Historian

Summary

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere. Objectivity During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, people became aware that the court needed to identify what was an "objective historian" in the same vein as the reasonable person, and reminiscent of the standard traditionally used in English law of "the man on the Clapham omnibus". This was necessary so that there would be a legal benchmark to compare and contrast the scholarship of an objective historian against the illegitimate methods employed by David Irving, as before the I

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historian

About this result

This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.

Related publications (5)

Related publications

Related people

Related units

Related concepts (45)

Related concepts

Related courses (5)

Le cours vise a familiariser les etudiants avec l'histoire de l'environnement et des paysages, et avec la maniere dont les preoccupations environnementales amenent a repenser aujourd'hui le sens et les principes de l'architecture et des disciplines de projet.

Negative Creep: Reading Manfredo Tafuri, Today. The course offers a systematic introduction of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri's body of work to students in order to ease their reading of his often difficult work and discover its contemporary relevance.

This course aims at building a genealogy of capitalism through the spaces it has produced retracing history from the English 'Agricultural Revolution' of the 18th century to the rise of the Welfare State. Topics such as the factory, housing and infrastructure will be presented and discussed.

Related courses

Related lectures (5)

Related lectures

Graphical details: the secret life of Christopher Wren's drawing of the weather clock

Ion-Gabriel Mihailescu

Historians have unanimously credited Christopher Wren with having constructed a weather clock (a self-registering instrument) in the early 1660s. This conclusion was based on the account of the French diplomat Balthasar de Monconys, which included a sketch uncannily similar to an undated drawing by Wren of the weather clock. By critically re-examining the available sources, I argue that one can infer that Wren never actually constructed a weather clock. What Monconys saw and sketched was, in fact, a drawing produced by Wren for a meeting of the Royal Society that took place on 8 January 1662. I further show that there is strong evidence to assume that Wren's drawing for the Royal Society is the undated drawing preserved at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The new context in which I place Wren's drawing provides an incentive to look at it with fresh eyes. Though the drawing does not represent a device actually constructed by Wren, it still bears (unexpected) connections to the material world that surrounded him. The analysis of the drawing developed in this article will be relevant for historians interested in the role that images can play as historical evidence.

2021

The journeys throughout Europe for attesting the state of contemporary architecture brought the great passionate promoter of the Modern Movement, Sigfried Giedion, also to Stockholm. One month after the opening of the 1930 Stockholm exhibition, generally considered as the precise event from which new functionalist architecture become manifest, the Swiss historian came in contact with the Swedish efforts in the social and housing question. This was the result of the future-oriented program of the exhibition of which Giedion was updated by Swedish delegation since the late 1928. Housing prototypes produced for the sake of the event and few first housing interventions built in Stockholm, responded to new standards, techniques and expressive language. All of this positioned Sweden to equal the results achieved by other countries in the forefront like Germany, Netherlands, France and Russia, which had previously faced the same problems. The participation of the Swedish delegation for the first time – namely Sven Markelius and Gunnar Sundbärg – to the II CIAM in Frankfurt (1929) had contributed in this regard as well. The goal of the present contribution is to examine in detail two extensive accounts of Giedion (Stein Holz Eisen, July 1930 and Cahiers d'Art – re-print in Bauwelt, September 1930), particularly focusing on how Swedes tackled the housing issue. His look shed the light on three key figures, namely Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundhal and Sven Wallander, that are recognised as those who, at first, attempted to address the discussion on the ‘minimum dwelling’. No doubts that Giedion contributed to include Sweden in his heterodox portray of modern architecture, via capsizing the initial viewpoint of a country at the fringe of the uropean animated debate. His comments literally paved the way for spreading Swedish interventions with regard to housing across many journals and publications even outside the national borders. A particular attention goes also to the analysis of the features of three housing projects he presented in the papers in order to contextualize and compare them to a larger extent.

2019

During one of his many trips around Europe to observe the state of contemporary architecture, Sigfried Giedion went to Stockholm in 1930. On returning to Zurich, he published two extensive pa-pers about the city and the Stockholm Exhibition. The goal here is to analyse Giedion’s views on how Swedes tackled the housing issue, especially Sven Markelius, Eskil Sundhal and Sven Wallander, whom the Swiss historian recognised as being the first to address the issue of “minimum dwelling”

AISU International2020

2019