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Directions:
Read the following text and answer the questions by reading information
from the left column that corresponds to each of the marked details given in the
right column. There are two extra choices in the right column. Make your answer
on ANSWER SHEET 1. (10 points)
“University history, the history of what man has accomplished in the world,
is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here,” wrote the
Victorian Thomas Carlyle Well, not any more it is not.
Suddenly, Britain looks to have fallen out with its favorite historical
form. This could be no more than a passing literary craze, but it also points to
a broader truth about how we now approach the past: less concerned with learning
from our forefathers and more interested in feeling their pain. Today, we want
empathy, not inspiration.
From the earliest days of the Renaissance, the writing of history meant
recounting the exemplary lives of great men. In 1337, Petrarch began work on his
rambling writing Debins Illustribus-on Famous Men, highlighting the virtus (or
virtue) of classical heroes. Petrarch celebrated their greatness in conquering
fortune and rising to the top. This was the biographical tradition which Niccolo
Machiavelli turned on its head. In The Prince, he championed cunning,
ruthlessness, and boldness, rather than virtue, mercy and justice, as the skills
of successful leaders.
Over time, the attributes of greatness shifted. The Romantics commemorated
the leading painters and author of their day, stressing the uniqueness of the
artist’s person experience rather than public glory. By contrast, the Victorian
author Samuel Smile wrote self-Help as a catalogue of the worthy lives of
engineers, industrialists and explorers. “The valuable examples which they
furnish of the power of self -help, of patient purpose resolute working and
steadfast integrity, issuing in the formation of truly noble and manly
character, exhibit.” wrote Smile, “what it is in the power of each to accomplish
for himself.” His biographies of James Watt, Richard Arkwright and Josian
Wedgwood were held up as beacons to guide the working man through his difficult
life.
This was all a bit bourgeois for Thomas Carlyle, who focused his
biographies on the truly heroic lives of Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell and
Napoleon Bonaparte. These epochal figures represented lives hard to imitate, but
to be acknowledged as possessing higher authority than mere mortals.
Not everyone was convinced by such bombast. “The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles,” wrote Marx and Engel in The
Communist Manifesto. For them, history did nothing, it possessed no immense
wealth nor waged battles: “It is man, living man who does all that.” And history
should be the story of the masses and their record of struggle, As such, it
needed to appreciate the economic realities, the social contexts and power
relations in which each epoch stood. For:“Men make their own history, but they
do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances
chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and
transmitted from the past.”
This was the tradition which revolutionized our appreciation of the past.
In place of Thomas Carlyle, Britain nurtured Christopher Hill, EP Thompson and
Eric Hobsbawm. History from below stood alongside biographies of great men.
Whole new realms of understanding - from gender to race to cultural studies -
were opened up as scholars unpicked the multiplicity of lost societies. And it
transformed public history too: downstairs became just as fascinating as
upstairs. |
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发表于 2017-8-6 14:04:43