The Annales school is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs. The school has been highly influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social and economic rather than political or diplomatic themes.
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe, especially Western Europe, in the 17th and 18th centuries, with global influences and effects. The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.
The historiography of the French Revolution stretches back over two hundred years.
Cultural history records and interprets past events involving human beings through the social, cultural, and political milieu of or relating to the arts and manners that a group favors. Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897) helped found cultural history as a discipline. Cultural history studies and interprets the record of human societies by denoting the various distinctive ways of living built up by a group of people under consideration. Cultural history involves the aggregate of past cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in practices, and the interaction with locales.It combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
The "figurative system of human knowledge", sometimes known as the tree of Diderot and d'Alembert, was a tree developed to represent the structure of knowledge itself, produced for the Encyclopédie by Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Denis Diderot.
Peter Joachim Gay was a German-American historian, educator, and author. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and former director of the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers (1997–2003). He received the American Historical Association's (AHA) Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2004. He authored over 25 books, including The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, a two-volume award winner; Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968), a bestseller; and the widely translated Freud: A Life for Our Time (1988).
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe written in 1797. The poem is a ballad in 14 stanzas.
Verdigris is a common name for any of a variety of somewhat poisonous copper salts of acetic acid, which range in colour from green to a bluish-green depending on their chemical composition. Verdigris has been used for artistic purposes from antiquity until the late 20th century, including in easel painting, polychromatic sculptures, and illumination of maps. Verdigris was a common ingredient in colouring agents and pharmaceutical preparations. Until the 19th century, verdigris was the most vibrant green pigment available and was frequently used in paintings. However, due to its instability, its popularity declined as other green pigments became readily available. The instability of its appearance stems from its hydration level and basicity, which changes as the pigment interacts with other materials over time.
Robert Choate Darnton is an American cultural historian and academic librarian who specializes in 18th-century France.
The Bitter Tea of General Yen is a 1933 American pre-Code drama war film directed by Frank Capra and starring Barbara Stanwyck, and featuring Nils Asther and Walter Connolly. Based on the 1930 novel of the same name by Grace Zaring Stone, the film is about an American missionary in Shanghai during the Chinese Civil War who gets caught in a battle while trying to save a group of orphans. Knocked unconscious, she is saved by a Chinese general warlord who brings her to his palace. When the general falls in love with the naive young woman, she fights her attraction to the powerful general and resists his flirtation, yet remains at his side when his fortune turns.
The history of mentalities, from the French term histoire des mentalités, is an approach to cultural history which aims to describe and analyze the ways in which historical people thought about, interacted with, and classified the world around them, as opposed to the history of particular events, or economic trends. The history of mentalities has been used as a historical tool by several historians and scholars from various schools of history. Notably, the historians of the Annales School helped to develop the history of mentalities and construct a methodology from which to operate. In establishing this methodology, they sought to limit their analysis to a particular place and a particular time. This approach lends itself to the intensive study that characterizes microhistory, another field which adopted the history of mentalities as a tool of historical analysis.
Robert Buford Pippin is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.
Cat burning was an alleged form of cruelty to animals as an entertainment or festivity in Western and Central Europe during the Middle Ages prior to the 1800s. People would gather cats and hoist them onto a bonfire causing death by burning or otherwise through the effects of exposure to extreme heat. In the medieval to early modern periods, cats, which were associated with vanity and witchcraft, were sometimes burned as symbols of the devil.
Dominick LaCapra is an American-born historian of European intellectual history, best known for his work in intellectual history and trauma studies. He served as the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University, where he is now a professor emeritus.
Roger Chartier,, is a French historian and historiographer who is part of the Annales school. He works on the history of books, publishing and reading. He teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Collège de France, and the University of Pennsylvania.
Martin Chartier was a French-Canadian explorer and trader, carpenter and glove maker. He lived much of his life amongst the Shawnee Native Americans in what is now the United States.
Journal of My Life is an autobiography by Jacques-Louis Ménétra, an eighteenth-century master glazier in Paris. Begun in 1764, when Ménétra returned from a journeyman's tour of the French provinces, Ménétra's text intersperses accounts of his life on the road and in Paris with tall tales, braggadocio, jokes, and accounts of his seductions and pranks. In the words of historian Robert Darnton, Ménétra's narrative "restores the human dimension to the study of social conditions and brings flesh and blood to lifeless sociological categories. What we can finally see, with the help of these memoirs, is ordinary, everyday life."
The McKenzie Lectures are a series of annual public lectures delivered by "a distinguished scholar on the history of the book, scholarly editing, or bibliography and the sociology of texts". The lectures are held in Oxford at the Centre for the Study of the Book. The series was inaugurated in 1996, in honour of Donald Francis McKenzie (1931–1999), upon his retirement as Professor of Bibliography and Textual Criticism, University of Oxford.
As of 2018, five firms in France rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: Éditions Lefebvre Sarrut, Groupe Albin Michel, Groupe Madrigall, Hachette Livre, and Martinière Groupe.
The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France is a 1996 book by literary scholar Robert Darnton. Darnton maps the "forbidden sector" of eighteenth-century French literature, using archival records that showed the popularity of forbidden books including pornography, utopian literature, and a popular genre of slanderous political works. In 1995, the book won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.
