What is modern historical science. Historical science and modern society. Agronomic science in the 20th century

In the midst of April Fool's Day, I think it will be useful to clearly explain why people who consider history not a science are not very smart themselves. On the Internet you can find a bunch of forums and various topics created on them: science or history. Here are some of the arguments of such people on this matter:

Each new government rewrites history to suit itself; there is no objectivity.

There is no way to check how everything really happened, and all history books lie.

Historians are storytellers, etc., etc.

The funny thing is that this point of view (history is not science) is supported by people, even with higher education, and in all seriousness. Such thoughts have a harmful effect primarily on children who do not understand why they should study a “fictional” science. In a word, laughter and sin. So, is history a science or not?

Any science, no matter what, has the characteristics of being scientific that are common to all sciences. Actually, by the presence of these signs you can judge whether science is in front of you or not. These are the signs:

Availability of the research object. An object is that part of reality that science studies. The peculiarity of history is that its object lies outside of today's time. The object of studying history is the historical process. The historical process is the process of transformation of all spheres of people's lives over time. Exaggerating, we can say that the historical process is, for example, the evolution of the family (patriarchal => nuclear, for example), the evolution of the city, social relations, culture. History answers the question: how and why human society develops; reveals the driving factors and conditions for the development of society.

I think it is clear that the object of science is history. Every person wants to know who his parents are, if any, and who his grandfathers, great-grandparents, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc. were.

The second sign of scientific character is the presence of clear methods of cognition. For example, in chemistry and biology, you can study the structure of matter by observing through a microscope. In physics, there are clear instruments for measuring on one scale or another: current strength, temperature, etc. Do such methods exist in history? Is it possible to know the past?

Yes, they exist, yes it is possible. How do historians find out about certain facts? From sources. Remember forever: amateurs read books, professionals read sources: documents, chronicles, chronographs. Yes, but you can also lie about them? Therefore, researchers are armed with source analysis: the history of the creation of the source, the conditions of its writing are studied, and in the end, not one source is taken, but several. And through comparative analysis, scientists reach the truth.

In addition to written sources, there are also archaeological ones. By the way, I recommend reading the article on the topic about. Based on the alleged event, it is established what exactly happened? It's a lot like investigating a crime. Only unlike criminology, history, as a rule, deals with people who have already died. More precisely, with their things (“evidence”), etc.

History does not disdain modern technical methods: radiocarbon analysis, or the use of geoinformation methods. I think you understand that with the second sign of scientific nature, history is also all-top. Let's move on.

Any science has established scientific centers, personnel, and institutions. That is, it is institutionalized. History too: there are established scientific schools, both in Russia and abroad.

Well, the thesis that nothing can be verified is not entirely true. Today there are a lot of experiments when scientists recreate the realities of the primitive era: for example, they are trying to make tools from stone, etc. When I was in Luxembourg, I was in the local national museum (entrance is 1 euro, which you get at the exit :)). There are seven floors. Moreover, the first floor is from the primitive era, where the dwellings of ancient people are recreated. Strongly. In addition, today tribes live far from the so-called civilization. By observing the life of such a tribe, you can verify a lot of things.

Next is the thesis that history is often rewritten. What is being rewritten, my dears, is not historical facts, but their interpretation. It should also be understood that this very interpretation depends not only on the powers that be, but also on the findings of new historical sources.

For example, in 2004, scientists discovered the Rurik mound. Yes, yes, that same Rurik. So, how will this person's personality gain more serious weight in historical research?

It’s one thing when you read about Rurik in the chronicles. And it’s completely different when you find his mound - archaeological confirmation. This is how the truth is established. What did you think?

So people who claim that history is not a science can hardly be called smart. So let's call them stupid on April Fool's Day :)

From the editor: We thank the European University Press in St. Petersburg for the opportunity to publish a fragment from the book by historian Ivan Kurilla “History, or the Past in the Present” (St. Petersburg, 2017).

Let's now talk about historical science - how much does it suffer from violent storms in the historical consciousness of society?

