History & CultureMental model

Presentism: judging the past by today's yardstick.

Presentism means judging people of the past as if they had your knowledge and your values. A doctor in 1750 who prescribed bloodletting wasn't stupid; he followed the best theory of his day. Historians first try to understand which options someone could even see at the time before passing judgement. That's not an acquittal, it's an order of operations.

Useful: For any past decision, ask: what did the person know, and what could they not have known?

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Denkwerkzeug Methode

Difficulty:

Related cards

Do great men make history, or does history make great men?In 1840, Thomas Carlyle declared that world history was 'the biography of great men'. Herbert …
Longue durée: reading history at three speeds.In 1949, the French historian Fernand Braudel distinguished three layers of time: events like …
Source criticism: four questions before you believe a source.Historians test every source with fixed questions: Who wrote it? When, and how close to the event? …
Why every collapse looks 'inevitable' in hindsight.Hindsight bias makes you treat an outcome you know as having been predictable. The fall of Rome …
Why the past seems to consist entirely of stone palaces.What you know of an era is what survived: stone churches rather than wooden huts, letters of the …
The trap of reading history as a road leading to us.In 1931, the historian Herbert Butterfield criticised 'Whig history': narratives in which …
"What if not?" is a measuring tool, not a game.To say how important a cause was, you have to ask what would have happened without it. In 1964 …
A fingerprint lies less often than a letter.Sources split into two kinds. Relics arise incidentally: tools, rubbish, invoices, fingerprints. …

Keep reading

This card belongs to the topic History & Culture. Every card is short, cites a source and can be saved – due ones come back by themselves later.

About Doomlearn · Projects · Legal notice · Privacy · Terms