a history of fearlessness essay

From Fear to Fearlessness

Fearlessness is not an absence of fear.

Posted February 21, 2019

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Fearlessness is not an absence of fear ; it is being committed to something bigger than the fear. That something can be another person’s safety, a higher purpose, a calling, or any other intention.

You may wonder why a book on relationships would be addressing the concept of courage. Anyone who has been in the trenches of committed partnerships knows that it takes more than sweetness to meet the challenges that love demands. Loving another person requires us to live with an open heart. The French root of the word “courage” is “Coeur”, from the Latin “Cor”, both of which mean “heart”. To live openheartedly requires great courage since we are vulnerable to loss, rejection, and pain.

When our feelings get hurt, it takes great courage to resist the temptation to become defensive and to instead become fearless. We can’t help but feel fear when we are threatened, but even in those difficult moments, we have the power to determine how we react. Acting from our deeper intentions rather than indulging our impulse to defend, withdraw or attack can pay off in long-term rewards. Whenever we make this choice, we strengthen our fearless muscle.

Fear is normal. Fear is not the enemy. We can’t get rid of fear; even if we could it would NOT be a good thing to do. Fear can alert us to possible dangers. Cultivating fearlessness does not mean that we no longer have fear, but that we have moved from fearing fear and avoiding anything that activates it, By accepting the inevitability of fear, we learn to appreciate its value. Fearlessness is the state of being in which we are aware of fear yet not controlled by it.

When we are possessed by fear, we’re unwilling to take risks, which can be a good thing, since some risks would be unwise. When we live in a state of ongoing anxiety , our primary commitment is to avoid pain or loss. There are some risks that are worth taking if we seek to experience fulfilling lives. The old cliché states, “The only constant in life is change.” And change isn’t guaranteed to be for the better. We can try to minimize the risks involved in the inevitable changes that life brings, but if we don’t become friends with fear, our lives can become stagnant.

Risk-taking is something that if done with discernment, supports our ability to learn from our mistakes. As we correct our errors, we are better prepared for future challenges. If we don’t risk, we don’t learn and grow.

Rather than being guided by the question of “What is the safest thing to do in this situation? we can ask ourselves the questions, “What is it that I truly want to experience now?” Cultivating fearlessness is about redirecting the focus of our attention from away fear and towards desire. This is not to say that we ignore fear, but simply that we subordinate it to our commitment. Doing so puts fear in its rightful place. It is still in the equation, but it is no longer the determining factor.

Often it’s not that we have too much fear; we don’t have enough of it, and we’re afraid of the wrong things. Many people reach the end of their lives with regrets. Often, their regrets are not about mistakes they made, but about what they wish they had been willing to risk.

When we trust ourselves to survive our mistakes, to learn from them, we put in the corrections that will affect our future actions. We feel less fearful since we have established greater trust in ourselves that we can handle the failures and disappointments that occur in all well-lived lives. Trying to avoid discomfort weakens us and makes us more fearful. Reawakening the curiosity that we had as children helps us know fear intimately. As we become familiar with fear, we come to be less averse to it and see it as an intrinsic aspect of the process of coming to terms with our deeper values.

Resistance, control, rage , and resignation are all defenses against fear. Any form of manipulation, lying , avoiding, denying, withdrawing, withholding, or defensiveness, strengthens fear. In cultivating fearlessness we are challenged to do the opposite of these things, to confront that which we have been avoiding.

The process of becoming fearless has to do with the development of self-care, self-responsibility, self-compassion, and self-trust. It also requires us to cultivate the quality of forgiveness , not just for others, but also for ourselves, the person who is often the hardest to forgive.

Many of us view the world as a dangerous place where it would be foolish to let down our guard. Granted, there are people to whom it would be very unwise to give our trust, but there is also a grave danger in bringing a stance of suspicion to every encounter. Such a posture predisposes us to justify dishonesty hypocrisy and irresponsibility.

Confronting fear requires experiencing both our aversion as well as our desire, and to engage both sides directly. If desire is strong and the expected rewards are high, we can commit to going forward even in the face of fear. This is truly “warrior work” and it’s not for the faint of heart. We don’t necessarily begin with a brave heart; we develop it along the way. We begin wherever we are right now and just put one foot in front of the other and repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Linda Bloom, L.C.S.W. , and Charlie Bloom, M.S.W. , are the authors of Secrets of Great Marriages: Real Truths from Real Couples About Lasting Love .