History as a scientific discipline is experiencing overload from different sides: the state of historical consciousness of society is an external challenge, while the accumulated problems within science, calling into question the methodological foundations of the discipline and its institutional structure, represent internal pressure.

Plurality of subjects (“History in fragments”)

Already in the 19th century, history began to fragment according to the subject of study: in addition to political history, the history of culture and economics appeared, and later social history, the history of ideas and many directions studying various aspects of the past were added to them.

Finally, the most uncontrollable process was the fragmentation of history according to the subject of historical questioning. We can say that the process of fragmentation of history is pushed forward by the identity politics described above. In Russia, the fragmentation of history by social and gender groups occurred more slowly than by ethnic and regional variants.

Coupled with the fragmentation of the methodology used by historians, this situation led to the fragmentation of not only historical consciousness as a whole, but also the field of historical science itself, which by the end of the century was, in the words of the Moscow historian M. Boytsov (in a sensational situation among the professional community in the 1990s article), a pile of “shards”. Historians have come to state the impossibility of unity not only of the historical narrative, but also of historical science.

The reader has already understood, of course, that the idea of ​​the possibility of the only true historical narrative, the only correct and final version of history is contrary to the modern view of the essence of history. You can often hear questions addressed to historians: well, what happened in reality, what is the truth? After all, if one historian writes about an event this way, and another writes differently, does that mean one of them is mistaken? Can they come to a compromise and understand how it “really was”? There is a demand for such a story about the past in society (the recent attempt of the popular writer Boris Akunin to become a “new Karamzin”, and, to some extent, the debate about a “single textbook” of history, are probably growing from such expectations). Society, as it were, demands that historians agree to finally write a single textbook in which “the whole truth” will be presented.

There are indeed problems in history in which it is possible to find a compromise, but there are also those in which this is impossible: this is, as a rule, a story told by “different voices”, associated with the identity of a particular social group. The history of an authoritarian state and the history of victims of some “great turn” are unlikely to ever create a “compromise option.” An analysis of the interests of the state will help to understand why certain decisions were made, and this will be a logical explanation. But his logic in no way “balances” the history of those people who, as a result of these decisions, lost their fortune, health, and sometimes life - and this story will also be true about the past. These two views on history can be presented in different chapters of the same textbook, but there are many more such points of view than two: it can be difficult, for example, to reconcile the history of different regions in a large multinational country. Moreover, the past provides historians with the opportunity to create multiple narratives, and bearers of different value systems (as well as different social groups) can write their own “history textbook”, in which they can describe history from the point of view of nationalism or internationalism, statism or anarchy, liberalism or traditionalism. Each of these stories will be internally consistent (although, probably, each such story will contain silence about some aspects of the past that are important to other authors).

It is apparently impossible to create a single and consistent story about history that unites all points of view - and this is one of the most important axioms of historical science. If historians have given up on the “unity of history” quite a long time ago, then the awareness of the immanent inconsistency of history as a text is a relatively new phenomenon. It is associated with the above-mentioned disappearance of the gap between the present and the recent past, with the intervention of memory in the process of historical reflection of modern society.

Modern historians are faced with the problem of this multiplicity of narratives, the multiplicity of stories about the past that are produced by different social groups, different regions, ideologists and states. Some of these narratives are confrontational and potentially contain the germ of social conflicts, but the choice between them has to be made not on the basis of their scientific nature, but on the basis of ethical principles, thereby establishing a new connection between history and morality. One of the newest tasks of historical science is to work at the “seams” between these narratives. The modern idea of ​​history as a whole looks less like a single stream, and more like a blanket sewn from different scraps. We are doomed to live simultaneously with different interpretations and be able to establish a conversation about a common past, maintaining disagreements or, rather, polyphony.

Historical sources

Any historian will agree with the thesis formulated by the positivists that reliance on sources is the main feature of historical science. This remains true for modern historians as much as it was for Langlois and Seignobos. It is precisely the methods of searching and processing sources that students are taught in history departments. However, in just over a hundred years, the content of this concept has changed, and the basic professional practice of academic historians has been challenged.

