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ИСТОРИЧЕСКИЙ ФАКУЛЬТЕТ

HISTORY

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History is the study of the human past Historians study records of past events and prepare new records based on their research. These records, as well as the events themselves, are also commonly called history.

The past has left many traces, including traditions, folk tales, works of art, archaeological objects, and books and other written records. Historians use all these sources, but they mainly study the past as it has been recorded in written documents. As a result, history is generally limited to human events that have taken place since the development of writing about 5,000 years ago.

Historians study all aspects of past human life-social and cultural conditions as well as political and economic events. Some historians study the past simply to understand better how people of other times acted and thought. Others seek to draw lessons from those actions and thoughts as a guide for decisions and policies today. However, historians disagree about the lessons history, and so there are many different interpretations of the past.

History became a field of study in many schools during the 1800’s. Today, students throughout the world study history in school. They learn about the past chiefly from textbooks, but also through such activities as field trips to historical sites and visits to museums. Most nations require schools to teach their country's heritage as a means of developing patriotism. History is thus used not only to tell students how their national way of life developed, but also to justify and support national ideals and institutions.

Until the 1900’s, historians primarily studied political events. They wrote almost exclusively about diplomacy, wars, and affairs of state. Today, historians also study many other subjects. Some examine economic and social conditions. Others trace the development of religions, the arts, or other element of culture.

History is often classified as one of the social sciences, along with such fields as economics, psychology and sociology. However, historians differ from other social scientists in the way in which they study social processes. Other social scientists seek to develop general laws by examining patterns of behavior that recur throughout time. In contrast, historians study the conditions or events of a particular time. Historians may use theories from the other social sciences to help explain these conditions and events. But historians rarely attempt to develop general laws.

The field of history is so vast that historians have traditionally split it into divisions. The three main divisions of history are based on period, nation, and topic.

Periods of time form the chief divisions in the study of history. Historians divide Western history into three periods. They are ancient times, from about 3000 B.C. to the A.D. 400’s; medieval times, the 400’s to the 1500’s; and modern times, the 1500’s to the present. Scholars may divide these periods into many shorter periods. The division of history into periods helps historians organize and focus their studies. However, this division may distort the evidence presented by history. For years, historians considered the medieval era as a period of superstition and disorganization that came between two supposedly better periods of history. This viewpoint prevented them from realizing that the Middle Ages had a vitality of its own and formed the basis of modern European civilization.

The division of history by nation involves, for example, the study of American, Chinese, or French history. Tile division by topic enables historians to deal with particular aspects of past human activity. Many historians study economic, social, and intellectual history in addition to studying traditional political history. Some historians focus on such specialized topics as the history of science, of an ethnic group, or of a city.

 

HOW HISTORIANS WORK

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The study of history involves many processes and techniques, but most historians follow a few basic steps in their work. First, they select for study an issue or person from some period of the past. Next, they try to read a variety of source materials – everything written by or about the subject. Then they interpret the information obtained from these sources. Finally, they write a narrative history or a biography.

Historians use two main types of sources in their research, primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources consist of documents and other records produced during the period being studied. They include books, diaries, letters, and government records. Motion pictures and tape recordings may serve as primary sources for events of the 1900’s. Secondary sources are materials prepared later by people who studied the primary sources.

Historians choose documents that reveal most accurately the facts they wish to know. Therefore, they prefer primary sources to secondary ones, and confidential reports to public ones. Historians who study recent events use a special type of source. They go to participants in those events and record their oral testimony. Such oral history supplements documentary history.

The scarcity of sources is a great problem for historians, whose work sometimes resembles that of detectives. Many activities and thoughts of ordinary people, plus other useful data, were never recorded. Much that was written down has been lost or destroyed through the years. Also, historians often must rely on the writings of only a few people. Such writings are mere fragments on which to base a reconstruction of the past.

Historians analyze the documents with which they work to determine the reliability of these sources. They compare documents with other sources and also check for such flaws as errors in the order of events or varia­tions in writing style. In addition, the historian must determine whether the author's account of events can be trusted.

Basic historical facts are data generally accepted by all historians because the evidence for them seems unquestionable. However, historians often disagree about the meaning and significance of such facts. These experts try to be as unbiased as possible, but their own beliefs and prejudices influence their interpretation. For example, a historian's social, economic, and religious views help determine what he or she accepts as "normal" in another person. This judgment, in turn, determines what the historian accepts as reliable testimony or as a likely sequence of events. Such interpretation explains why historians who use the same data may disagree about events and their significance.

