The video above is a lecture by Prof. Timothy Snyder that introduces a series of his lectures on Hitler and Stalin Today. The first lecture (above) starts by asking the question "What is History?" For me, the lecture is interesting because it provides an opportunity to explain how Quantitative History, Cliometrics or General Systems History differ from the academic discipline of History.
There are a few points in the lecture that I want to emphasize:
- History, Texts and Data
- Threads in History
- No one knows what is going on right now
- Testing Hypotheses
- Mental models vs. Mathematical Models
- Levels of Analysis
- World-Systems Theory
Spaghetti Plots
Notes
- Timothy Synder (born August 18, 1969) is an American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Holocaust. He holds the inaugural Chair in Modern European History, supported by the Temerty Endowment for Ukrainian Studies, at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. From 2017 to 2025 he was the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University.
- Tadeusz Borowski a Polish writer and journalist. His wartime poetry and stories dealing with his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz are recognized as classics of Polish literature.
- History the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened.
- World History a field of historical study examines history from a global perspective. It emerged centuries ago; some leading practitioners have included Voltaire (1694–1778), Hegel (1770–1831), Karl Marx (1818–1883), Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975). The field became much more active (in terms of university teaching, textbooks, scholarly journals, and academic associations) in the late 20th century.
- Quantitative History a method of historical research that uses quantitative, statistical and computer resources. It is a type of the social science history.
- Cliometrics sometimes called 'new economic history' or 'econometric history', is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social and economic history). It is a quantitative approach to economic history (as opposed to qualitative or ethnographic). There has been a revival in 'new economic history' since the late 1990s.
- General Systems Theory the transdisciplinary study of systems, i.e., cohesive groups of interrelated, interdependent components that can be natural or artificial. Every system has causal boundaries, is influenced by its context, defined by its structure, function and role, and expressed through its relations with other systems. A system is "more than the sum of its parts" when it expresses synergy or emergent behavior.
- Complex Systems a system composed of many components that interact with one another. Examples of complex systems are Earth's global climate, organisms, the human brain, infrastructure such as a power grid, transportation or communication systems, complex software and electronic systems, social and economic organizations (like cities), an ecosystem, a living cell, and, ultimately, for some authors, the entire universe.
- Heterarchy a system of organization where the elements of the organization are unranked (non-hierarchical) or where they possess the potential to be ranked a number of different ways. Definitions of the term vary among the disciplines: in social and information sciences, heterarchies are networks of elements in which each element shares the same "horizontal" position of power and authority, each playing a theoretically equal role. In biological taxonomy, however, the requisite features of heterarchy involve, for example, a species sharing, with a species in a different family, a common ancestor which it does not share with members of its own family.
- World-Systems Theory (also known as world-systems analysis or the world-systems perspective) is a multidisciplinary approach to world history and social change which emphasizes the world-system (and not nation states) as the primary (but not exclusive) unit of social analysis. World-systems theorists argue that their theory explains the rise and fall of states, income inequality, social unrest, and imperialism.
- Geopolitics the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and international relations. Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them. According to multiple researchers, the term is currently being used to describe a broad spectrum of concepts, in a general sense used as "a synonym for international political relations", but more specifically "to imply the global structure of such relations"; this usage builds on an "early-twentieth-century term for a pseudoscience of political geography" and other pseudoscientific theories of historical and geographic determinism.