To understand the difference in attitude towards the sources of historical science and the practice that preceded it, we must recall that what we call falsification of documents was a frequent occurrence in the Middle Ages and was not condemned at all. The entire culture was built on respect for authority, and if something was attributed to authority that was not said by them, but was certainly good, then there was no reason to question it. Thus, the main criterion for the truth of a document was the good that the document provided.

Lorenzo Valla, who was the first to prove the forgery of the “correct document,” did not dare to publish his “Reflection on the fictitious and false donation of Constantine” - the work was published only half a century after the author’s death, when the Reformation had already begun in Europe.

Over the course of several centuries, historians have developed increasingly subtle ways of determining the truth of a document, its authorship, and dating, in order to exclude the use of forgeries in their work.

“The past,” as we found out, is a problematic concept, but the texts of the sources are real, you can literally touch them with your hands, re-read them, check the logic of your predecessors. The questions formulated by historians are addressed precisely to these sources. The first sources were living people with their stories, and this type of source (bounded by time and space) is still important in working with recent and modern history: oral history projects of the 20th century have produced significant results.

The next type of sources were official documents remaining from the daily activities of various types of bureaucracies, including legislation and international treaties, but also numerous registration papers. Leopold von Ranke preferred diplomatic documents from state archives to other types of documents. Statistics - government and commercial - allows the use of quantitative methods in the analysis of the past. Personal recollections and memoirs traditionally attract readers and are also traditionally considered very unreliable: memoirists, for obvious reasons, tell their desired version of events. However, given the author's interest and comparison with other sources, these texts can provide much insight into events, motives, and details of the past. From the moment of its appearance, materials from periodicals began to be used by historians: no other source makes it possible to understand the synchronicity of different events, from politics and economics to culture and local news, as well as the pages of newspapers. Finally, the Annales school proved that any object that bears traces of human influence can become a source for a historian; a garden or park laid out according to a specific plan, or plant varieties and animal breeds bred by man, will not be left out. The accumulation of significant amounts of information and the development of mathematical methods for processing it promise great breakthroughs in the study of the past with the beginning of the use of Big Data processing tools by historians.

However, it is important to understand that in themselves, until they come into the historian’s field of interest, a text, information or material object is not a source. Only the question asked by the historian makes them so.

In the last third of the twentieth century, however, this practice was challenged. Having postulated the inaccessibility of the past, postmodernists reduced the work of historians to transforming one text into another. And in this situation, the question of the truth of this or that text faded into the background. Much greater importance began to be attached to the problem of what role the text plays in culture and society. The “Donation of Constantine” determined state-political relations in Europe for many centuries and was exposed only when it had already lost its real influence. So who cares if it was fake?

The professional practice of historians has also come into conflict with the instrumental approach to history that is spreading in society: if the past is not recognized as having independent value and the past must work for the present, then the sources are not important. Indicative is the conflict that broke out in the summer of 2015 between the director of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, Sergei Mironenko, who presented documentary evidence of the composition of the “feat of 28 Panfilov’s men” in the Battle of Moscow in 1941, and the Minister of Culture of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Medinsky, who defended the “correct myth” from being verified by sources.

“Any historical event, when completed, becomes a myth - positive or negative. The same can be applied to historical figures. Our heads of state archives must conduct their research, but life is such that people operate not with archival information, but with myths. Information can strengthen these myths, destroy them, and turn them upside down. Well, public mass consciousness always operates with myths, including in relation to history, so you need to treat this with reverence, care, and prudence.”
Vladimir Medinsky

In fact, politicians not only express their claims to control history, but also deny the right of historians to expert judgment about the past, equating professional knowledge based on documents with “mass consciousness” based on myths. The conflict between the archivist and the minister could be considered a curiosity if it did not fit into the logic of the development of the historical consciousness of modern society, which led to the dominance of presentism.

Thus, having parted with positivism, we suddenly found ourselves faced with a new Middle Ages, in which a “good goal” justifies the falsification of sources (or their biased selection).

