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The Annals School of History

 

            In this essay I will examine the variety of history known as the Annales school of history. This essay will outline what the Annales schools is, how its different from other varieties of history, and its value as a style of history. .
             First lets identify and briefly describe the tradition or school of history being examined. The Annales school was established by two french, Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. The scholars of the Annales have drawn their inspiration from non-historians as much as from historians, theirs is a kind of history which crosses all frontiers and uses all techniques. But what- ever non-historical sources have fed it, the school itself is essentially historical. Trevor-Roper explains in his copy the first edition of the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, that Bloch and Febvre describes their view on history. They describe that historians, having passed through the same experiences and drawn from them the same conclusions, have long been afflicted by the disease consequent on a divorce of tradition. They felt that history had to be re-thought. History needed a new perspective. The Annales school was a movement in the search for a large or big picture view of history. In order to see this history it rejected the traditional event driven history. The new form of history replaced the study of leaders with the lives of ordinary people and replacing examination of politics, diplomacy, and wars with research into climate, demography, agriculture, commerce, technology, transportation, geography, and communication. The main scholarly expression of this school has been through the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, which changed its name to Annales: economies, societes, civilisations in 1947. This journal broke from the traditional event based historiographies by showing the importance of taking all parts of society into consideration. This long view of history was described by Braudel as filling in the blanks between traditional historical studies of events.


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