In History
Essentialism is used by some historians in listing essential cultural characteristics of a particular nation or culture. A people can be understood in this way. In other cases, the essentialist method has been used by members, or admirers, of an historical community to establish a praiseworthy national identity. Contrastingly, many historians reject essentialism as a form of determinism and prefer to contextualize cultural tropes within a broader lens of historical cause and effect.
Read more about this topic: Essentialism
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“History ... is, indeed, little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.
But what experience and history teach is this—that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)