Mountain of Fame (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: John E. Wills, Jr.
- First Published: 1994
- Type of Work: History
- Time of Work: About 2000 to 1989
- Setting: Mainland China
- Genres: Nonfiction, History
- Subjects: Culture, Communism or communists, Revolutionaries, Poetry or poets, Folklore, Conquest, China or Chinese people, Biography, Poisons or poisoning, Heads of state, Confucianism
- Locales: China
In Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History, John E. Wills, Jr., professor of history at the University of Southern California, takes a “lives-and-times” approach that was used in China as early as the second century b.c.e. by the famous “Grand Historian,” Sima Qian. Later Chinese dynastic histories followed the same model, using biographies of eminent persons who influenced the historical process for good or ill.
As to historiography in the West, Thomas Carlyle proclaimed, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Thus he wrote...
[The entire page is 2436 words long]
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