Regression
Glossary

History’s History

HISTORY (ἱστορία)


History
[from the Greek ἱστορία, meaning: inquiry, knowledge acquired through investigation].

The discipline that deals with systematic narratives of past occurrences (facts and persons involved) relating to a specific geographic area, to a particular people, to a country, a period, a person, &c..
Such narratives are usually written as a chronological account (chronicle) and often interpreted through an ideologic model framed by values and principles, aiming to find explanations or justifications to the involved events, and to evaluate their impacts and following consequences.

The study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered Prehistory.

A TALE FROM OUR HISTORY’S HISTORY…

Once upon a time, a very very long time ago…, our anthropoid ancestors, aiming to gain some control over their lives through the domination/management of environmental conditions, started acting on this world using several different tools and developing the appropriate techniques.


Those proto-humans ascended then to the new status of homo faber [men able to make things] and since, within each environmental/historical context, more or less deep and rapid processes of technological improvement, social development and cultural enhancement started to occur.

Today, we are the result of such a slow and very long process of evolution of our human species, from primitive humanoids to the homo sapiens we are today; a process that involved physical complexion and aspect, brain size and mental capacities, social conditions and structures, cultural density and complexity and its means of expression and communication…

images by Zdenec Burian

to IMAGES OF PRIMITIVE MEN

Such a process affected almost every aspect of our lives and, retrospectively interpreted through our actual knowledge a significant amount of information gathered in a rationaly sustainable hypothesis , it shapes what we, today, call «Progress».

… Progress then is a theory which involves a synthesis of the past and a prophecy of the future. It is based on an interpretation of history which regards men as slowly advancing – pedetemtim progredientes – in a definite and desirable direction, and infers that this progress will continue indefinitely.

[John Bagnell Bury – 1920]

However, such a narrative only became viable after a modern (scientific) historical interpretation of the remains of our pre-historic ancestors and their settings, a process manly developed after the XVIII century, supported by the discoveries and studies made since then by the (new or renewed) sciences of Astronomy, Geography, Geology, Paleontology, Archeology, &c.

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)