The rich analyses of Fernand Braudel and his fellow Annales historians have made significant contributions to historical theory and research. In a departure from traditional historical approaches, the Annales historians, assume (as do Marxists) that history cannot be limited to a simple recounting of conscious human actions, but must be understood in the context of forces and material conditions that underlie human behavior. Braudel was the first Annales historian to gain widespread support of the idea that history should synthesize data from various social sciences, especially economics, in order to provide a broader view of human societies over time (although Febvre and Bloch, founders of the Annales school, had originated this approach).
Braudel conceived of history as the dynamic interaction of three temporalities. The first of these, the evenementielle, involved short-lived dramatic "events," such as battles, revolutions and the actions of great men, which had preoccupied traditional historians like Carlyle. Conjonctures was Braudel's term for larger cyclical processes that might last up to half a century. The longue duree, a historical wave of great length, was for Braudel the most fascinating of the three temporalities. Here he focused on those aspects of everyday life that might remain relatively unchanged for centuries. What people ate, what they wore, their means and routes of travel for Braudel these things create "structures" which define the limits of potential social change for hundreds of years at a time.
Braudel's concept of the longue duree extended the perspective of historical space as well as time. Until the Annales school, historians had taken the juridical political unit the nation-state, duchy, or whatever as their starting point. Yet, when such enormous timespans are considered, geographical features may well have more significance for human populations than national borders. In his doctoral thesis, a seminal work on the Mediterranean during the reign of Philip II, Braudel treated the geohistory of the entire region as a "structure" that had exerted myriad influences on human lifeways since the first settlements on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. And so the reader is given such arcane information as the list of products that came to Spanish shores from North Africa, the seasonal routes followed by Mediterranean sheep and their shepherds, and the cities where the best ship timber could be bought.
Braudel has been faulted for the imprecision of his approach. With his Rabelaisian delight in concrete detail, Braudel vastly extended the realm of relevant phenomena; but this very achievement made it difficult to delimit the boundaries of observation, a task necessary to beginning any social investigation. Further, Braudel and other Annales historians minimize the differences among the social sciences. Nevertheless, the many similarly- designed studies aimed at both professional and popular audiences indicate that Braudel asked significant questions which traditional historians had overlooked.
The passage suggests that, compared with traditional historians, Annales historians are:
- more interested in other social sciences than in history.
- critical of the achievements of famous historical figures.
- skeptical of the validity of most economic research.
- more interested in the underlying context of human behavior.
Answer(s): D
Explanation:
The author states in Paragraph 1 that unlike conventional historians, the Annales historians emphasized understanding history in the context of the forces and material conditions that underlying human behavior.
Choice D paraphrases this.
Annales historians are interested in synthesizing data from social sciences in order to do history, but they are not more interested in other social sciences than in history, so Choice A is wrong. Braudel incorporated the study of great figures into his framework of the three temporalities, so there is no reason to think Annales historians would be critical of the achievements of historical figures (Choice B). Choice C is incorrect because the author states in Paragraph 1 that the Annales historians advocate using economic data in historical research.
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