Göttingen School of History

The Göttingen School of History was a school of thought established at the University of Göttingen in the late 18th century.[1]

It was the original centre of the "Historical Science" ("Geschichtswissenschaft") academic discipline.[2] The historians sought to write a universal history by combining the critical methods of Jean Mabillon with that of the philosophical historians such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon.[3]

The group of historians played an important role in creating a "scientific" basis for historical research,[4] and were responsible for coining fundamental terms in scientific racism such as Blumenbach and Meiners's color terminology for race: Caucasian or white race; Mongolian or yellow race; Malayan or brown race; Ethiopian or black race; and American or red race,[5] and Gatterer, Schlözer and Eichhorn's Biblical terminology for race: Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic.

List of academics

References

  1. ↑ Gierl, Martin (3 May 2013). "Change of Paradigm as a Squabble between Institutions". Scholars in Action (2 vols): The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century. BRILL. p. 285. ISBN 90-04-24391-7. The term “Gottingen school of history" refers not to student-teacher relations nor to a shared methodology, but precisely to this field of competition in historical, cultural and anthropological interpretation, which emerged in Gottingen in the second half of the eighteenth century as an institutional effect of the Gottingen university, and which is captivating not for its shared attitude, but for its vigorous activity emanating from all of the university’s areas of expertise in all areas of contemporary cultural-historical debate - which, as a political and cultural identity debate, was at the centre of discourse in the late Enlightenment.
  2. 1 2 Burns, Robert M. (2006). Historiography: Foundations. Taylor & Francis. pp. 94–. ISBN 978-0-415-32078-8.
  3. ↑ Iggers, Georg (1 November 2010). The Theory and Practice of History: Edited with an Introduction by Georg G. Iggers. Routledge. p. 19. ISBN 978-1-136-88292-0. There had developed in the eighteenth century at the University of Gottingen a school of historians, including Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig Schlozer and Arnold Hermann Heeren, who combined the critical method of erudite scholars like Mabillon with the concern of the philosophic historians of the eighteenth century, such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who sought to write universal history without a strict critical evaluation of their sources. Niebuhr and Ranke refined the concern with critical method, Ranke in the process narrowed the universality of the outlook of the Gottingen historians. What Ranke brought to history was less a new method - this had been developed to a great extent by the Gottingen school - than a greater emphasis on the professional and technical character of history and a conception of history that we shall discuss later in this Introduction.
  4. ↑ Cheng, Eileen K. (2008). The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism & Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860. University of Georgia Press. pp. 362–. ISBN 978-0-8203-3073-0. …historians of the Gottingen school played an important role in establishing the basis for critical scholarship and a more “scientific” approach to history during the second half of the eighteenth century as they used their training in philology and statistics and in what were considered the “auxiliary sciences" of paleography and numismatics to analyze historical data.
  5. ↑ The End of Racism by Dinesh D'Souza, pg 124, 1995, "Blumenbach's classification had a lasting influence in part because his categories neatly broke down into familiar tones and colors: white, black, yellow, red, and brown."
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Gierl, Martin (3 May 2013). "Change of Paradigm as a Squabble between Institutions". Scholars in Action (2 vols): The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century. BRILL. p. 285. ISBN 90-04-24391-7. ...that its opponent was by no means a united historians camp". On the contrary: August Ludwig Schlozer, an early full member with Gatterer, who later turned increasingly into Gatterer’s competitor, became a member of the academy as Michaelis protégé in 1766; the popular philosopher Christoph Meiners, who had published a cultural-anthropological History of Mankind in 1775, was a member of both societies as well; Spittler and Heeren two other leading thinkers of the so-called “Gottingen school of history", which, with respect to ancient history, encompassed Heyne and Michaelis with their works on antiquity - where members of the academy.
  7. 1 2 https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/old-testament/54892.html
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