medes in the same year in which the history of Rome began. From the first year of Ninus reign until the rebuilding of Babylon by Semiramis there were sixty-four years; the same between the first of Procas and the building of Rome. Eleven hundred and sixty-four years after each city was built, it was taken,Babylon by Cyrus, Rome by Alaric, and Cyrus conquest took place just when Rome began the Republic. But before Rome becomes a world empire, Macedon and Carthage intervene, guardians of Romes youth (tutor curatorque). This scheme of the four world-monarchies, which was to prevail through all the middle ages, was developed through seven books filled with the story of war and suffering. As it was Orosius aim to show that the world had improved since the coming of Christ, he used Trogus Pompeius war history, written to exalt Roman triumphs, to show the reverse of victory, disaster and ruin. Livy, Caesar, Tacitus and Suetonius were plundered for the story of horrors; until finally even the Goths in Spain shine by contrast with the pagan heroes; and through the confusion of the German invasions one may look forward to Christendom,and its peace.</b>
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So you can see how Islam got its Force of History. Its from the Roman Church. So now do we know why study history?
Even the Lefties who rewrite and reinterpret Indian history also have an agenda(No wonder Hiliare Belloc called Islam and Marxism heresies from outside) however their principal Marxist backers have collapsed and they are in the pocket of other dominant forces.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Bengal gets taste of Naipaul acid</b>
AMIT ROY
www.telegraphindia.com/10...227245.asp

London, Sept. 11: Intellectual life in Calcutta has been smothered by the communists, just as independent thinking in much of the Arab world has been destroyed by uneducated mullahs, Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul has argued in a hard-hitting article in the British magazine Tatler.

What is clear is that Naipaul has as much contempt for the communists of Calcutta as he does for those who run the madarsas in Pakistan and elsewhere.

<b>“Communist Calcutta rots and rots in the most shameful way; but the talking people there hold fast to their ancient Marxist half-truths,” rages Naipaul.</b>

His savaging of supposedly ignorant mullahs is not so different. <b>“More fearfully, for our interdependent world, the poorer clients of Arab faith in various countries have been made to believe that the substitute for education is the faith itself: more and more of it when things go wrong until, in the end, in the barren religious schools where the only book is the holy book, to be learnt by heart, boys can be trained by semi-literate men with beards, with a half-view of the world, to be foot soldiers of the faith, to fight religious wars everywhere, to be killing machines and human bombs: the final short cut to achievement, avoiding the pain and labour and shame of a world too hard to master.”</b>

when Naipaul writes about the need to understand Indian history, he seems to be referring to be something much deeper. Without that, he fears that India, for all its impressive economic achievements, could eventually be lost.
Indian writers and scientists flourish abroad, he says, but not the pursuit of historical truth. That has to happen at home. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>“History is more than an academic subject here. You might say it is too important to be left to historians. India vitally needs to arrive at an understanding of its own history. Every other great country has an understanding of itself. India doesn’t, and this lack makes it incomplete and vulnerable.” </span>
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[acharya]

Bill to monitor religious propaganda in textbooks

Special Correspondent

Ministry accepts CABE suggestion to form National Textbook Council

# CABE will double up as a forum where complaints regarding textbooks can be registered
# Penal provisions being considered

NEW DELHI: The Union Human Resource Development Ministry is working on legislation to set up a National Textbook Council to monitor school textbooks produced outside the government system — including Shishu Mandirs/Vidya Bharati schools run by the Sangh Paivar and madrasas — as recommended by the Central Advisory Board of Education (CABE).

Though still under consideration, the Ministry is planning to arm the proposed Council with executive powers to ensure that its recommendations carry weight and do not remain on paper alone. The draft legislation is ready and has been sent to the National Council of Educational Research and Training to secure legal opinion.

Some penal provisions are being considered though the Ministry is still working on the modalities of implementing them. Given the way the Indian education system is structured where the Government does not have a direct interface with schools, the penal provisions will in all likelihood be implemented through affiliating boards. Another issue that the Ministry is grappling with pertains to textbooks within the government stream. A case in point being the Gujarat Government school history books which eulogise Hitler.

