Study sheet: History Geography and Political Thought

📋 Course Outline

1. Origins and Scope of History
2. History as an Academic Discipline
3. Historical Periodization and Time
4. Historical Reconstruction and Memory
5. Historiography and Historical Writing
6. Foundations of Geography
7. Geographical Schools and Approaches
8. Geopolitics and Territorial Power
9. Geopolitical Theories and Strategies
10. Political Science and Political Systems

📅 Key Dates

1. beginning of the third millennium BCThe first chronicles appeared in Mesopotamia.
2. fourteenth centuryMarsile of Padua criticized papal temporal power and linked political action to human free will and election. — Marsile de Padoue, Defensor Pacis
3. middle of the sixteenth centuryUniversities in Wittenberg, Marburg, and Königsberg had chairs of history.
4. June 1679Gottfried von Leibniz probably first used the word geopolitics in an encyclopedic project. — Gottfried von Leibnitz
5. middle of the nineteenth centuryModern political science emerged as states and societies underwent major transformations.
6. end of the nineteenth centuryModern geopolitics emerged with rationalism, geographical development, and German expansionism.
7. 1907An independent history degree appeared in France.

📖 1. Origins and Scope of History

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• History : A representation and reconstruction of the past made possible by writing and based on knowledge obtained through investigation.

📝 Essential Points

• Herodotus, who lived from 480 to 425 BC, is often presented as the father of history because he recorded recent Greek events so that time would not erase human achievements.

• Thucydides, who lived from 460 to 400 BC, introduced an early rational method to history with the aim of seeking truth.

💡 Memory Hook

Writing → chronicles → Herodotus → Thucydides

📖 2. History as an Academic Discipline

📝 Essential Points

📌 History initially focused on war, politics, and religion, then progressively expanded to society, diplomacy, and economics.

• The professionalization of history enabled a rigorous and scientific critical method while retaining qualities such as imagination.

• The School of the Annales was founded in France at the beginning of the twentieth century by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch and promoted long-term, broad, transdisciplinary study.

💡 Memory Hook

Autonomous training → critical method → scientific historiography

📖 3. Historical Periodization and Time

★ Must-know

• The French periodization comprises:

  • Antiquity from 3500 BC to 476
  • the Middle Ages from 476 to 1492
  • the modern era from 1492 to 1789
  • the contemporary era from 1789 to the present

• The duration of French historical periods decreases because the quantity of sources increases almost exponentially.

Further detail

• The Anglo-Saxon model comprises: Ancient History from 3500 BC to 500, the Middle Ages from 500 to 1500, the Modern Age from 1500 to the present, the Early Modern Period from 1500 to 1800, the Late Modern Period from 1800 to the present

• The American model uses six periods:

  • technological and environmental transformations
  • organization and reorganization of human societies
  • regional and transregional interactions
  • global interactions
  • industrialization and global integration
  • acceleration of global change and realignments

💡 Memory Hook

French four-period model versus Anglo-Saxon models

📖 4. Historical Reconstruction and Memory

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Historical reconstruction : The reasoned representation of what no longer exists, created by placing the past at a critical distance.

★ Must-know

📌 History is never memory because history provides explanatory frameworks for the past, whereas memory is shaped by individual and collective experience.

• According to Lucien Febvre, people do not preserve the past in memory but reconstruct it from the present and through collective life. — De 1892 à 1933 : Examen de conscience d’une histoire et d’un historien, 1933

📌 Historians must use emotion cautiously because the emotion felt by a reader may not correspond to the emotion experienced by the testimony’s author. — Pierre Laborie, Témoignage et récit historique, 2002

Further detail

• Contemporary history is built with and against witnesses’ memories because historians can directly confront living testimony.

💡 Memory Hook

History reconstructs and explains; memory preserves and judges

📖 5. Historiography and Historical Writing

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Historiography : The critical study of how history is written, including changes caused by social and political contexts and the tools used to produce history.

★ Must-know

• Braudel distinguishes three temporal levels (Fernand Braudel):
  • the long term of general structures
  • the medium term of economic cycles
  • the short term of political events

📌 Historical writing may use literary qualities and the pleasure of reading, but its narrative imagination must remain constrained by reality. — Paul Ricoeur

Further detail

• The long term is particularly useful for studying the evolution of mentalities. — Fernand Braudel

💡 Memory Hook

Context and tools → changing ways of producing history

📖 6. Foundations of Geography

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Geography : A family of sciences studying the dimensions of Earth, its physical components, and the relationships between spaces and human societies.

★ Must-know

• Geography comprises mathematical geography, physical geography, and human geography.

Further detail

• In antiquity, geography was linked to geopolitics because knowledge of territories helped define and analyze territories possessed or sought.

• Ptolemy’s Geography was an eight-book compilation of the knowledge of his time, with the eighth book presenting maps based on observations from the preceding seven books.

📖 7. Geographical Schools and Approaches

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Determinism : Carl Ritter — An explanation of a social condition by a natural cause that determines it.
• Human geography : A science that observes, describes, and analyzes territories to explain their role in the spatial organization of human societies.

★ Must-know

• Friedrich Ratzel argued that societies are largely explained by the natural environment in which they develop and linked social diversity to environmental diversity. — Anthropogeographie

Further detail

• Elisée Reclus rejected determinism and is considered a precursor of social geography.

💡 Memory Hook

Determinism explains societies by nature; social geography emphasizes human action

📖 8. Geopolitics and Territorial Power

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Geopolitics : The study of the spatialization of political phenomena, including relations between political action and terrestrial or maritime spaces.

📝 Essential Points

📌 Geopolitical spaces are objective realities that are also perceived subjectively through the symbols and historical meanings attributed to them by people who control or covet them.

💡 Memory Hook

Territorial rivalries → spatial consequences of power

📖 9. Geopolitical Theories and Strategies

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Lebensraum : Friedrich Ratzel’s concept of living space, used to justify the expansion of Germany in response to a limited territory and a dynamic population.
• Sea Power : The influence of Sea Power upon History 1660 – 1783 — Alfred T. Mahan’s concept that a state projects influence through naval power, especially when it is distant from major centers of power.

★ Must-know

• Ratzel’s rules of state expansion emphasize (Friedrich Ratzel, 1897):
  • cultural evolution
  • ideological and commercial power
  • annexation of smaller entities
  • living borders
  • access to the sea or resources
  • expansion against weaker neighbors
  • repetition after annexing weaker nations

Further detail

• Mahan argued that the United States had to project influence through naval power because it was distant from Europe and Asia, the main centers of power and civilization. — Alfred T. Mahan, The influence of Sea Power upon History 1660 – 1783

• Karl Haushofer presented states as living organisms that must expand to prosper and developed a nationalist German geopolitics aimed at economic self-sufficiency.

💡 Memory Hook

Ratzel’s expansion → Mahan’s Sea Power → Haushofer’s national strategy

📖 10. Political Science and Political Systems

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Political science : A discipline studying political phenomena, including forms of government, the organization and exercise of power, and political actors.

📝 Essential Points

• Political science aims to understand how societies function politically and covers fields from political theory to political sociology.

📌 Political science should first teach relativism toward political systems of thought.

💡 Memory Hook

Ancient thought → Marsile of Padua → modern political science

📊 Synthesis Tables

Historical Time Models

Model	Periods	Key boundaries
French	Antiquity, Middle Ages, modern era, contemporary era	3500 BC–476; 476–1492; 1492–1789; 1789–present
Anglo-Saxon	Ancient History, Middle Ages, Modern Age	3500 BC–500; 500–1500; 1500–present
American AP World History	Six thematic periods	8000 BC–present