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From Athens to Auschwitz
The Uses of History
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by Christian Meier,
Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider
Harvard University Press
Due/Published
April 2005, 256 pages,
cloth
ISBN
0674016920
What does history mean today? What is its relevance to the modern world? In contemplating fundamental questions about history and the Western legacy, the noted classical historian Christian Meier offers a new interpretation on how we view the world. Meier sees an "absence" of history in contemporary Europe and throughout the West--an absence he attributes to the way modern historians have written about history and, more important, to the dramatic transformations of the twentieth century. He argues for the central legacy of Western civilization. He tackles the difficulty of reconciling a historical perspective with our era of extreme acceleration, when experience is shaped less by inheritance and legacy than by the novelty of changes wrought by science and globalization. Finally, Meier contemplates the enormity of the Holocaust, which he sees as a test of "understanding" history. If it is part of the whole arc of the Western legacy, how do we fit it with the rest? |
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