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A Conceptual and Therapeutic Analysis of Fear pp 91–123 Cite as

Montaigne’s Essays : A Humanistic Approach to Fear

Sergio Starkstein 2
First Online: 18 April 2018

608 Accesses

Montaigne’s Essays is of major importance for the philosophy of fear. In this work, Montaigne provides narratives of a variety of fears, and in doing so describes a full palette of fear-related emotions, from individual doubts and avoidance, to terror and generalised panic. Montaigne’s analysis and treatment of fear is unique because he is among the first philosophers to openly discuss his own fears and the variety of philosophical therapies he used to subdue them. After employing Stoic and Epicurean remedies, Montaigne found the most useful philosophical therapy in the sceptical Pyrrhonian tradition. Thus, the Essays express an open-minded, particularistic and anti-dogmatic approach to life. Montaigne’s motto ‘What do I know?’ reflects his non-partisan approach and receptiveness to improving his emotional well-being, as well as increasing his knowledge and joy of life by accepting life events as these unfold.

It is fear that I am most afraid of: In harshness it surpasses all other mischances . Michel de Montaigne, Essays (Book I, “On fear”) (Montaigne 2003 )

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It is difficult to introduce Montaigne as a philosopher, as he did not belong to the ‘establishment’ nor did he want to become a ‘professional’ philosopher. He was a ‘humanist’ in the sense of Petrarch and Erasmus, a man of letters, and a politician. Nevertheless, the Essays is the work of a profound philosopher, one of the most original thinkers of the Renaissance who understood the human soul as few before or after him. Julie Roberts ( 2015 , p. 246) considers the Essays as a “pathographically curative” text, with the effort to examine oneself as one of the main aspects of philosophical therapy. She connects Montaigne’s therapy with Foucault’s “care of the self” (Foucault 1986 ). Rachel Starr ( 2012 , p. 436) considers the Essays as the pinnacle of “humanistic psychotherapy.”

After publishing the first edition in 1580, Montaigne continued adding material, which creates some confusion, as he did not correct his previous concepts even when they were in contradiction with the new ones. The additions from 1580 to 1588 are marked with a “B”, whereas the additions from 1588–1592 made in the 1588 ‘Bordeaux copy’ (first published in 1595) are marked with a “C”. I have used Screech’s translation (Montaigne 2003 ), but also added material from Frame’s translation whenever I considered the concept to be more clearly conveyed (Montaigne 1965 ). Reference to specific essays will be given to by volume and number, and page numbers within specific essays will be referred to by volume, essay, and page number. Letters A, B and C are used, when necessary, to indicate the different editions.

The presence of clearly demarcated philosophical stages in Montaigne’s intellectual evolution has been contested by a number of authors, and is extensively discussed in Bermúdez ( 2015 , pp. 54–61). Frame ( 1955 , pp. 5–7) describes three periods in Montaigne’s philosophical development: the first one (“Stoic period”) extended from 1572 to 1574; the second one (“Sceptical period”) extended from 1575 to 1577, and the final period (“Epicurean period”) extended from 1578 until Montaigne’s death in 1592.

This type of autobiographical writing was not new (Montaigne’s Essays was preceded by Augustine’s Confessions and Petrarch’s Secretum ), but Montaigne’s text is unique in the frankness of personal descriptions, in which a reader of any place and period may be easily reflected.

Fear is a main theme in I.6 “The hour of parley is dangerous”, I.11 “On prognostications”, I.16 “On punishing cowardice”, I.19 “That we should not be deemed happy till after our death”, I.20 “To philosophise is to learn how to die”, I.21 “On the power of imagination”, I.33 “On fleeing from pleasures at the cost of one’s life”, I.39 “On solitude”, and I.57 “On the length of life”.

This sounds anachronistic, but the extrapolation of the Essays into contemporary life is commonly practiced and for good reasons (Lazar and Madden 2015 , pp. 1–2), as fear is one of the most primitive human emotions, the phenomenology in terms of feelings and behaviour has not changed in its conceptual essence, and the main causes of this emotion are perennial, such as the fear of death, poverty, sickness and wars.

Scholar ( 2010 ), remarks that the Essays “haunt its readers” by the free-thinking style of Montaigne’s writings. Montaigne was a scholar, but fiercely anti-dogmatic, anti-authoritarian, and able to make “all questions accessible to his readers” (Scholar 2010 , p. 7).

“When he is threatened with a blow nothing can stop a man closing his eyes, or trembling if you set him on the edge of a precipice…” (A.2.3.388).

“Anyone who is afraid of suffering suffers already of being afraid” (3.13.1243).

The main essays discussing the fear of death are “Constancy” (1.12), “That the taste of good and evil…” (1.14), “That to philosophise is to learn to die” (1.20), “Solitude” (1.39) and “The inconsistency of our own actions” (2.1).

