Writing Histories and Creating Myths: Perspectives on Trends in the Discipline of History and its Representations in Some South African Historical Journals 1985-1995

dc.creator	Johann W.N. Tempelhoff
dc.date	2012-02-01T00:00:00Z
dc.date.accessioned	2015-07-20T20:08:03Z
dc.date.available	2015-07-20T20:08:03Z
dc.identifier	10.5787/27-1-228
dc.identifier	2224-0020
dc.identifier	https://doaj.org/article/e5b7c54acc4b4870875c6121881c2ceb
dc.identifier.uri	http://evidence.thinkportal.org/handle/123456789/7958
dc.identifier.uri	https://doaj.org/article/e5b7c54acc4b4870875c6121881c2ceb
dc.description	<p>"Such is history. A play of life and death is sought in the calm telling of a tale, in the resurgence and denial of the origin, the unfolding of a dead past and result of a present practice. It reiterates, under another rule, the myths built upon a murder of an originary death and fashions out of language the forever - remnant trace of a beginning that is as impossible to recover as to forget." <em>Michel de Certeall</em></p> <p><strong> </strong></p> <p><strong>INTRODUCTION: THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORIES AND THEIR CIRCUMSTANCES</strong></p> <p>The study and writing of history rely on very specific circumstances to flourish. Such circumstances prevailed, in ancient Greece when a hyper-critical Athenian, Thucydides (c.460-400B.C.), after the Peloponnesian war in 420BC, produced his history.3 It was also a Europe which had been exposed to a belligerent Napoleonic France and the emergent awareness of Prussian sense of destiny, which inspired a youthful Leopold von Ranke, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, to produce an anti-Enlightenment discourse in his hermeneutics.4 In more recent times a standard history of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world, by Fernand Braudel (1902-1985),5 made its appearance in a post-World War II era when the ambitions of global political domination had been transferred from a Western European nucleus to the United States of America (USA) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The totalitarian approach of the <em>Annales </em>historians opened up new vistas on historical studies that were incomprehensible at the beginning of the twentieth century.</p>
dc.language	English
dc.publisher	University of Stellenbosch. Faculty of Military Science (Military Academy)
dc.relation	http://scientiamilitaria.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/228
dc.relation	https://doaj.org/toc/2224-0020
dc.source	Scientia Militaria : South African Journal of Military Studies, Vol 27, Iss 1 (2012)
dc.subject	Writing Histories and Creating Myths
dc.subject	Trends in the Discipline of History
dc.subject	Military Science
dc.subject	U
dc.subject	DOAJ:Military Science
dc.subject	DOAJ:Technology and Engineering
dc.subject	Military Science
dc.subject	U
dc.subject	DOAJ:Military Science
dc.subject	DOAJ:Technology and Engineering
dc.subject	Military Science
dc.subject	U
dc.subject	Military Science
dc.subject	U
dc.subject	Military Science
dc.subject	U
dc.title	Writing Histories and Creating Myths: Perspectives on Trends in the Discipline of History and its Representations in Some South African Historical Journals 1985-1995
dc.type	Article