Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies
And yet the history Of History demands rather than invites at tention. Art, science and philosophy combined, history is the Old est and vastest of the interests Of mankind. What was the past to Babylon or Rome? When and how was Time first discovered, and the shadowy past marked out by numbered years? What travel ling Greeks first brought home that knowledge Of the dim antiquities Of Egypt and the East which made them critics of their own Homeric legends and SO created history? What havoc was wrought in scientific inquiry by religious revelations and in revelations by scientific inquiry? By what miracle has the long lost past been at last recovered, in our own day, so that we are checking up Herodotus by his own antiquity, correcting the narrative of Livy or Tacitus by the very refuse deposited beneath the streets upon which they walked? This is more than romance or literature, though the romance is there to the full. For the history of History is the story of that deepening memory and scientific curiosity which is the measure of our social consciousness and our intellectual life.
But we must first get our bearings. For the word history has two meanings.1 It may mean either the record Of events or events themselves. We call Cromwell a maker of history.
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