"History" in Chinese is both "old" and "new".
To say "old" is that some old scholars believe that the "History of the Three Kingdoms" annotated by Pei Songzhi is the source of the word "history".
His Biography of Master Wu records that Zhao Zi was an ambassador to Wei, and he was eloquent and convinced Wei Wendi Cao Pi. In the Note, Pei Songzhi elaborated on Zhao Zi’s response, saying, "The prince of Wu floats on the river with a million ships; Ren Xian can make use of his abilities, and he will keep his mind on the classics. Although I have spare time, I read a lot of books, collect historical records, adopt strange things, and it doesn’t work for scholars to find chapters and extract sentences.
Accordingly, the earliest "history" means "browsing historical records".
When we say "new", it is from the Ming Dynasty that "history" has a new meaning.
During the Wanli period of the Ming Dynasty, Yuan Lefan, a great scholar, wrote A Supplement to the Outline of History. Its "history" means "historical records".
In modern times, the meaning of "history" has changed again.
About the end of the Ming Dynasty, the Japanese reprinted A Supplement to the Outline of History, which was widely circulated in China. Its version was introduced into China in the late Qing Dynasty, which made the word "history" widely accepted. At this time, the meaning of "history" is similar to that of "words and things recorded in ancient books" in Chinese "history"
The Chinese character "calendar" is a simplified character, which has three traditional Chinese characters-"calendar" and "calendar", which is generally considered to be universal.
In fact, there are subtle differences in mutual meaning. What is connected with history should be "Guan", which means "through", "through", "universal" and "ranking".
Therefore, the ancients used the word "中中" to match "history".
The original meaning of "history" is official position, "holding in the hand", pictographic and knowing, indicating that "historian" is upright, and later extended to mean "what happened in a certain time and space in the past".
Now, if you ask what "history" is, it actually means this-"All the past is history".
In the west, for example, English "history" originally means "telling stories", and later it has the same meaning as Chinese "history"-"all the past is history".
Specifically, the meaning of the word "history" in modern times is divided into two levels.
The first level is "objective history", that is, what happened in the past.
In "objective history", it includes "broad history" and "narrow history".
"Generalized history" refers to the objective process of the movement and change of everything that exists objectively. Generally speaking, it includes natural history and social history.
For example, "the history of the universe" is all the "past" courses that the vast universe has experienced-whether people can recognize and understand it or not. This belongs to "natural history".
For another example, "human history" is all the "past" courses of the species "man" since its formation-no matter how much people have figured out. People have a society, which is "social history".
"Social history" or "human history" refers to the objective process of movement and change of human society from the beginning, which is usually called "narrow sense history".
"Human History" is the research object of "Anthropology" and "Anthropology Archaeology". "Social history" is the main research object of "history" and "sociology".
In addition, "narrow sense history" also refers to the history of the development and change of some objective things.
For example, the objective history of the development and change of the earth’s "biology" is the object of "biology" research; For example, the objective history of the earth’s "geography" changes is the research object of "geology" and "historical geography", and so on.
The second level is "historical theory", that is, human’s subjective cognition of objective "broad history" and "narrow history".
This kind of cognition, or covers a wide range, or the perspective is extremely concentrated.
For example, there is a great history written by Ming Xu recently in China, with the subtitle from the origin of the universe to human civilization and the English title of BIG HISITORY.
There is also a great history of everything written by David Christian, the pioneer of the Great History School abroad, with the English title A Big History of Everything.
However, other historical works in a narrow sense have a very concentrated perspective, such as "A certain dynastic history", "China iron history", "Medieval costume history" and "Xiongnu history", and so on.
Since the "historical theory" is people’s subjective cognition, firstly, the authenticity and total bias of the narrative are closely related to the author’s vision, position, materials and materials, which are bound to be limited by the times; Second, even if we take a realistic attitude towards "objective history", it is bound to be a process of approaching "historical truth" and the complicated reasons behind it.
What is "history"? It is the "historical truth" of all "objective history"
The purpose of human cognition of "objective history" lies in more, more complete, more detailed and truly understanding of "historical truth" and drawing regular knowledge from it.
As for the so-called "history is a little girl dressed for everyone", as Hu Shi, the well-known originator of China, said, including the German Nazi Piper’s saying that "history is written by winners" and so on, all of which can be attributed to the typical idealistic view of history, so there is no need to talk more.
# History in ancient books #
