Mill’s Three Stages or Modes of History and Historiography
- Stage 1 Interprets Past anachronistically solely in terms of the present
- Stage 2 Presents history as people exprienced it
- Stage 3 Offers a theory of history
Lord Acton (1834-1902)
Thomas Arnold (1795-1842)
Walter Bagehot (1826-1877)
- Science makes earlier ages seem “antique”
- The Benefits for Science and Technology of British Political Freedom
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
François-Pierre-Guillaume Guizot (1787-1874
- French historian most in line with British tastes
- Moves from second to third stage of historical writing
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859)
- The Superiority of Modern Historical Writing
- Macaulay’s Critique of Herodotus
- Macaulay’s Critique of Thucydides
- Macaulay’s Critique of Xenophon
- Macaulay’s Critique of Plutarch
- Macaulay’s Critique of Sallust
- Macaulay’s Critique of Tacitus
Jules Michelet (1798-1874)
- Jules Michelet (homepage)
- A Michelet Chronology
- Invents new mode of historical writing
- Style sparkling rather than flowing; full of expressiveness, epigrammatic, and personifies abstractions
- Michelet on race
- Michelet’s use of tableaux
- Jules Michelet & World History as a Progressive Movement toward Human freedom
- The fundamental but changing role of the Catholic church in the middle ages
- The medieval clergy's role preserving western culture
- Repeated religious revivals and their role in history
- The rising importance of commerce, the end of religious crusades, and the destruction of the Templars
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831)
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832)
M. Augustin Thierry (1795-1856)
- Earliest of the three great modern French historians
- Learns from Chateaubriand and Scott “worthlessness” of first stage historiography
Miscellaneous
Last modified 19 November 2020