Some historians rely heavily on information from other social sciences to form their interpretations. For example, the study of history that uses theories and insights from psychology is called psychohistory. Similarly, some historians use statistical methods to interpret data from such sources as old censuses and account books. This approach is called cliometrics.

As the last step in interpretation, a historian prepares a written account of events. The writing of history is part of a field called historiography. Some of the best histori­ans use the techniques of the novelist and dramatist to entertain as well as inform.

 

ARCHAEOLOGY

 

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Archaeology is the scientific study of the remains of past human cultures. Archaeologists investigate the lives of early people by studying the objects those people left behind. Such objects include buildings, artwork, tools, bones, and pottery. Archaeologists may make exciting discoveries, such as a tomb filled with gold or the ruins of a magnificent temple in the midst of a jungle. However, the discovery of a few stone tools or grains of hardened corn may reveal even more about early people.

Archaeological research is the chief method available for learning about societies that existed before the invention of writing about 5,000 years ago. It also provides an important supplement to our knowledge of ancient societies that left written records.

In the Americas, archaeology is considered a branch of anthropology, the scientific study of humanity and human culture. European archaeologists, however, think of their work as most closely related to the field of history. Archaeology differs from history in that historians mainly study the lives of people as recorded in written documents.

Archaeologists look for information about how, where, and when cultures developed. Like other scientists, they search for reasons why major changes have occurred in certain cultures. Some archeologists try to understand why ancient people stopped hunting and started farming. Others develop theories about what caused people to build cities and to set up trade routes. In addition, some archaeologists look for reasons behind the fall of such early civilizations as the Maya in Central America and the Romans in Europe.

Archeologists examine any evidence that can help them explain how people lived in past times. The three basic kinds of archaeological evidence are artifacts, features, and ecofacts. Artifacts are objects that were made by people and can be moved without altering their appearance. Artifacts include such objects as arrowheads, pots, and beads. Artifacts from a society with a written history may also include clay tablets and other written records. Features consist mainly of houses, tombs, irrigation canals, and other large structures built by ancient peoples. Unlike artifacts, features cannot be separated from their surroundings without changing their form. Ecofacts are natural objects found with artifacts or features. Ecofacts reveal how ancient people responded to their surroundings. Examples of ecofacts include seeds and animal bones.

Any place where archaeological evidence is found is called an archaeological site. To understand the behavior of the people who occupied a site, archaeologists must study the relationships among the artifacts, features, and ecofacts found there. For example, the discovery of stone spearheads near the bones of an extinct kind of buffalo at a site in New Mexico showed that early human beings had hunted buffalo in that area.

If objects are buried deep in the ground, their position in the earth also concerns archaeologists. The scientists study the layers of soil and rock in which objects are found to understand the conditions that existed when the objects were placed there. In some places, archaeologists find many levels of deposits called strata. The archaeological study of strata, called stratigraphy, developed from the study of rock layers in geology.

 

FROM THE HISTORY OF ARCHEOLOGY

 

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The idea of studying the past through ancient objects has developed gradually. But the most intense interest has occurred in the past 200 years. During the 1700’s, some wealthy Europeans began to study and collect art objects from the times of ancient Greece and Rome. This interest in classical art is called antiquarianism. These firstdiggerslooked only for treasures and threw away ordinary objects.

Also during the 1700’s, European scholars began to debate how long human beings had lived on the earth. Their interest resulted partly from recent discoveries of primitive stone tools together with the bones of extinct animals. These scholars also knew about the huge mounds and ruined cities in the Americas that pointed to ancient human life here. They realized that human beings had a prehistoric past, but they could not decide when and where this past had begun.

The 1800’s brought a more scientific approach to the study of the past. The great length of human prehistory became widely accepted due to advances in geology and biology. By the early 1800’s, geologists had determined that rock formation resulted from extremely slow processes, such as erosion and volcanic activity. This view, known as uniformitarianism, led most scholars to believe that the earth was much older than previously thought. Then, in 1859, the British biologist Charles R. Darwin proposed the theory of biological evolutionin his book This theory suggested that human beings, like other animals and the earth itself, had developed slowly over a great period of time.

