History and historical events
History as a concept and as content, the possible ways of approaching and interpreting it as a phenomenon, and its relationship as Time to the Past and the Present, are issues that have long preoccupied research in this field. More recent views, regarding it as a sequence of events and their narration, regardless of the degree of truth or plausibility they include (Veyne 1971: 423), highlight the inherent duality that characterises it: as ‘historical reality’ on the one hand and as the ‘study of this reality’ on the other, whilst a third dimension emerges from these, concerning the very processes of narrating the former (Le Goff 1998: 148). In this way, traditional views of the sort that ‘History is the science of people in Time’ (Bloch 1974) give way to others that regard it as a concept that is ‘ambiguous, potentially event-oriented and potentially structural’ (Ricoeur 1961:226), while simultaneously promoting the study of History through models different from those used in the past.
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