Laws of history

At the end of the 19th century, the debate about the scientific nature of history focused on its ability to discover the laws of human development. Over the course of the 20th century, the very concept of science evolved. Today, science is often defined as “a field of human activity aimed at developing and systematizing objective knowledge about reality” or as “description using concepts.” History certainly fits into these definitions. In addition, various sciences use the historical method or historical approach to phenomena. Finally, we must understand that this is a conversation about the relationship between concepts developed by European civilization itself, and these concepts are historical, i.e. change over time.

And yet - do historical laws, “laws of history” exist? If we talk about the laws of development of society, then this question must obviously be redirected to sociology, which studies the laws of human development. Laws for the development of human societies certainly exist. Some of them are statistical in nature, some allow us to see cause-and-effect relationships in a repeating sequence of historical events. It is these kinds of laws that are most often declared by supporters of the status of history as a “rigorous science” to be the “laws of history.”

However, these “laws of history” were most often developed (“discovered”) not by historians, but by scientists involved in related social sciences - sociologists and economists. Moreover, many researchers identify a separate field of knowledge - macrosociology and historical sociology, which consider such scientists as “their” classics such as Karl Marx (economist) and Max Weber (sociologist), Immanuel Wallerstein and Randall Collins (macrosociologists), Perry Anderson and even Fernand Braudel (only the last one from the list is also considered by historians to be their classic). In addition, historians themselves very rarely in their works propose formulas for the laws of history or somehow refer to such laws. At the same time, historians take great pleasure in asking questions posed within the framework of macrosociological, as well as economic, political science, philology and other social science and humanities disciplines of the past, thus transferring the theories of related sciences to the material of the past.

It's easier to talk about historical discoveries. Discoveries in history are of two types: the discovery of new sources, archives, memoirs, or the formulation of a new problem, question, approach, turning into sources what was not previously considered sources, or allowing one to find something new in old sources. Thus, a discovery in history may be not only a birch bark letter discovered during excavations, but also a research question posed in a new way.

Let's dwell on this point in a little more detail. Since the time of the Annales school, historians have begun their work by posing a research question - this requirement seems to be common to all sciences today. In the practice of historical research, however, there is constant repeated clarification and reformulation of the question in the process of working on it.

The historian, in accordance with the hermeneutic circle model, constantly refines his research question based on the data he receives from sources. The final formulation of the historian’s research question becomes a formula for the relationship of the present to the past, established by the scientist. It turns out that the research question itself is not only the starting point, but also one of the most important results of the study.

This description well illustrates the idea of ​​history as a science about the interaction of modernity with the past: a correctly posed question determines the “difference of potentials,” maintaining tension and establishing a connection between modernity and the period under study (unlike those social sciences that seek to find an answer precisely to the originally posed question). question).

Examples of the laws of history can be the recurring patterns of using the past in modern debates (the selection in the past of subjects and problems that help in solving today's problems or in the struggle for a group vision of the future; the limitations of such selection, the influence of scientific works and journalism on the formation of the historical consciousness of society), and also ways of setting tasks and obtaining historical knowledge.

Notes

1. Cliometry is a direction in historical science that is based on the systematic application of quantitative methods. The heyday of cliometrics occurred in the 1960s and 70s. Published in 1974, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel ( Fogel R.W., Engerman S.L. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Boston; Toronto: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974) caused heated controversy (findings about the economic efficiency of slavery in the southern United States were perceived by some critics as a justification for slavery) and showed the possibilities of cliometrics. In 1993, one of the book's authors, Robert Fogel, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, including for this research.

6. Monuments of cultural heritage - a strategic priority of Russia // Izvestia. 2016. 22 Nov.

7. The hermeneutic circle was described by G.-G. Gadamer: “We can understand something only thanks to pre-existing assumptions about it, and not when it is presented to us as something absolutely mysterious. The fact that anticipations can be a source of errors in interpretation and that prejudices that contribute to understanding can also lead to misunderstanding is only an indication of the finitude of such a being as man, and the manifestation of this finitude.” ( Gadamer G.-G. About the circle of understanding // The relevance of beauty. M.: Art, 1991).

Historical science and historical education
in the modern information space.

Russian historical science today stands on the threshold of a new stage of its development. This stage seems to be due to the challenges of the time both within the country and in the world as a whole.

