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.
All the old history was written for the amusement of the ruling classes. The lower classes couldn't read, and their rulers didn't care about remembering what happened to them.
History never looks like history when you are living through it.
Thousand got away to other countries; thousands returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration camps.
I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under.
Hitler was no inexorable product of a German 'special path', no logical culmination of long-term trends in specifically German culture and ideology. Nor was he a mere 'accident' in the course of German history.
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