By and large, the Ministry has accepted the recommendations of the CABE committee, headed by historian Zoya Hasan, in toto. The Council, as per the draft, will be an autonomous and independent body. It will double up as a forum where citizens can register complaints.
<b>
The CABE Committee had advocated a Textbook Council after it found that textbooks used in schools run by religious and social institutions contained a great deal of communal propaganda material.</b> The CABE committee scanned textbooks used by Vidya Bharati schools, including Shishu Mandirs, and madarsas across 11 States. It also examined textbooks brought out by private publishers.

In view of the very same difficulties that the Ministry is facing in ensuring that the recommendations of the Textbook Council are implemented, the CABE Committee has stopped short of making any suggestions on this front. According to it, the Council should be empowered to examine complaints and place its views in the public domain to generate a debate and sensitise people.

Besides, the Committee had suggested that CABE should set up a standing committee to keep itself updated on textbook-related issues.

[acharya]

History books court controversy again

Abraham Thomas / New Delhi

Reference to plundering Jats, beef-eating Brahmins hurts sentiments-------- The Delhi High Court has asked the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to explain why its history textbooks be not withdrawn for carrying objectionable content against the Brahmin and Jat community of the country.

The issue came up for consideration after the Arya Jat Mahasabha and former deputy mayor Mahesh Chandra Sharma filed separate applications in a public interest litigation pending before court.

The petitioners alleged that the history textbooks introduced by NCERT for Class VI-XII sought to show the Brahmin and Jat communities in a bad light. While Jats were depicted as plunderers, Brahmins were shown sacrificing cows and being beef eaters.

In his application, Mr Sharma alleged that in the Class XI history textbook, written by Ram Sharan Sharma, there was a specific reference to the Brahmin community who were accused of sacrificing cows on a large scale. Further in a Class VI history book, authored by historian Romila

Thapar it was written that Aryans and Brahmins offered beef to guests as a mark of honour. This had hurt the religious sentiments of Hindus for whom the cow is a sacred animal.

The Division Bench of Justice Vijender Jain and Justice Rekha Sharma while taking cognizance of these facts asked the NCERT to respond within four weeks. The court had earlier issued notices to NCERT, the Central Board of Secondary Education and the Union Ministry for Human Resources Development, after a petition was filed by five persons who challenged the NCERT's decisions to come out with revised textbooks.

The petitioners, represented by senior counsel RP Bansal told the court that in 2000, a National Curriculum Framework of Secondary

Education (NCFSE) was framed and implemented by NCERT based on which a syllabus was prepared. When the same was challenged in Supreme Court, NCERT gave an undertaking that owing to objectionable remarks against certain communities in the textbooks available in schools, the same would be withdrawn and fresh textbooks issued in accordance with the NCFSE-2000. But NCERT came out with the old textbooks yet again.

The Arya Jat Mahasabha claimed that the Class XII history textbooks contained derogatory remarks against the Jat community. Annexing portions of the text, the Jat Mahasabha stated, that school children were taught that Jats were plunderers and changed sides to suit their advantage, Taking objection to the same, the Jats demanded the deletion of the said portions. The court referred their matter to NCERT asking them to prepare a detailed response by December 7, the next date of hearing.

[Guest]

[quote=acharya,Oct 27 2005, 09:22 AM]
History books court controversy again

Abraham Thomas / New Delhi

Reference to plundering Jats, beef-eating Brahmins hurts sentiments----

**********



History is a subject that should teach students to hone their analytical and critical faculties.

1. BEEF:

In today’s context this is found to be hurtful to most Hindus.

Yet it is undeniable in ages gone past, and the ancient literature does indicate that, meat eating and beef eating was prevalent.

The ancient Indian texts, Rig Veda etc contain references to this, and the Vedic deity Indra too is referred to as eating beef.