The topic on the futility of premeditation is discussed in-depth in the penultimate essay “On physiognomy” (3.22).

“I am one of those by whom the powerful blows of the imagination are felt most strongly. Everyone is hit by it, but some are bowled over” (A.1.21.109).

“When I contemplate an illness I seize upon it and lodge it within myself” (C.1.21.109).

“Once the pain has gone I am not much depressed by weakness or lassitude. I know of several bodily afflictions which are horrifying even to name but which I fear less than hundreds of current disturbances and distresses of the mind” (C.3.13.1245).

“Then, there is no madness, no raving lunacy, which such agitations do not bring forth” (A.1.8.30).

“Resigned to any outcome whatsoever once the dice have been thrown” (B.2.17.732); and “Few emotions have ever disturbed my sleep, yet even the slightest need to decide anything can disturb it for me” (B.2.17.732).

“In events I act like a man: in the conduct of events, like a boy. The dread of a tumble gives me more anguish than the fall” (B.2.17.733).

“…thank God we have nothing to do with each other” (A.1.24.143).

“I tell those who urge me to take medicine at least to wait until I am well and have got my strength back in order to have the means of resisting the hazardous effects of their potions” (A.1.24.143).

“Can I feel something disintegrating? Do not expect me to waste time having my pulse and urine checked so that anxious prognostics can be drawn from them: I will be in plenty of time to feel the anguish without prolonging things by an anguished fear” (B.3.13.1243).

His father lived to 74 years, a grandfather to 69, and a great-grandfather to almost 80, “none having swallowed any kind of drug” (A.2.37.864).

“How many men have been made ill by the sheer force of imagination? Is it not normal to see men bled, purged and swallowing medicines to cure ills which they feel only in their minds?” (A.2.12.547).

“Why do doctors first work on the confidence of their patient with so many fake promises of a cure if not to allow the action of the imagination to make up for the trickery of their potions? They know that one of the masters of their craft told them in writing that there are men for whom it is enough merely to look at a medicine for it to prove effective” (A.1.21.116). Thus, the trickery of doctors consisted in using medications as strong placebos to cure imaginary illnesses, as well as convincing patients that their drugs were curing an otherwise irreversible condition (Justman 2015 ).

Robert ( 2015 , pp. 721–744) has analysed the subtle way in which Montaigne ridiculed both physicians and patients for engaging in fully unproven expensive treatments.

“… they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more” (B.1.3.11).

“The continual suspicion, which leads a Prince to distrust everyone may torment him strangely” (A.1.24.145).

“So vain and worthless is human wisdom: despite all our projects, counsels and precautions, the outcome remains in the possession of Fortune” (A.1.24.143).

“The longest of my projects are for less than a year; I think only of bringing things to a close; I free myself from all fresh hopes and achievements” (C.2.28.797).

“My old age…deadens within me many of the desires and worries which trouble our lives: worry about the way the world is going; worry about money, honours, erudition, health… and me” (C.2.28.797).

“I am the most ill-disposed toward pain” (C.1.14.69).

“When my condition is bad I cling violently to my illness: I abandon myself to despair and let myself go towards catastrophe” (B.3.9.1072).

“Death is the only guarantor of our freedom, the common and ready cure of our ills” (A.1.14.53). Montaigne acceptance of suicide is not explicitly stated in the text, perhaps due to fear of the Inquisition.

It may also be the case that Montaigne had no firm opinion about the best ‘remedies’ for fear, and left different options open.

“The anxiety to do well…puts the soul on the rack, break it, and make it impotent” (Montaigne 1965 1.10.26, Frame’s translation).

Bakewell states that premeditation did not liberate Montaigne from his fears, but actually served to imprison him (Bakewell 2010 , p. 3).

“Do we ask to be whipped right now…just because it may be that Fortune will, perhaps, make you suffer a whipping some day?” (B.3.12.1189).

“No man has ever prepared to leave the world more simply nor more fully than I have. No one has more completely let go of everything than I try to do” (C.1.20.98) [my italics].

“How many country-folk do I see ignoring poverty; how many yearning for death or meeting it without panic or distress? That man over there who is trenching my garden has, this morning, buried his father or his son” (B.3.12.1178).

This description seems to idealise and romanticise the behaviour of the ‘lower classes’, but this is what Montaigne was contemplating, what he saw in his own estate. Although he cannot know what was going on in the minds of his peasants and he employs a clumsy generalisation I believe that this image can be read as being used to contrast different human responses to fear and to show that fear can be successfully dominated.