By the mid-1800’s, archaeology had become a separate field of study, and evidence of human prehistory was accumulating rapidly. Important discoveries included prehistoric lake dwellings in Switzerland, ancient cave paintings in France and Spain, and part of a prehistoric human skull found in Germany. In the late 1800’s, archaeologists began to use techniques of excavation that made it possible to determine sequences of cultural development. In an excavation at Naqada, Egypt, the British scholar Sir Flinders Petrie became one of the first diggers to look carefully for all remains, not just for treasures. Others who undertook major excavations at that time included the British nobleman Sir Austen Henry Layard, at Nineveh in what is now Iraq, and the German businessman Heinrich Schliemann, at Troy in what is now Turkey.

European archaeologists of the late 1800’s focused their studies on the ancient European and Middle Eastern civilizations described by classical and Biblical authors. American archaeologists, however, could find almost no written records of the civilizations they studied. Partly for this reason, they turned to anthropology for methods of interpreting their discoveries. For example, they studied artifacts produced by contemporary American Indians to help interpret objects from past societies.

The scope of archaeology expanded greatly during the 1900's. Archaeologists began to explore the past civilizations of Central and South America, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, and other areas.

Contemporary archaeologists have also developed many new research techniques. They use sampling methods based on the principles of statistics and probability. In this way, they can study sites quickly and without extensive excavation. New scientific methods also aid in the discovery of underground sites.

 

ANTHROPOLOGY

 

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Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity and of human culture. Anthropologists investigate the strategies for living that are learned and shared by people as members of social groups. These scientists examine the characteristics that human beings share as members of one species and the diverse ways that people live in different environments. They also analyze the products of social groups – both material objects and less material creations, such as beliefs and values.

Like other social scientists, anthropologists look systematically for general patterns in human behavior. They develop theories and use scientific methods to test them. Their research is comparative and cross-cultural – that is, it studies various groups of people to determine their similarities and differences. For example, anthropologists have studied the legal systems of African farm villages, of New Guinea pig breeders, and of European industrial nations. Social scientists in other fields work mainly in urban, industrial societies and make cross-cultural comparisons less often.

Another important feature of anthropology is its emphasis on an insider's view of a society. Anthropologists try to determine how people who share a culture view their world. Anthropology can make major contributions to international harmony because it helps provide an understanding of various cultures.

The chief branches of anthropology include physical anthropology, archaeology, linguistic anthropology, cultural anthropology, and social anthropology. These branches often overlap. For example, archaeologists and cultural anthropologists study many of the same cultural features. But archaeologists concentrate on past civiliza­tions, and cultural anthropologists work mainly on present ones. Another specialty, applied anthropology, in­volves practical application of the other fields.

Physical anthropology, also called biological anthropology, is the study of human physical characteristics. Two of the most outstanding characteristics of human beings are their large brains and their ability to walk upright. Physical anthropologists search for fossil remains from prehistoric times to trace the development of such characteristics. They also seek cultural remains, such as stone tools and evidence of fires, to analyze the links among brain size, posture, and cultural development. Archaeology is the study of objects left by earlier peoples, including artwork, buildings, clothing, pottery, and tools. Archaeologists trace the development of cultures by studying the things those people made and used. Linguistic anthropology analyzes the ways that language is used by people of different societies. Cultural anthropology is the study of human culture. Like archaeologists, cultural anthropologists study the artwork, houses, tools, and other material products of a culture. They also devote much research to a culture’s nonmaterial creations, including its music, religious beliefs, symbols, and values. Social anthropology deals with social relationships in human groups. Such relationships include marriage, family life, authority, and conflict. Applied anthropology is the use of anthropological research to achieve a practical goal. Applied anthropologists actively try to improve a situation, rather than merely analyzing it.

CIVILIZATION

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Civilizationis a way of life that arose after people began to live in cities or in societies organized as states. A civilization consists of the art, customs, technology, and form of government, and everything else that makes up the way of life in a society. In this respect, civilization is similar to culture. But culture refers to any way of life and includes both simple and complex life styles. The word civilization refers only to life styles that feature complex economic, governmental, and social systems.

Throughout history, individual civilizations have arisen and collapsed, but the basic features of civilization do not disappear. Ideas and inventions spread from one civilization to another. In many cases, similar developments occur independently in different civilizations.

During most of the prehistoric period, people lived in small groups and moved from place to place in search of food. They hunted, fished, and gathered wild plants. These early people had a simple social organization based on close family ties. Between 13,000 and 10,000 years ago, some societies of hunters and gatherers in the Middle East adopted more settled ways of life and developed social organizations based on larger, more formal groups. All of these societies developed in areas with predictable seasonal supplies of such foods as fish and easily gathered plant foods. Some archaeologists believe that the social changes occurred in part because certain grain plants became more plentiful near the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago. The technology and social organizations of some of these more advanced societies served as a foundation for later farming societies.

