MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY

Examples of “Narrative” in History

Example A

“Luso-tropical civilization is an expression I have suggested to characterize what seems to be a particular form of behavior and a particular form of accomplishment of the Portuguese of the world: [especially] his tendency to prefer the tropics for his extra-European expansion and his ability to remain successfully in the tropics – successfully from a cultural as well as from an ecological point of view – an intermediary between European culture and such tropical cultures as one found by him in Africa, India, Malaya, and the part of America which became Brazil.”

– Gilberto Freyre, New World in the Tropics: The Culture of Modern Brazil (1950)

Example B

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. . . Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -- bourgeoisie and proletariat.”

– Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto (1848)

Example C

“All the human culture, all the results of art, science and technology that we see before us today, are almost exclusively the creative product of the Aryan. This very fact admits of the not unfounded inference that he alone was the founder of all higher humanity, therefore representing the prototype of all that we understand by the word "man." He is the Prometheus of mankind from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illuminated the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of the earth . . . It was he who laid the foundations and erected the walls of every great structure in human culture.”

– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1925)