Hartle ( 2013 , p. 17) also believes in a more opinionated than a non-judgmental Montaigne, stressing that throughout the Essays Montaigne constantly makes judgments of all sorts. This is certainly true, except for the questions that obsessed Montaigne the most: the fears of sickness poverty and death. When discussing Montaigne’s scepticism in relation to Sextus Empiricus, Bermúdez Vazquez remarks that “philosophical speculation leads only to confusion because of the inevitability of uncertainty. It produces anxiety rather than peace of mind” (p. 17).

“Fear, desire, hope, impel us towards the future; they rob us of feelings and concern for what now is, in order to spend time over what will be – even when we ourselves shall be no more” (B.1.3.11).

This has obvious Buddhist resonances, and may be related to Montaigne’s admiration of Pyrrhonism, which has many affinities with Eastern thought (Beckwith 2015 ). Pyrrho’s main concepts as reported by Sextus Empiricus had been translated into French about 20 years before the first edition of the Essays (see Calhoun 2015 ).

Montaigne’s purported unnoticed way of life was only partially true, since while trying to stay away from the daily nuisance at his chateau, he would eagerly seek the company of the few erudite Montaigne had in esteem to engage in conversation, and more reluctantly, work for the king on political missions.

“The greatest thing in the world is to know how to live to yourself” (A.1.39.272).

This is clarified in a footnote by Screech (Montaigne 2003 ) as “I make a distinction,” a term used in formal debates to reject or modify an opponent’s assertion.

“Life must be its own objective, its own purpose. Its right concern is to rule itself, govern itself, put up with itself” (C.3.12.1191).

The number following the year corresponds to the remark in Philosophical Investigations .

Bakewell, S. (2010). How to live—Or a life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer . Great Britain: Chatto & Windus.

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Starkstein, S. (2018). Montaigne’s Essays : A Humanistic Approach to Fear. In: A Conceptual and Therapeutic Analysis of Fear. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78349-9_4

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The five principles of fearlessness

National geographic society’s chairman jean case explains the bold risk-taking behind great discoveries and innovations..

Jean Case, philanthropist and National Geographic Society's chairman.

Philanthropist and National Geographic Society's chairman Jean Case outlines the qualities of change makers in her book Be Fearless .

If you think that only a rare genius, an exceptionally privileged individual, or a massively funded organisation can launch a breakthrough product or bring a world-changing movement to life, I’ll introduce you to the fearless people from all walks of life who have made the unimaginable possible. You might be dazzled by their achievements, and it’s easy to assume they possessed extraordinary abilities or advantages that set them apart from ordinary strivers. But I have news for you. Their single common trait was this: they were all passionate about making the world better. They seized an opportunity and kept at it in spite of daunting barriers, frequent failures, and loud objections—and they succeeded. Today we look at them, our most iconic creators, and wonder how the world ever existed without their contributions. But, as you will see, many of their stories provide inspiration and helpful hints on how we can all make a greater impact in every aspect of our lives, and serve as beacons of fearlessness for others.

Today’s global challenges—poverty, civil unrest, political stalemates, economic divisions, climate change—play out daily against the backdrop of our living rooms. But if these problems seem too big and complex—easier to ignore than to even attempt to solve—know that there has never been a better time to engage. An explosion of technological innovation is transforming the way we live. And if we’re going to keep up with the rapid pace of change, we need to rethink the old way of doing things.

My husband, Steve, and I started the Case Foundation in 1997 with a fearless mission: to invest in people and ideas that can change the world . This means we’re always investigating and experimenting to find the best ideas out there, the best leaders, the best models for innovation. A few years ago, we engaged a team of experts to determine the “secret sauce” that propelled those rare leaders, organizations, and movements to success. They discovered five principles that are consistently present when transformational breakthroughs take place. To spark this sort of change, you must:

1. Make a Big Bet. So many people and organisations are naturally cautious. They look at what seemed to work in the past and try to do more of it, leading to only incremental advances. Every truly history-making transformation has occurred when people have decided to go for revolutionary change.

2. Be bold, take risks. Have the guts to try new, unproven things and the rigour to continue experimenting. Risk taking is not a blind leap off a cliff but a lengthy process of trial and error. And it doesn’t end with the launch of a product or the start of a movement. You need to be willing to risk the next big idea, even if it means upsetting your own status quo.

3. Make failure matter. Great achievers view failure as a necessary part of advancing towards success. No one seeks it out, but if you’re trying new things, the outcome is by definition uncertain. When failure happens, great innovators make the setback matter, applying the lessons learned and sharing them with others.

