History & CultureMental model

Nobody ever woke up in the Middle Ages.

Periods are retrospective filing aids, not natural boundaries. In the 14th century Petrarch coined the idea of a dark intervening age in order to read his own time as a rebirth. The Italian and English Renaissances sit about 200 years apart, and "Dark Ages" is now considered too loaded for scholarly use.

Useful: For any period boundary, ask who drew it and what purpose it serves.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

BegriffeDenkwerkzeugEpochen

Difficulty:

Related cards

Chesterton's fence: don't remove what you don't understand.In 1929, G. K. Chesterton described a fence in the middle of a field. The modern reformer says: 'I …
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 …
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 …
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 …

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