Mores changed, and most Hindus will not eat beef, though some do, especially when abroad. A lighter comment came from one individual, who aid “ Foreign cows are not holy cows”

If a community does not eat beef today, and considers it against their religious beliefs to do so, there is nothing wrong with respecting such sentiments and not needlessly rubbing the salt in.

The question really becomes when and at what grade level/age such material should be taught. This material is then fine at a university level, but does it really need to be emphasized or taught a school level?


2. THE JATS:

The Indian history text books ( and consequently non Indian textbooks)are either devoid of Jat history or dismissive, and the few references that show up are disparaging.

In this case it is not matter of hurting sentiments, but rather of bringing out their history and contributions to the Indian society and culture over the last few thousand years.

The references to Jats are contained only in the History of India texts in the medieval period, when the Muslim Mughal rule was in force.

The summary description:

“ They are shown have rebelled against “ Imperial Authority” and looted Imperial military governors, and military convoys circa 1669- 1750 CE. They are supposed to have made the region Agra to Mathura, Dholpur ( the area known as Braj) unsafe for travel. The took sides in the intra-Muslim conflicts and played politics. They also carved out a short lived state of Bharatpur in the UP/Rajastan area, south of Agra. ”

This in a nutshell of what is aught to our children and students today, and it was no different when I was in University some 35 years ago.

My own experience was that I simply could not find any information about my people - the Jats.

Now I have nothing against such a characterization, as long as it is factual and complete.

The facts are a little different.

The Jats have been around for thousands of years and do not suddenly appear in the medieval period as peasants, ryots or serfs to the Muslims/Rajputs.

They were/are fiercely independent and republican, mindful and tolerant of all communities who lived with them, and their social, spiritual, and religious beliefs.

It is they who led the resistance to the Islamic invaders, and most critically, kept the area 300 miles around Delhi out of the clutches of the Muslim Mughals and their religion. It is their valour, and willing to sacrifice their lives, that kept the Hindu scared places- Mathura, Brindaban, Haridwar, and Rishikesh safe from annihilation by the Islamicists..

These places wee not saved because, some priests were singing their chants in the temple! There is not one single instance of any Hindu Rajput Raja, from Rajastan to Kangra or Kashmir, who came to the defence of these sacred places. The Rajput is found instead to be making war on the people of Braj, in league with his Islamic masters at Delhi, not defending it.

The question really becomes, why the Jats are treated so denigrated in Indian History textbooks?

Sadly Indian society is a casteist society, and those who wrote our history, as it is taught today, saw it to their advantage to disparage the Jats, not seeing that it is themselves and the larger Indian society that would suffer in the process.

From Muslim chroniclers, one expects this, as the Jats did not roll over and dies, and gave them no rest.

When Hindu writers R S Sharma, Mahajan, K S Lal etc show an anti Jat bias, for whatever their petty casteist ends, one does experience disappointment.

It is not that the Jats did not record their history. They did, as best as they could, amidst the continual war they were engaged in.

To analyze this, and change this we formed the Yahoo Jathistory group, to bring out and put Jat history in its proper perspective.


The is open to all, is academically oriented, and has members who come from a cross section of communities, religions, professions, including academics, and countries.

[edited: Yahoo link removed. Comments and feedback can be soliticted on this forum - Admin]
Comments and feedback invited.


Ravi Chaudhary

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The ancient Indian texts, Rig Veda etc contain references to this, and the Vedic deity Indra too is referred to as eating beef.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

Which passage of Rig Veda is that? Nothing anything against beef eating or non-beef eating Hindus but this fact was challenged on national TV to famous historian Pannikar who hasn't responded till date. Details of this episode could be found in politics of history thread.

[Guest]

Ravi Chaudhary,
Read this
Link
Link

I hope this will enlighten you. Its easy to creat myth and live in mythical world of Macaulay.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-Mudy+Oct 27 2005, 10:20 PM-->QUOTE(Mudy @ Oct 27 2005, 10:20 PM)<!--QuoteEBegin-->Ravi Chaudhary,
Read this
Link
Link

I hope this will enlighten you. Its easy to creat myth and live in mythical world of Macaulay.
[right][snapback]40171[/snapback][/right]
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
I am not here to try and prove that Beef eating was rampant among the Vedic people, or the later Hindus.

