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In literary and historical analysis, presentism is a term for the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. Some modern historians seek to avoid presentism in their work because they consider it a form of cultural bias, and believe it creates a distorted understanding of their subject matter. [1]
In a slightly different sense, the term history refers not to an academic field but to the past itself or to individual texts about the past. History is a broad discipline encompassing many branches. Some focus on specific time periods , such as ancient history , while others concentrate on particular geographic regions, such as the history of ...
The "past" is also used to define a time that is a certain number of minute before or after a particular hour, as in "We left the party at half-past twelve." [ 10 ] [ 8 ] People also use "past" to refer to being beyond a particular biological age or phase of being, as in, "The boy was past the age of needing a babysitter," or, "I'm past caring ...
Time travel is the hypothetical activity of traveling into the past or future. Time travel is a concept in philosophy and fiction , particularly science fiction . In fiction , time travel is typically achieved through the use of a device known as a time machine .
It is not to be confused with presentism, a similar but distinct mode of historical analysis in which present-day ideas (such as moral standards) are projected into the past. The idea was first articulated by British literary critic Matthew Arnold in 1880 and later named and defined by American historian David Hackett Fischer in 1970.
Temporal paradoxes fall into three broad groups: bootstrap paradoxes, consistency paradoxes, and Newcomb's paradox. [1] Bootstrap paradoxes violate causality by allowing future events to influence the past and cause themselves, or "bootstrapping", which derives from the idiom "pull oneself up by one's bootstraps."
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Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history through late antiquity.The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the development of Sumerian cuneiform script.