Reviews for History of South Africa to Eighteen Seventy

The average rating for History of South Africa to Eighteen Seventy based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-02-10 00:00:00 Bobby W Baker During the 1920s, the social sciences were establishing separate departments at all the major universities and receiving a handsome share of grants and glory from the great foundations. Some historians sought a piece of the rising prestige of the social sciences by attempting to align the two fields. The main proponents of this rapprochement were a small band of scientific New Historians, including Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., Dixon Ryan Fox, and Harry Elmer Barnes. They believed that an alliance between history and the social sciences caused no inherent epistemological break from scientific history and actually promoted objectivity. John Higham referred to Harry Elmer Barnes as the most “rabid prophet” of the scientific New Historians in his attempts to overthrow traditional, narrow, political scholarship. Barnes’s principle manifesto was The New History and the Social Studies, which was a historiographical attempt to “set forth the interrelations of history and the social studies.” This was a zealous call to arms for a “social scientific” history, and as Novick claimed, with only a few exceptions “the call went unanswered.” Barnes’s specific intent of his book was to discuss how the methodologies of social science could contribute to historical objectivity and, reciprocally, how history could be of value to the social sciences. He employed a historiographical approach to answer this question by examining written change over time in seven related disciplines to social science, including geography, psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, and science and technology. He estimated “the importance [of each discipline] as a branch of historiography...with respect to the nature of history.” Each of these disciplines received a comprehensive chapter describing the past, present, and prognostications for the future. The goal of this book and Barnes’s idea of the New History were concomitant. A main tenet of the New History was to “take into account the sum total of human achievement,” to provide contemporary historiography with “a complete and reliable picture of the past.” Barnes believed that the greatest need for the present (the 1920s) was to “bring social, economic, and political institutions and technique up to the same level of efficiency and objectivity which has been reached in science and technology.” Thus, The New History and the Social Studies was intended to inculcate the historical profession with the New Historian’s ideals by providing a historiographical compendium of “facts” from all discipline of “human achievement.”

Review # 2 was written on 2015-12-12 00:00:00 Thomas Stalnik I picked this up for some extensive reading in Greek at a level I hoped I could handle. It was more or less OK for my level (estimated to be B1 or B2), though with a lot of infrequent vocabulary. If you're looking for an unbiased history of modern Greece (well, as much as any history can be), this isn't it. It's so over-the-top patriotic, you'll dream in blue and white for days. Sadly, it's not much better for language learning. I gather this was intended as a textbook for Greek-American elementary school children attending Greek school at their local Orthodox church. The goal is to instill pride in Greek history and culture through fairly easy Greek. Nothing wrong with that. It just gets a little - OK, a lot! - repetitive and the vocabulary is far from frequent. Does your everyday conversation include such terms as "blood-colored", "suzerain", and "to be murdered by being skewered like a souvlaki"? If so, this book will teach them to you. If not, it's adequate reading practice but probably not something you'll retain for long simply because you'll have few opportunities to use the vocabulary again.