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The Essential Historiography Reader Summary

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In “The Essential Historiography Reader” by Caroline Hoefferle, and “The Penguin History of Europe” by J.M. Roberts, both authors write about what “modern history” is. Hoefferle, breaks down the evolution of history and how its recorded into three different periods of time. She starts with ancient history, then moves into medieval and finishes with modern history. Roberts, believes that modern history was shaped in three centuries. Both authors agree on what modern history is, but only Hoefferle really goes into detail about the transition from how history was recorded in the ancient world up until the evolution of modern history. Hoefferle begins her book with the start of early histories, noting key ancient Greek historians such as Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides. …show more content…

16). Homer told stories and history traveling across the country and followed a mythopoetic tradition, but nothing was recorded (Hoefferle, p. 16-17). The revolutionary shift came from the emergence of historians who criticized Homer’s lack of applied rationalist methods to the study of their past (Hoefferle, p. 16). Herodotus was the first to break away from that tradition and “attempted to study the world through observable evidence” ( Hoefferle, p. 17) Herodotus’ thinking was very different and intuitive for the time period. He was interested in describing, not only what happened, or where it happened but also why certain things occurred (Hoefferle, p. 17). This way of thinking would become “the foundation for history as it would be practiced in Western Civilization for the next two thousand years” (Hoefferle, p.

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