East and West are terms in constant use, pregnant with meaning but hard to define. We speak of individuals or groups as 'Oriental' or Western' in character. We hear of an Asian viewpoint, unaccept- able to the West of a Western colonialism causing resentment in the East. East is East, we remember reading, and never the twain shall meet. 'But they must meet l' say the idealists, and so the deba…
HISTORY," said Charles Seignobos, "is not a science it is a method (procédé de connaissance) By that he meant that historical method may be applied to the subject matter of any discipline as a means of extracting fact. That is true, but it is no less true that historical method has a special significance for the historian. The historian (or other scholar acting in loco historici) applies the…
However selective the aims of individual historians may be, their collective aim is to climb to an increasingly comprehensive view of the past. This anthology is designed to show by what feats of imagina- tion and technique the hairpin turns in the road of historical writing have been engineered. The men represented here all possess certain qualities in common: literary ability, intellectual po…