Word: braudel
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...Braudel's sweeping view is particularly influential just now, for American historiography and historical teaching have been torn by internecine warfare in recent years. Against the traditional view that history should be based on documentary evidence-and artistically inspired by the Muse Clio-the innovators known as Cliometricians argue that truth can best be found in computer analyses of population movements, interest rates and other social data. Still others explain old riddles by invoking the theories of sociology and psychoanalysis. New voices insist that it should serve the purposes of racial justice or economic reform. In contrast...
...Braudel's work did not emerge all at once, or by itself. Its origin dates back to 1929, when Historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch founded a scholarly review in Paris called the Annales (Annals). Its tone was combative, its fervor evangelical. Its purpose: to debunk the chronicling of politics and biographies of great men that had obsessed historians since the 19th century. Let there be new approaches, Febvre exhorted, ranging from aerial photography to the study of climates...
...magazine's readers was young Fernand Braudel, then a fledgling schoolteacher in Algiers. "I am someone without ambition," Braudel remarked to TIME'S Ellie McGrath. "My father was a mathematician and wanted me to be a mathematician, so studying history was an adolescent revolt against my father." Looking out across the Mediterranean and wondering what to work on for his doctoral dissertation, Braudel decided on King Philip. But "little by little," recalls Braudel, "Philip II attracted me less and less, and the Mediterranean more and more." There was also the influence of Febvre, who had himself done work...
Then, the war. Captured by the Germans in 1940, Braudel chafed in a prisoner of war camp at Lübeck. He sustained himself by teaching other inmates (and occasionally playing pranks, like painting a pigeon's wings with the red. white and blue tricolor and then setting it loose, provoking a vain fusillade from German guards). He sustained himself too by a great feat of memory-writing The Mediterranean, filling up and mailing out one schoolboy copybook after another. "I had to believe that history, destiny, was written at a much more profound level," recalls Braudel of those...
...cities and societies; the history of political events, "surface disturbances, crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs." Striking insights emerge. Europe is not an entity; it is the physical sea that gives the region unity. Reversing the 19th century preoccupation with northern Europe, Braudel turns the globe upside down. Africa immediately looms large, overshadowing tiny Europe. The central struggle and axis in the Mediterranean is not north and south but east and west-the Spanish and Ottoman empires caught in endless "cultural conflict." At the end, there is an affirmation of the Annalistes...