About 9000 B.C, people in the Middle East began to cultivate cereal grasses and other plants. They also domesticated goats and sheep at about this time, and they later tamed cattle. The rise of agriculture was a major step in the development of civilization. Farmers settled in permanent villages, which had enough food to support a few craft-workers and priests. Periodic food shortages led to increased trade among villages. The villagers exchanged grain, pottery, and various raw materials. By about 3500 B.C., people in the Middle East had learned to smelt copper and make bronze tools and weapons. Gradually, villages in the Middle East grew into cities. Religious shrines and sacred places, which flourished as ceremonial sites, became the centers of economic and political power in the emerging cities.

Several civilizations developed independently in various parts of the world. The first one arose about 3500 B.C in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley in the Middle East. Other civilizations developed in the Nile Valley in Egypt, the Indus Valley in what are now Pakistan and north­western India,the Huang He Valley in China, and the Andes Mountains of present-day Peru. These ancient civilizations grew up in widely different natural environments. The people developed systems of writing and new forms of government, made advances in science and technology, and excelled in crafts and art.

Philosophers, historians, and archaeologists have suggested many reasons for the rise and fall of civilizations. Most archaeologists attribute the rise of civilizations to a combination of causes, including the structure of political and social life, the ways people modify their environment, and changes in population. In many cases civilizations may have appeared because local chieftains took deliberate steps to strengthen their own political power. Many scientists believe that political forces and the misuse of land and other natural resources resulted in the economic and political collapse of early civilizations.

 

ANCIENT GREEK EDUCATION

 

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Greek civilization flourished from about 700 B.C. to about 330 B.C. During this period, the Creeks made the greatest educational advances of ancient times. In fact, Western education today is based on the ancient Greek model.

Ancient Greece was divided into independent city-states. The educational system of each city-state aimed to produce good citizens. Athens and Sparta, two of the most powerful city-states, had different ideals of citizenship. In Sparta, citizens were judged largely by their political and military service. The government controlled education. Boys received physical and military training, but few learned to read or write. In Athens, unlike Sparta, citizens were judged more by the quality of their minds. But Athenian citizens were also expected to develop their bodies and serve the state.

Athens made the greatest educational advances of any Greek city-state. But Athenian education was far from democratic. Education was limited to the sons of Athenian citizens. Less than half of all Athenians were citizens. Slaves made up a large part of the Athenian population, and were not considered worthy of an education.

Athenian boys started their education at about age 6. But they did not go to schools as we think of schools today. A trusted family slave simply took them from teacher to teacher, each of whom specialized in a certain subject or certain related subjects. Boys studied reading, writing, arithmetic, music, dancing, and gymnastics. As the boys advanced, they memorized the works of Homer and other Greek poets. Boys continued their elementary education until they were about 15 years old. From about ages 16 to 20, they attended a government-sponsored gymnasium. Gymnasiums trained young men to become citizen-soldiers. They emphasized such sports as running and wrestling and taught civic duty and the art of war. Students held discussions in order to improve their reasoning and speaking ability.

Some Athenian gymnasiums became centers of advanced learning. By the 400s B.C, advanced learning in Athens consisted of philosophy and rhetoric. Philosophy included the study of logic, mathematics, morals, and science. Rhetoric included the study of government, history, and public speaking.

During the 400’s and 300’s B.C, Athens produced such great philosophers and teachers as Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. About 387 B.C., Plato founded a school of philosophy that became known as the Academy. Some scholars believe the Academy was the world's first university. Aristotle founded a similar school called the Lyceum about 330 B.C.

Most young Athenian women received no formal education. They mainly learned domestic skills from their mothers – that is, how to prepare food, make clothing, and care for infants. However, some women belonged to religious organizations through which they developed skills in music, poetry, and dancing.

The Greeks strongly believed that a boy could best learn what he is and should try to become by imitating an older, ideal model. For this reason, every young Greek male became the companion of an older citizen. In most cases, this person was a friend of the boy's father or a relative. It was hoped that a strong love would develop between the two. As a result, the younger male would want to imitate his companion and in so doing take on his virtues.

