Word: braudel
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White-haired Fernand Braudel fingers a 13th century Florentine coin, its bronze surface green with age, as he muses on the grand passion of his life: the Mediterranean. "Everything about the Mediterranean has pleased me-the sea, the people, the food. It is a passion that burns you up. And nowadays, for me, the Mediterranean is too strong, too burning. It's all over...
...analyzes the shepherds' trails over the Pyrenees, it considers the early use of glacial ice to make ice cream, and it ponders the fate of the Jews, driven from city after city as the population exceeded the available food supply. Only after the fundamentals are established does Braudel turn to the traditional history of political events. Even then, the celebrated King Philip of Spain is only a small figure in the vast struggle between the Spanish and Turkish empires for the domination of the Mediterranean-at the very moment when the sea was about to lose its importance...
...over. Last weekend an international gathering of 150 historians and social scientists assembled at the State University of New York at Binghamton to pay homage to Braudel and his enduring love. English Scholars Peter Burke and Eric Hobsbawm arrived to offer tribute. Historians from Canada, The Netherlands and France sang Braudel's praises. The occasion: the inaugural conference of SUNY'S new Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations. It was the first major American recognition of French Historian Braudel-perhaps the most influential historian now at work and the author...
...offer is hard to resist. How, one might ask, could Adler nominate Eliot's pretentious The Cocktail Party and not his superb Four Quartets? If there is room for the historical musings of Toynbee, why is there no room for Braudel's monumental The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II? And if this list is supposed to update the original of 25 years ago, why does it recognize so few living writers? Bellow and Solzhenitsyn are admirable, but where is the magic of Grass's The Tin Drum or Robert Lowell...
...from Fernand Braudel, the French historian, that Gutman may get his greatest inspiration. He quotes Braudel, who once wrote that "victorious events come about as the result of many possibilities," that "for one possibility which actually is realized innumerable others have drowned." These others, according to Braudel, usually "leave little trace for the historian. And yet, it is necessary to give them their place because the losing movements are forces which have at every moment affected the final outcome." American history still awaits such a perspective, but Gutman renews the hope that historians can study all people...