History today for Russia is the most problematic area of ​​science. It is enough to refer to discussions about school education, about 3rd generation standards in history, about the unified state exam in history and its place in the system of “compulsory-optional disciplines,” about educational literature, etc.

When assessing the state of historical science, it is necessary to take into account several external and internalfactors influencing its development. This is, first of all:

A transitional state of society, which is in the stage of socio-economic and political transformation. In this situation, the distrust of a significant part of society in previous schemes is interspersed with receptivity to pseudo-historical sensational “discoveries” that are far from science.

Tendencies are developing to transform history into an element of “media culture,” which is actively and successfully promoted by the media.

Government support for natural sciences is visible. And this belittles the importance of the humanities.

But the development of society requires answers to the emerging problems of our time.

Now the task of not just writing historical works on this or that topic comes to the fore, but creating a history verified by large and reliable databases.The historical community is divided into various status groups. There is academic science, there is university science, historical knowledge is “produced” by various structures (centers, foundations, institutions). Historical assessments are given and replicated not only by historians, but also by journalists and philologists; sometimes writers who are far from professional make their contribution to the situation. Besidesthe use of Internet resources hasdual character - they are capable, with a properly organized search, of providing important information, but this information is often unreliable and often contains errors and falsifications. There must be verified banks and databases created by the scientific community and young researchers.

By now, a new subject area of ​​history has taken shape quite clearly. – post-Soviet period. Refusal of the Marxist interpretation of history sometimes reaches extreme forms of denial of the theory of progress, the forward movement of world history in general. An experienced teacher also uses the works of classics (K. Marx, F. Engels, V. Lenin) in his work.

Sergey Pavlovich Karpov, Dean of the Faculty of History, Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences wrote: “ In the training of historians, the most important place is occupied by general humanitarian training and the education of students. The practice of recent years shows that along with the widespread introduction of the Internet into education, everyday life, and even into the communication system of young people, there is an obvious decline in literacy and erudition. This is facilitated by the Internet resources themselves, which are replete with gross spelling and syntactic errors, and the deplorable state of studying the Russian language and literature in high school, which is aggravated by the abolition of the essay as an entrance test to universities, and its replacement by the ineffective and formal Unified State Examination in the Russian language. This has already given rise to a disdainful attitude among applicants and students towards the classics, towards the culture of words. The penetration of computer slang into everyday speech, into reports, essays, term papers and diploma essays has also become a dangerous phenomenon.”

Speaking about the Bologna education system, he said that the reform led to simplification, homogenization and a decrease in the level of education. And in the field of writing and teaching history, the focus is not on systematicity, but on the search for the unusual. And the sacrifice becomes training, breadth of historical horizons.

The historical past of Russia forms an important part of the humanitarian space at different levels of public consciousness - from the political language of politicians to the everyday life of the population.And Russian historical sciencelags behind the modernization tasks of Russian society and education reforms. Why? Firstly, there is a noticeable generational “gap” in the corporation of historians. A generation of Soviet-style scientists has passed away, faculties have been reorganized, and the composition of the scientific community has changed for various reasons. And in general there has been a devaluation of history as a profession in market conditions.

Textbooks should be created by university and academic scientists, but under one condition: they must be tested by secondary school methodologists and school teachers. Because scientists know the current state of science, but do not sufficiently evaluate the psychology of schoolchildren. It is difficult for them to judge what a student will accept and what not. The ideal textbook is written by a school teacher and a scientist together. This is the type of textbook that will be the most interesting and adapted. But so far there are few such examples, because textbooks are written either by scientists or methodologists.

In addition to the textbook, you need a wholecomplex educational literature : reading book, anthology, atlases, teaching materials. For a school teacher, one textbook and one program are not enough. We must read additional literature, but not purely scientific literature. The teacher must be an expert in all history. Therefore, we need a book to read, an anthology that would reflect modern scientific achievements with interesting facts.

The Internet is, of course, important because you can get a lot of information from there. It is necessary to be able to select what is most important, because now the information flow is increasing. You need to be able to navigate and choose the main thing, because it is impossible to comprehend everything. I enjoy reading magazines such as “Rodina”, “Russian History”, and others that show the true history of our Motherland.