To me, personally, it is a non-issue.

If my ancestors beef, some eons ago, so they did! We do not do so now? Mores change, customs change, beliefs change.

Among the Jats, cow slaughter is taboo, and so is beef eating. Even the rumor can start off a riot.

Swami Dayanand, who is quoted in one of the articles, started the Arya Samaj, and his ideas fitted quite seamlessly into Jat mores that already existed. The Arya Samaj has been in the forefront of stopping cow slaughter, and bringing Muslims back into the fold of Hinduism. Many of their members have paid the price for that with their llives.

E.g. even in 1668, Gokul, when he took the pledge to fight and free the Braj of the oppression of te Muslim moguls, took 5,000 people, attacked the Muslim officials in Mathura, killed them, and stopped cow slaughter in the Temples, and killed the butchers.

For his pains, he was later hacked to death limb by limb.

I am looking at this phenomena, if I may call it that, from a technical historical angle.

There are references to cow/bull eating in the ancient texts. Different people interpret these verses differently.

My point is simply is that even if were proved that beef eating was prevalent in ancient times, something that D N Jha and Co are/were trying to do, let them, what exactly is the big deal?

I am sure our ancient civilization, can handle this storm in a tea cup!
Best regards
Ravi Chaudhary

[Guest]

Ravi,

The issue is not whether beef eating is moral or immoral? Nor is the issue pertaining to your position (or mine for that matter) on beef eating.

If there are claims being made left right center that RigVedas preached/advocated eating beef, surely one shouldn’t have difficulty pointing to it. If you hold that position or belief, perhaps you will. Certainly historians like Pannikar or Jha for that matter have not been able to put their money where their mouth is on this issue. Or is it not fair to question their academic honesty? Some other writings of Jha are questioned in this very thread, please spend some time reading it.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->There are references to cow/bull eating in the ancient texts. Different people interpret these verses differently.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
First let's see if the exact ancient texts on this issue. Then we can see if it's an issue related to interpretation or a propogation of some myth for those with an agenda.

Just curious, have you read "Eminent Historians" by Arun Shourie?

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->My point is simply is that even if were proved that beef eating was prevalent in ancient times, something that D N Jha and Co are/were trying to do, let them, what exactly is the big deal?

I am sure our ancient civilization, can handle this storm in a tea cup!<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Its a nonsense created by Jholawalla, so either stay in dream land of Jhollawalla who can even deny existance of their own mother or go for facts written and well researched by honest historian and our own religious text.
Choice is yours.

[Guest]

Mudy,

What if this Jha or Pannikar types comes up tomorrow with - '<i>Hey it's no big deal if xxxx (p*** be upon him) was a connoisseur of choicest pork delicacies, surely a community that's lasted 1400 years can handle it, don't sweat, it's just tsunami in tea cup</i>"
What do you think will happen? Methinks, that very tea cup will be rammed up his you-know-where before one could cry 'ICHR' (Indian Council of Historical Research)

[Guest]

Viren , Mudy

I did not mean to upset you.

I am familiar with Dr D N Jha, and Shourie's writing too.

One cannot stop people like Jha writing nonsense. All I am suggesting is , not to get overly worked up about it.

Better concentrate on bringing out your own version, laying it open for critical analysis, debating it out, and then disseminating it.

Media, like this site are very important for that very reason!!


Take care

Ravi.

[Guest]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->One cannot stop people like Jha writing nonsense. All I am suggesting is , not to get overly worked up about it.
Better concentrate on bringing out your own version,
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
When they are writing we should keep on telling they are jerk and one should not ignore them.
We are doing our job, which includes bringing facts in front and exposing joker historians.

[Guest]

Ravi,

What's history but a fable agreed upon, right? We nod our heads and accept nonsense since it's either inconsequential or not relevant to our daily life and next thing we know - Aurangazeb is most benevelont ruler, Jaichand is hero, Jizziya was a tax relief and Vedas preached bovine diet.

