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The Origins of History is a landmark
in the study of history. It is a distillation of twenty
years of the thought and research that Herbert Butterfield
devoted to the beginnings of historical awareness. When
did man first attempt to acquire a "past" and
endow it with meaning? In this companion volume to his classic
The Origins of Modern Science, Butterfield recaptures
history's nebulous origins in the shards, ruined monuments,
and dynastic records of Ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and
China. He then moves from these simple records of daily
and yearly events to the true beginnings of historical consciousness
in the Hebrew Scriptures, with their elaboration of an historical
memory for a people who were not only conscious of a past
but derived their collective identity from it. From this
beginning, Butterfield's unique and richly detailed book
moves on to the Greeks and the Christians. He explores the
problems of the early Church in linking the traditions of
Jesus to its own belief and ultimately to the development
of a new historical understanding when Christianity became
the religion of the Roman Empire. The book then traces "how
God got out of the story" through the gradual growth
in Islam and Western Europe of a skeptical attitude toward
recorded authority, and the birth of "scientific"
history as we know it today.
Widely regarded as the outstanding British
historian of his time, Sir Herbert Butterfield (1901-1979)
was Professor of Modern History at Cambridge and Vice Chancellor
of the University. In addition to his classic, The Origins
of Modern Science, he is the author of The Whig Interpretation
of History.
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