Chapter 2 Introduction to history leads us closer to life

If you read books and have the habit of jumping directly to the end to see the ending, you will definitely like this book-because the ending is already mentioned not long after the beginning.This book tells the history of Europe six times in total from different angles. The content of this book was originally a handout for teaching, the purpose is to give Australian college students a preliminary understanding of European history.But as a teacher, I didn't start from the front, step by step and talk to the end.My approach is to give students a quick overview and then go back and add details.

In the space of the first two chapters I briefly outlined the complete history of Europe, which is indeed the shortest history of Europe.The next six chapters each take a specific topic extension.The reason for this is that by going back and doing a deeper examination, students can deepen their understanding. All stories have a plot: a beginning, a middle, and an end.By this definition, civilization is not a story.If we think that the evolution of civilization must have ups and downs, we will be attracted by the story, although it will come to an end sooner or later.My purpose is to find out the basic elements of European civilization, and see how these elements are recombined through time, to shape a new look from the old; to see how the old things stand firm and reappear.

History books always touch on many people and events. This is one of the benefits of history and brings us closer to life.But what's the point of all this?Which are the really important things?Question marks like these always linger in my mind. Therefore, many events and people included in history books do not appear in this book. The second part of the book, which is the more detailed description, stops abruptly when it comes to 1800, purely because when I was preparing these materials, I had another class devoted to history after 1800.How many historical stories would be missed because of this?However, I sometimes wish that if my method works, you will see that the outlines of the world we currently inhabit were laid down a long time ago.

The focus of this book, after the classical period, is mostly on Western Europe.In shaping European civilization, the importance of the various regions of Europe is not equal.The Italian Renaissance, the German Reformation, the British Parliamentary Government, and the French Democratic Revolution all had a greater impact than the partition of Poland. I have relied heavily on the work of historical sociologists, especially Michael Mann and Patricia Crone.Crone is not an expert on European history, her field of expertise is Islamic culture.However, she has a chapter in a little book called Pre-Industrial Societies: "The Oddity of Europe," which is a wonderful piece of work, only The entire history is told in thirty pages, almost as short as my "A Very Brief History".It provided my idea of ​​sorting out and reorganizing the various mixed elements of Europe, and the result is what the first two chapters of this book present.

For many years I taught at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, where I had the honor of being a colleague of Professor Eric Jones.He has encouraged me to look at history in the big picture, and I have relied heavily on his book The European Miracle. I wrote these textbooks, and the original target audience was Australian students, who knew too much about Australian history and too little about European civilization, and they, too, were part of Europe.