Iggers And Wang Turning Points

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“[A] “Turning point” is not a formal concept but a metaphor [that marks] when we cease to go along the same road...and instead head off in some different direction,” (89). This quote is from Islamic historian R. Stephen Humphreys, and is a good indicator of the material presented by Edward Wang and Georg Iggers, in their book Turning Points in Historiography: a Cross-Cultural Perspective. Throughout this book Iggers and Wang look at significant works and people that have changed the path of how history is written. Some of the strengths of this tome are that it includes works from many different areas of history as well as looking at several schools of thought. Iggers and Wang reference another author Daniel Woolf who worked on an encyclopaedic volume, and after reading an excerpt from Woolf there are many structural similarities (2-3). Woolf focuses mainly on European history, while Turning Points more closely examines Asian history, specifically Chinese. …show more content…

Looking at one essay by Chun-chieh Huang, a Chinese historian, the notable philosopher Confucius, and his work Spring and Autumn Annual, is regarded as work that all following “...Chinese historians employed to narrate and judge the past,” (39-40). But Confucius's work was mostly about Taoism and not necessarily contributing to history. Though this is a prime example of how part time historians have had a great influence on history, there are also fields that the modern historian might scoff at that have also been Turning Points in Classical