A Study Of Charles ·A Beard’s Historiography

Charles a. Beard (1874-1948) was an admirable historians in the 20th century. As the representative figure of progressive history school, his research fields across two fields:the American history and political science, and have a great influence in academia. 30 s of the 20th century, Beard’s historical viewpoint and method research on the history of the United States has inestimable enormous impact. Relativism history changed the American historian’s attitude toward history to a great extent at that time. But in a long period of time, beard’s historical relativism was regarded as backwards of historiography thought. So I hope my research on Beard’s relativism historiography can help us know more of Beard’s unique shape of historical thought and research method, and evaluate afresh historical relativism.This thesis includes five parts:The first part is the introduction, which mainly introduces the research purpose and the significance of the topic of this thesis, foreign and domestic academic research results of relevant content, the structure and innovation of this paper.The second part, beginning with the social and academic backgrounds of Beard, I will discusses his academic origin of relativism historiography thoughts, which will lay a solid foundation to analysis the historical view objectively and reasonably.The third part, I focused on analyzing the source of historical relativism thought. Through research on the thoughts of social environment at that time, I deem the establishment of relativism history under the influence of the following four factors:the influence of the first world war, the rise of the realist school of law, the development of American historians regionalism and the new development of the natural physical science.The fourth part, I will analysis relativism historiography of beard. This section will be divided into the following two parts, firstly, defining the concept, breaking down the relativism into some key concepts,such as practicability, subjectivity, times of relativity, and then through the discussion of the key to interpretation the relativism.The last I will evaluate the thought of relativism, analysis objectively its contribution for American history and the influence on later generations.