About two thousand years ago, the great Roman orator and philosopherMarcus Tulius Cicero said: “The first task of history is to refrain from lying, the second is not to conceal the truth, the third is not to give any reason to suspect oneself of bias or biased hostility.”

Textbook analysis:

The methodological apparatus of textbooks allows you to organize effective work in the classroom and at home. Textbook for grade 5 “History of the Ancient World” Vigasin A.A., Goder G.I. characterize:

1. scientific nature, accessibility and popularity of presentation in volumes that take into account the age of students;
2. contains excerpts from historical documents, which develops skills in working with historical written sources;
3. work with basic historical concepts and terms, as well as dates of the studied period of history, has been thought out;
4. a large number of bright illustrations, reproductions of historical paintings, architectural monuments of the era, giving a figurative idea of ​​culture and life.

Conclusion:

The guidelines in historical education should be professionalism, education of citizenship and patriotism through an objective analysis of events and facts, based on a general humanitarian culture. In the absence of a deep internal culture, imitation of foreign cultures increases, which inevitably dooms us to lag behind.

The key subject in teaching history, along with historiography and methodology, issource study. Tradition of scrupulous study of sources; respect for fact; the desire to find, study, describe and define specific Russian realities has been largely lost. But this scientific discipline is the foundation of historical analysis. There are few serious theoretical developments in this area, but there are an innumerable number of problems.

There must be a moral responsibility of the historian for the reliability and objectivity of information.

"History" as one of the oldest scientific concepts. His initial interpretations. Polysemy and semantic diversity of modern interpretations of the concept of history. History as reality and a science that studies the past of human society.

The legitimacy of asking questions is whether history is a science and whether historical knowledge is objective. Is history a science or an art? The prevalence of the term “historical art” among researchers of the past and present. German philosophers F. Nietzsche and O. Spengler about history as “poetry” and “a work of art.”

Discussions about the boundaries and possibilities of historical knowledge. The opinion that all historical literature is only “conventional history.” Reasons for the impossibility of writing a "definitive history". The essence of the thesis “History is made by the historian.” Italian historian and philosopher B. Croce and the perception of historical research as a product of the mind. Absolutization of the subjective aspect, individual judgment and the way of intuitive understanding of history. French historian A.I. Marr about the inaccessibility of the essence of the historical process to the knowing subject and the reasons for this.

Criteria and signs of strict science. Historical science and claims to objective truth, to a literal reflection of past reality. The degree of relativity and hypotheticalness of historical knowledge. The subject of the historian's research. Specific events and processes, taken in certain space-time coordinates, as the most important category of historical science. The problem of selectivity and optimal selection of those phenomena from the life of society that help to recreate its objective history.

To depict a historical event means to describe or explain it? Which question is more important - how it really happened or why it happened? Ideographicism and orientation towards descriptive science. The form of “story-story”, “narrative”. The desire for historical explanation and the emergence of such trends as “intellectual history”, “personalized history”, etc. The concept of causality as a category of historical explanation and the most common type of theoretical activity of a historian.

History is a type of search and one of the forms of finding the truth. Features of the historical method of research. Logic and concreteness of knowledge. The impossibility of doing without a conceptual apparatus borrowed from other humanities. The importance for the scientific work of a historian of such categories as “society”, “development”, “event”, “fact”, “personality”, “people”, “nation”, “state”, “politics”, “ideology”, “ culture", "economy", "war", "rebellion", "revolution", "coup", "material", "spiritual", etc.

Historian in science and society. History as a political tool. The question of preserving the autonomy of science. The functioning of science as an institution of society. A scientist as a free or unfree creative person. The concept of the scientific community and scientific authorities. The nature of their influence on the process and results of the researcher’s work.

Concept of the paradigm of history. Science as a paradigm accepted by the scientific community. Paradigm shift. Achieving agreement on paradigms, goals and means of scientific activity. The turn towards the objectification of scientific knowledge that arises for various reasons and its consequences. “General agreement” as a criterion for the scientific nature of existing theories. Norms and values ​​that make up the ethics of science. The responsibility of historians for assessing the achievements of science.