RACE AND DISCRIMINATION

 

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History includes many episodes in which the members of one group of people deemed themselves superior to another group. Such beliefs were long used to rationalize the enslavement and persecution of people viewed as inferior. For example, the ancient Romans viewed the Germanic tribes as a "race" of barbarians who were barely human. Europeans who settled in America claimed superiority over the American Indians to justify their expansion into the New World. In the 1930s, the leaders of Nazi Germany preached that Germans belonged to the "superior Aryan race," and that Jews and all other non-Aryan peoples were inferior.

Experts have not discovered any scientific basis for such claims of superiority. But many people still view other groups in terms of stereotypes. That is, they have oversimplified, preconceived, and generalized beliefs about the members of these groups. At various times, for example, certain groups have been described as dirty, dishonest, sly, humorless, or dull. These judg­ments have often been confused with racial traits, though they have nothing to do with the biological con­cept of race. Many such judgments have nothing to do with culture either, but only with the opinions or prejudices of those who make them. Discrimination can result from these stereotypes. As a result of these beliefs, members of minority groups in many societies have fewer educational and job opportunities than do members of the majority group.

The belief that some groups are more intelligent than others has been used to justify discrimination. Scientists have shown that a person's intelligence is partly inherited and partly determined by the environment. The use of intelligence to compare groups of people is extremely difficult, because few such comparisons can be considered equal. A better-educated group, for example, will score higher on tests that measure education. Groups that value mathematical skills or technical ability will do better on tests involving such skills.

Many experts believe it is impossible to design an intelligence test that is not influenced by a person's experiences. Nevertheless, scientists are trying to develop culture-fair or culture-free tests that reduce the effects of cultural differences on test scores.

The differences among human beings make the world a fascinating place in which to live. But when people focus on these differences, they often fail to appreciate how similar all human beings are. Most of the distinctions people make between themselves and others have much more to do with culture than with biology.

ФАКУЛЬТЕТ ЕСТЕСТВОЗНАНИЯ

 

THE SCIENCE OF GEOGRAPHY

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Geography, which comes from the Greek word geo, meaning “earth”, and graphein, meaning “description”, is literally a study of the planet Earth. As trained scientists, geographers describe and analyze the physical characteristics of our planet and the ways in which people interact with these physical characteristics and with each other.

Throughout history people who went even short distances from where they lived became keenly aware of differences that distinguish one place from another and one group of people from another. Many of these travelers formed mental images of the places that they had visited and told others what they had seen. They sometimes scratched crude maps on rocks or on pieces of cloth or leather to improve the accuracy of their descriptions.

Geography, the study of the relationship between people and their physical surroundings, or environments, grew directly out of these attempts by early explorers to describe what they had seen on their travels. Today those who study geography describe and analyze the earth to explain what is where, why it is there, and what significance it has.

Most geographers focus on one of the two major branches of geography, physical geography and cultural geography, or on one of its more specialized fields. The earth offers many different natural or physical features. Low-lying jungles mark some places on the earth. Ice-covered mountain peaks dominate other places. Each location derives its physical character from combinations of the shapes of the land, climate, soils, plants, animals, and other naturally occurring phenomena. These combinations of physical features and their variations from place to place are the subject of physical geography.

In contrast to physical geography, cultural geography focuses on the impact of human ideas and actions on the earth. The sum of what a human group acquires through living together, such as language, knowledge, skills, art, literature, laws, customs, and life styles, is known as that group’s culture. Cultural features are evident in a group’s tools, food, government, religion, and other characteristics.

Each group of people has a strong effect on its human habitat, or the place where that group lives. This effect is known as the cultural landscape. Examples of cultural landscapes include the fields people clear and farm, the crops and livestock they raise, and the style and distribution of the villages and cities they build.

The skyscrapers of New York City’s cultural landscape, for example, show how humans there have changed the environment. People constructed multistorey buildings to make better use of a very limited amount of space. Even remote villages in the Himalayas or in the Amazon Basin show how a society, or group of people who share traditions, institutions, activities, and interests, changes its habitat.

Along with the cultural landscape, geographers also study the process of cultural diffusion, or the spread of parts of a culture from one area to another. The spread of Christianity from Palestine to other parts of the Middle East and to Europe between the years A.D. 100 and 600 is one example of cultural diffusion. The spread of the alphabet is another example. The alphabet originated in the Middle East about 2000 B.C. and gradually spread to most parts of the world. Today many different cultures use various forms of the alphabet to write their languages. The process of cultural diffusion continues. The spread of rock music from Great Britain and the United States to other parts of the world illustrates modern cultural diffusion.