Word: gibbon
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Lake Michigan. Henry Adams, arriving in the private train car of a Pennsylvania Senator, was struck with a vision of a new America; he returned alone to spend two weeks studying the event, "more surprising, as it was, than anything else on the continent." He consciously imitated Edward Gibbon on the steps of the Expo's Administration Building -- but where Gibbon, sitting on the steps of Rome's Aracoeli church, had a vision of the falling Roman Empire, Adams saw a rising empire. Another visitor to the fair, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, delivered a famous paper there, saying that...
Letter-writing used to be an art form. From Roman times to the late 1800s (when that upstart Bell ruined every-thing) every literate person kept up some sort of correspondence. St. Catherine of Siena wrote to the pope, telling him not to be such a wimp. Gibbon wrote to the poet Pope telling him his poems didn't scan. Columbus wrote to every member of the royalty in Europe, begging for money...
...Germanic tribes began moving into Roman territory during the 3rd century, not as the "barbarian" invaders of popular legend but as immigrants and refugees. Even the Visigoths, who conquered Rome in A.D. 410, subjecting it, in Gibbon's majestic words, to the "licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia," had originally entered the empire peacefully, and many had loyally served in the Roman army. The celebrated sacking of Rome was primarily a humiliation, nothing like the all-out Roman destruction of Carthage, Thebes and Jerusalem...
Francis Parkman on LaSalle and his discovery of the Mississippi, "rolling like a destiny." Jacob Burckhardt on the civilization of the Rennaissance in Italy, which Clive, smiling, called "history for adults." Gibbon, and his cool-headed appraisal of the human excesses of Christianity. It was a fabulous semester, straightforward and absorbing...
...Thursdays, the textual stuff: approach, linguistical skill, emotive power, bias, mission. Is the historian willing to call judgement? If so, directly, or through irony (Gibbon), or through emphasis (Macauley). Method of research? Empiricism--footwork--or the pure remove of documents? Even Style: the visual mania of Carlyle; the reasoned compression of Ranke...