History may be divided into three movements: what moves rapidly, what moves slowly and what appears not to move at all.
Interpretation
History can be understood through different paces of change and continuity.
Fernand Braudel's quote suggests that history is not simply a linear narrative of events; instead, it can be categorized by the speed at which changes occur. Some events or trends progress quickly, some take place gradually, and others seem static but hold deeper significance over time, highlighting the complexities of historical interpretation.
In practice
This quote can be used in a history class to explain different historical processes.
For the historian everything begins and ends with time, a mathematical, godlike_x000D_ _x000D_ time, a notion easily mocked, time external to men, 'exogenous,' as economists_x000D_ _x000D_ would say, pushing men, forcing them, and painting their own individual times_x000D_ _x000D_ the same color: it is, indeed, the imperious time of the world.
Events are the ephemera of history; they pass across its stage like fireflies, hardly glimpsed before they settle back into darkness and as often as not into oblivion. Every event, however brief, has to be sure a contribution to make, lights up some dark corner or even some wide vista of history. Nor is it only political history which benefits most, for every historical landscape - political, economic, social, even geographical - is illumined by the intermittent flare of the event.
Leadership of a world-economy is an experience of power which may blind the victor to the march of history.
Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.
I've met many Holocaust survivors who find the era infinitely compelling because they have this deep hunger to understand how it all could possibly have happened.
I have not always been wrong. History will bear me out, particularly as I shall write that history myself.
It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.
History is not history unless it is the truth.
History is simply a piece of paper covered with print: the main thing is to make history, not to write it.
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