#timurids

I've been reading a histrographical book about early 1400s Iran recently, and within it, I've already stumbled upon three insane historical stories of just random people.

History memes #57

Over the years, as I laboured on this book, the dispassionate compassion of Buddha had seemed to me the perfect ideal for students of history, though of course we would all fail disgracefully to live up to it, as the passions of our lives and the furies of our age knead and rework us continually on the slow wheel of time. As time reworks us, we rework history. “All works of [historiography] are interim reports,” said John Noble Wilford. “What people did in the past is not preserved in amber…. Each generation looks back and, drawing from its own experience, presumes to find patterns that illuminate both past and present.” The past [or what remains of it] is nearly as alive as the present, and it changes as the present changes, the historical past as much as our personal past. … [T]he way facts interlock is unique to each generation, indeed to each historian. …[T]he value of [historiography] depends on the felicitous catalysis of the personal vision into a universal vision. It is essentially a triumph of art.