Statement of the problem as the beginning of historical research. The influence of the topic on the direction of scientific research and the methodology of work. Preferred requirements for problem selection. Scientific and non-scientific factors that predetermine it. Personal aspects of this choice. The concept of relevance in historical research. The rapprochement of historical work with literary work. The inevitable connection of "historical reconstruction" with a certain level of imagination. The admissibility of speculation and fiction in history. Intuition as a necessary component of the historical method. Cognitive meaning of intuition. The validity of intuition and the verification of truth. Verification problem.

From problem to product. The historian's work process and its stages. Source, historian and historical fact. Modern scientific interpretations of the concept of "historical fact". The connection of the latter with the problem of the reliability of historical knowledge in general. Historical fact is the primary element of research. Its relativity, variability and instability. Establishing a historical fact as a systemic phenomenon. Possible components of this system. German sociologist M. Weber on the subjectivity of the historian in determining a historical fact. The connection between the choice of fact and its social significance. Socially significant facts in the understanding of the historian.

The problem of the "source-historian" relationship. Positivist approach to the source as an empirical given fact. The establishment of a “cult” and “infallibility” of facts and its influence on the results of historical constructions. The question of the relationship between the source and the researcher in the formulation of the French historical school "Annals". Abandoning "telling history" in favor of interpretive history. The priority role of the researcher in historical knowledge. The principle of problematic nature and hypotheses as the main quality of research.

The unity of the methodology of source study and the methodology of history in the paradigm of A.S. Lappo-Danilevsky. The concept of source study as an integral and systematic doctrine. A look at the source as a cultural phenomenon of its time. The problem of criticism and interpretation of sources in historical science. Method of source analysis and synthesis in the paradigm of modern history methodology. The need for a clear distinction between the concepts of scientific evidence, methods of constructing hypotheses and methods of argumentation in the structure of scientific research. Criteria for identifying novelty and evidence.

The direct impact of the completeness of the source base on the evidence and weight of the study. Solving the problem of representativeness of the sources used. The concept of optimal knowledge. Advantages of a systematic approach to the problems of historical research methodology. The natural relationship of history with other social sciences - philosophy, sociology, political science, economics, cultural studies, jurisprudence, etc. The practical significance of historical science for society. Historical science as a way to identify the experience of mankind and its application in the modern life of people.

AGRONOMY SCIENCE IN THE XX CENTURY

In the science department of the Central Committee, the understanding of the groundlessness of T. D. Lysenko’s numerous promises and the pseudoscientific nature of his theoretical constructions is becoming more and more firmly established. By the end of the war, the country's leading scientists began to sharply oppose stagnation in biology. The organizer and leader of this movement was Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Belarusian SSR A.R. Zhebrak is a geneticist and plant breeder who in 1930-1931. Trained in the USA, including at the California Institute of Technology with one of the founders of genetics, creator of the chromosomal theory of heredity, President of the US National Academy of Sciences T. H. Morgan. Since 1934, A. R. Zhebrak headed the Department of Genetics at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. K. A. Timiryazeva. He understood that it was impossible to eliminate the difficult situation in Soviet science, to eliminate the monopoly position in it without the participation of the country's top leadership. The spokesman for the opinion of the post-war generation of young party workers on the development of biological science is Yu. A. Zhdanov, appointed head of the science department of the Propaganda and Agitation Directorate of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. His own high position and the support of his father A. A. Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee, allowed his son to take a relatively independent line in the leadership of science in the initial period of his activity. He undoubtedly carefully studied materials on biology from the archives of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, knew about the critical attitude towards T. D. Lysenko of a number of members of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee, and the appeals of scientists to the Central Committee of the party.

This was facilitated by external and internal factors. External factors included the strengthening of international cooperation, as a natural continuation of the military and political interaction of the great powers within the framework of the anti-Hitler coalition. Cooperation in the military and scientific fields required the interaction of the scientific forces of the world community. T.D. Lysenko, due to his archaic scientific views, was not ready for such cooperation, so he prevented this in every possible way. The prospects for the development of the country's national economy also objectively required an increase in the role of truly scientific research, which was facilitated by the arrival of new scientific personnel to the leadership. In addition, his brother went over to the side of the occupiers and after the war remained in the West, and S. I. Vavilov, the brother of N. I. Vavilov, came to lead the USSR Academy of Sciences.