The issue is that false myths are being propogated by people with an agenda and educated masses let it pass.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->One cannot stop people like Jha writing nonsense<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Yes one can. All we have to do is question his academic honesty and integrity about his work. I'm surprised that someone familiar with the works of people like Pannikar, Jha, Thappar, Irfan Habib, Satish Chandra etc is NOT worked about it. These people are not some looneys ranting in a letter to editor but people with tremondous influence in terms of shaping/molding the minds of young kids with fake history.

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Better concentrate on bringing out your own version, laying it open for critical analysis, debating it out, and then disseminating it.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Mudy's pointed to some links put out by India Forum on the subject. Feel free to dissect it for critical analysis and debate it here. Feel free to even dissmeninate it in your yahoogroup if you feel fit.

But if you state for a fact that something is said in vedas, I'll humbly request you to point it out to me since I haven't found it till date - and I've searched. Till then if you can't stop Jha's opionion on this little issue, you can atleast stop dissmeninating his half baked theories.

[Guest]

Pioneer.com
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>Jaundiced history </b>
The Pioneer Edit Desk
In an ideal situation, the state should not get involved with the writing of textbooks, especially those dealing with history. But the situation that prevails in India is far from ideal - although we claim to be an open, democratic society, the state continues to play a domineering role in deciding which child should read what about whom.

The control exercised by Government over the drafting of school syllabus and the writing of textbooks is a leftover of the era when <b>India blindly aped the manner in which Stalin and his successors sought to shape Soviet society to fit their twisted worldview and implement their venomous agenda</b>. The Soviet empire no longer exists, but its admirers in New Delhi struggle on with their enterprise to taint young minds and prejudice children against their own heritage and history.

Ironically, this evil enterprise has survived the change of political guard in the corridors of power. If the Congress is guilty of being the original sinner, the BJP also stands charged with not taking decisive action to put an end to the loathsome state patronage that enables charlatans to masquerade as know-all historians.

Hopefully, the writing of history to suit the insidious agenda of 'historians' and their political masters will no longer remain an indisputable right of the regime of the day, provided the Delhi High Court takes a PIL challenging the contents of school history textbooks to its logical conclusion. After the BJP-led NDA Government's anaemic attempt to cleanse school-level history of its obvious flaws and motivated interpretations, the Congress-led UPA has struck back with renewed vengeance.

Leftist historians who came to dominate academia because of their 'secular' credentials are back in business with the blessings of Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh whose perverted sense of nation and nationalism merits nothing more than pity and contempt.

Hence the absurdity of introducing textbooks that claim <b>Brahmins slaughtered cows and ate beef, and that Jats were plunderers</b>. Ram Sharan Sharma and Romila Thapar, authors of the two books whose objectionable contents have been questioned in court, have perfected the art of sanitising India's history of uncomfortable facts about the horrors inflicted by invaders from the North and West.

<b>And while heaping praise on those who conquered Hindu India with the help of the sword, they have skilfully injected factoids that are open to various interpretations.</b> By using school textbooks to preach their version of history, sanctified by the state, <b>they and their ilk strive to achieve the twin purpose of belittling Hindus and Hinduism as well as burdening children with a guilt complex that they will carry for the rest of their lives.</b>

A minuscule section of those who study history in school pick up this subject in college or university. Hence, they never get to contest the misinformation that is force-fed to them in their formative years. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>Rather than being taught how to nourish the culture and civilisation which they have inherited, they are encouraged to hate and disown their own past and grow up into deracinated Indians, a scheme that fits perfectly into the Marxist gameplan and the Congress's despicable politics. </span>

This is not to suggest the straitjacketing of history and limiting the scope of interpretation. Those who study history at the graduate or post-graduate level can deal with the complexities of historiography. Children should be exempt from the excesses of our historians - they have the right to look at the world through kaleidoscopes.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[acharya]

<b>PLEASE discuss Jha's book in another thread.
Any detials discussion has to be done in another thread.</b>