The idealists rightly pay attention to these factors. Where they go wrong is in claiming decisive importance for them in the total process of historical determination. Their method confines their analyses to the outer layers of the social structure so that they remain on the surface of events. Science has to delve into the nuclear core of society where the real forces which determine the direction of history are at work. This topic examines the way the language and practice of politics, colonialism, nationalism and citizenship have been gendered. It introduces students to work contesting narrow understandings of political participation to uncover the way women have exercised political power both formally and informally, and challenged their political exclusion. The intersections of race and gender in the establishment and evolution of political structures are explored.

Marxism has incorporated into its theory of social development not only the verified findings of modern scientific research but all the insights into history of its philosophical predecessors, whether materialist, idealist or eclectic, which have proved valid and viable. To do otherwise would flout the mandate of its own method which teaches that every school of thought, every stage of scientific knowledge, is an outgrowth of the past work of men modified and sometimes revolutionised by the prevailing conditions and concepts of their existence. Scientific inquiry into history and society, like the process of history itself, has given positive, permanent and progressive results. The sense of history is a precondition for a science of history. This is not an inborn but a cultivated, historically generated capacity. The discrimination of the passage of time into a well-defined past, present and future is rooted in the evolution of the organisation of labour. Man’s awareness of life as made up of consecutive and changing events has acquired breadth and depth along with the development and diversification of social production. The calendar first appears, not among food gatherers, but in agricultural communities.

Introduction

All the different types of historical explanation cast up in the evolution of man’s thought survive today. Not one has been permanently buried, no matter how outmoded, inadequate or scientifically incorrect it is. The oldest interpretations can be revived and reappear in modern dress to serve some social need or stratum. Idealistic interpretations of history were promulgated and promoted by numerous theorists from Leibnitz to Fichte. Their work was consummated by Hegel. In the early decades of the 19th century Hegel revolutionised the understanding of world history, placing it at the widest vantage point of the bourgeois era. His contributions may be summed up in thirteen points.

The paper offers students the chance to engage with two of the most famous Latin texts of the early middle ages: Einhard’s biography of Charlemagne and Asser’s of Alfred. The amount of historical knowledge possessed by extremely primitive minds may be gauged from the following observations made by the Jesuit father Jacob Baegert in his Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Peninsula written 200 years ago. “No Californian is acquainted with the events that occurred in the country prior to his birth, nor does he even know who his parents were if he should happen to have lost them during his infancy—The Californians—believed that California constituted the whole world, and they themselves its sole inhabitants; for they went to nobody, and nobody came to see them, each little people remaining within the limits of its small district.” The most celebrated latter-day expounder of this viewpoint was Carlyle who wrote: “Universal history, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the history of the great men who have worked here.” Herodotus’ text is our major source for all these events, and our understanding of them depends upon an understanding of Herodotus’ sources and his historical methods. By close study of the way in which Herodotus tells his story, making comparison where possible with evidence contemporary with the events described and with other later accounts, it is possible to understand both what Greeks of the middle of the fifth century had come to regard as the foundations of their current political arrangements, and also to assess the reliability of the traditions which Herodotus exploits. Problems concerning the nature of Athenian and Spartan politics in these years, as well as of the state of relations between Persia and Greece, for which there is also some Persian evidence, are the central historical concerns. But understanding Herodotus is important not only for our comprehension of the events of the period but for our understanding of the development of western historiography at whose head Herodotus stands.Until several thousand years ago, peoples took their own particular organisation of social relations for granted. It appeared to them as fixed and final as the heavens and earth and as natural as their eyes and ears. The earliest men did not even distinguish themselves from the rest of nature or draw a sharp line of demarcation between themselves and other living creatures in their habitat. It took a far longer time for them to learn to distinguish between what belonged to nature and what belonged to society. In pre-Spanish times they marked only one repetitive event, the pitahaya fruit harvest. Thus a space of three years is called three pitahayas. “Yet they seldom make use of such phrases, because they hardly ever speak among themselves of years, but merely say, ‘long ago’, or ‘not long ago’, being utterly indifferent whether two or 20 years have elapsed since the occurrence of a certain event.” This topic introduces students to the sociological theories of social stratification, especially those of Marx on class and Weber on social status, and examines how they have set the agenda for much social history. It also explores how such concepts have lost some of their explanatory force and how historians have refined them in new and exciting ways.

In describing his philosophy, the Italian thinker Croce wrote: “History is the record of the creations of the human spirit in every field, theoretical as well as practical. And these spiritual creations are always born in the hearts and minds of men of genius, artists, thinkers, men of action, moral and religious reformers.” This position combines idealism with elitism, the spirit using geniuses, or the creative minority, as the agency which redeems the masses. The first theme relates to the social context of art: how, precisely, are the variety and changes in artistic production (styles of painting, forms of architecture, etc.) related to contemporary social developments? Consideration needs to be given not only to structures of patronage, but also to broader issues of markets and consumption. He asserted that the historical process was essentially rational. It had an immanent logic which unfolded in a law-governed manner defined by the dialectical process. Each stage of the whole was a necessary product of the circumstances of its time and place. This course is intended to give students the opportunity to develop their reading ability in the Spanish language through an accessible academic text, while acquainting them with a number of key issues in the study of the history of Spain. It will also enable students to engage with an influential work of history that will give them an insight into general problems of historical method. The term history may be employed in two quite different senses: it may mean (1) the events and actions that together make up the human past, or (2) the accounts given of that past and the modes of investigation whereby they are arrived at or constructed. When used in the first sense, the word refers to what as a matter of fact happened, while when used in the second sense it refers to the study and description of those happenings ( see also historiography).To provide an introduction to elementary topics in parametric and non-parametric statistics, culminating in basic regressions. No prior knowledge of statistics is assumed and A-level mathematics is not required. By closely focusing on these works and their interpretation students can gain experience and practice of how to approach primary sources at the start of their Oxford careers, thereby acquiring a skill which will prove invaluable for their work on subsequent papers. Passages from the texts are set in Latin for detailed comment but the modest length of the texts means that students with basic Latin should have little difficulty coping with them. Students studying this paper may attend the Latin reading classes offered for graduate students (subject to the agreement of the tutor concerned). This topic offers students the chance to analyse how anthropological work has sharpened historians’ understanding of the central role of family and kinship structures in societies and of the diversity of forms which these structures may take. As a central topic of much anthropological work it exemplifies the way anthropological approaches have been contested and have developed over the last half century – from the stress on scientific categorization in the mid-twentieth century to the more recent emphasis of Pierre Bourdieu on fluidity and improvisation. Different techniques are required for investigating the history of peoples who adopted writing only recently. These used to be regarded as “people without history,” but historians are now beginning to isolate the historical content of their oral traditions. Oral epic poetry is still being performed today, in Nigeria, Serbia, and elsewhere, and studying it not only has revealed a great deal about classical epics such as the Iliad but also has shown how remarkable feats of memory could be performed by trained singers of tales, preserving the memory of historical events with much less distortion than was once suspected and recovering at least some of the early history of Africa and America. writing two short applied essays on a secondary source of their choice that they are studying in another history class.