For these reasons, at the end of 1947 - beginning of 1948, discussions on the problems of genetics and Darwinism intensified. In November-December 1947, at the Faculty of Biology of Moscow State University and in the Department of Biological Sciences of the USSR Academy of Sciences, meetings were held to discuss the problems of intraspecific struggle, in In February 1948, a conference on the problems of Darwinism was held at Moscow State University. At these meetings, the fallacy of T. D. Lysenko’s theoretical positions and the agricultural methods he proposed, which were detrimental to agriculture, were again noted.

In connection with the controversy that unfolded on the pages of the American magazine “Science” about the situation in Soviet biology, A. R. Zhebrak addresses a long letter to G. M. Malenkov, in which he, to raise the

Main problems:

1. The essence of the world-historical process and its study in the system of humanities.

2. Features of the study of history: subject, sources, methods, concepts, functions of historical knowledge.

3. Specifics of studying the history of Russia:

a) in Russian historiography of the 18th – early 20th centuries;

b) in the Soviet era (problems of ideological influence on science);

c) in modern Russian science.

4. Ethnogenesis of the Eastern Slavs and its study in historical science.

5. Prerequisites and features of the formation of the Old Russian state.

Topics of reports and abstracts:

1. Historical ideas and schools of Antiquity, the Middle Ages and Modern times.

2. Modern Western historical schools and concepts.

3. Soviet historical science: the contradiction between partisanship and objectivity.

4. Hypotheses about the influence of cosmic cycles on the history of mankind.

5. Auxiliary historical disciplines: historiography, source studies, archeology, heraldry, numismatics, etc.

Basic concepts: history, historical process, chronotope, historicism, objectivity, the principle of alternativeness in history, formation, civilization

Names of the main representatives of historical science and philosophy of history: Herodotus, G. Scaliger, G.Z. Bayer, G. Hegel, N.M. Karamzin, P.Ya. Chaadaev, S.M. Soloviev, M.N. Pokrovsky, R. Pipes, A.N. Sakharov.

Literature[main – 1 – 15; additional – 2, 4, 12]

Seminar 2. Formation of Old Russian statehood (IX – XII centuries)

Main problems:

1. The state of Kievan Rus of the 9th – first half of the 12th century: socio-economic and political development.

2. Historical conditionality of the adoption of Christianity. Baptism of Rus'. The role of Orthodoxy in the formation of the culture and moral values ​​of the Russian people.

3. Political fragmentation of Kievan Rus: prerequisites and essence of the process. Russian lands and principalities in the 12th – 13th centuries: features of socio-economic development and political structure (Vladimir-Suzdal, Galicia-Volyn, Novgorod and other lands)

4. Culture of Rus' IX - first half of the XIII century.

Topics of reports and abstracts:

1. The question of the origin of the Old Russian state: Disputes around the “Norman theory”.

2. Paganism of the Eastern Slavs

3. The Baptism of Rus' and the problem of dual faith in the spiritual life of the ancient Russians.

4. The emergence of monasteries in Kievan Rus and their influence on the morality and culture of ancient Russian society.

5. The main architectural monuments of Pre-Mongol Rus'.

6. Literature of Ancient Rus' XI - early XIII centuries.

7. Metropolitan Hilarion and his “Sermon on Law and Grace.”

Basic concepts: ethnogenesis, “Norman theory”, Polyudye, “Russian Truth”, veche, Cyrillic alphabet, cross-domed style, paganism, Orthodoxy, dual faith.

Main historical figures: Rurik, Vladimir Krasno Solnyshko, Yaroslav the Wise, Vladimir Monomakh, Hilarion, Nestor the Chronicler.

Literature[main – 1 – 15; additional – 1, 6 – 8, 11 – 13, 16, 18, 19, 22, 23, 25]