2.7 Read and translate the text without a dictionary:

Two major tendencies in the writing of history are evident from the beginnings of the Western tradition: the concept of historiography as an accumulation of records and the concept of history as storytelling, filled with explanations of cause and effect. In the 5th century BC the Greek historians Herodotus and, later, Thucydides emphasized firsthand inquiry in their efforts to impose a narrative pattern on wars and major political events. As examples of literary art, their critical accounts are interesting and dramatically unified and present prose of striking style, though sometimes at the expense of truth or verifiability of evidence. Biased accounts are more likely among the Romans, whose historians generally were members of the ruling class and thus

were hardly disinterested. The dominance of Christian historiography by the 4th century introduced the idea of word history as the result of operation of the divine in the affairs of men and women, an idea that was to prevail throughout the Middle Ages. In the early Middle Ages in the West, the Christian monastic historians mingled fact and myth in their accounts. The strengths of medieval historiography are its oc­casional accounts of witnessed contemporary events and frequent quotations from official documents.

The major contributions of Byzantine historiography were its strong secular tradition, which resulted in contemporary histories, bi­ographies, and popular chronicles, and its preservation of and emula­tion of the Greco-Roman classical models, which resulted in the con­tinuation of Greek learning and culture. The Byzantine tradition's most important achievement lay in its revival of the concept of critical history: attention thus was paid to rational analysis, to cause and effect. The two main influences on historiography in the early modern period were nationalism (as manifested in the concept of national his­tory) and the Reformation. The new historiography of the Enlighten­ment resulted from the wish to transfer the objective and impartial methods of natural science to the analysis and improvement of hu­man social structures.

The 19th and 20th centuries have seen the development of modern methods of historical investigation; the basis of these is the authenti­cation, interpretation, and critical evaluation of historical documents and earlier historiographic writings, and the synthesis of these materi­als into an accurate narrative or analysis of the past. Modern histori­ography has largely become the province of professional historians who acquire a knowledge of their discipline through specialized high­er education. Modern historiography is a cooperative venture in which the achievements of past historians are used systematically by their successors in a continuously expanding and changing reassess­ment of the past.

2.8 Summarize the text in a paragraph of about 200 words or speak on one of the topics:

1. The problems of modern and contemporary historiography.

2. Russian historiography.