4. Reach beyond your bubble. Our society is in thrall to the myth of the lone genius. But innovation happens at intersections. Often the most original solutions come from engaging with people with diverse experiences to forge new and unexpected partnerships.

5. Let urgency conquer fear. Don’t overthink and over analyse. It’s natural to want to study a problem from all angles, but getting caught up in questions like “What if we’re wrong? What if there’s a better way?” can leave you paralysed with fear. Allow the compelling need to act to outweigh all doubts and setbacks.

Hear how Alex Honnold copes with fear while free solo climbing mountains.

These five principles can be summarised in two words: Be Fearless. Taken together, they form a road map for effective changemaking for people from all walks of life, but it’s important to note that they aren’t 'rules'. They don’t always work in tandem or sequentially, and none is more important than another. Think of them as a set of markers that can help identify when decisions are being made fearlessly.

Philanthropy
People and Culture

Excerpt: the five principles of fearlessness

National Geographic Society’s chairman Jean Case explains the bold risk-taking behind great discoveries and innovations.

If you think that only a rare genius, an exceptionally privileged individual, or a massively funded organization can launch a breakthrough product or bring a world-changing movement to life, I’ll introduce you in these pages to the fearless people from all walks of life who have made the unimaginable possible. You might be dazzled by their achievements, and it’s easy to assume they possessed extraordinary abilities or advantages that set them apart from ordinary strivers. But I have news for you. Their single common trait was this: they were all passionate about making the world better. They seized an opportunity and kept at it in spite of daunting barriers, frequent failures, and loud objections—and they succeeded. Today we look at them, our most iconic creators, and wonder how the world ever existed without their contributions. But, as you will see here, many of their stories provide inspiration and helpful hints on how we can all make a greater impact in every aspect of our lives, and serve as beacons of fearlessness for others.

the cover of the book "Be Fearless" by Jean Case

The cover of Jean Case's book, Be Fearless.

Read about the history of risk and exploration at National Geographic.

1. Make a Big Bet. So many people and organizations are naturally cautious. They look at what seemed to work in the past and try to do more of it, leading to only incremental advances. Every truly history-making transformation has occurred when people have decided to go for revolutionary change.

2. Be bold, take risks. Have the guts to try new, unproven things and the rigor to continue experimenting. Risk taking is not a blind leap off a cliff but a lengthy process of trial and error. And it doesn’t end with the launch of a product or the start of a movement. You need to be willing to risk the next big idea, even if it means upsetting your own status quo.

5. Let urgency conquer fear. Don’t overthink and overanalyze. It’s natural to want to study a problem from all angles, but getting caught up in questions like “What if we’re wrong? What if there’s a better way?” can leave you paralyzed with fear. Allow the compelling need to act to outweigh all doubts and setbacks.

Hear how Alex Honnold copes with fear while free solo climbing mountains.

These five principles can be summarized in two words: Be Fearless. Taken together, they form a road map for effective changemaking for people from all walks of life, but it’s important to note that they aren’t “rules.” They don’t always work in tandem or sequentially, and none is more important than another. Think of them as a set of markers that can help identify when decisions are being made fearlessly.

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Home — Essay Samples — Philosophy — Ethical Dilemma — Analysis Of Fearlessness In Sophocless Antigone

Analysis of Fearlessness in Sophocless Antigone

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Antigone's moral dilemma, the meaning of fearlessness, the complexities of fearlessness, challenging gender norms, timeless relevance, in conclusion, references:.

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AHA Activities

Embracing Fearlessness

An Interview with New AHA President John R. McNeill

Allison Miller | Jan 11, 2019

When current AHA president Mary Beth Norton turns over the Association gavel to him at the 2019 annual meeting in Chicago, Georgetown University historian John R. McNeill will begin his year-long tenure as AHA president. A pioneer in environmental and global history and the recipient of a raft of fellowships and prizes, he is the author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 , which won the AHA’s 2010 Albert J. Beveridge Award, and, most recently, co-author (with Peter Engelke) of The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 . Serving as a historian on the multidisciplinary Anthropocene Working Group , McNeill has even contributed to our understanding of geologic time and, in a broader sense, to the urgency with which we must consider the fate of the planet we call home.

John McNeill at the 2018 AHA annual meeting, in Washington, DC. Marc Monaghan

McNeill is a third-generation academic historian. His father was William H. McNeill of the University of Chicago, who was also elected AHA president, serving in 1985. And his grandfather, John T. McNeill, was an esteemed church historian and authority on John Calvin.

Cerebral yet down to earth, McNeill is known in the AHA headquarters for dropping by one hot day last summer to talk with staff members in an aloha shirt. Still savoring a student’s successful dissertation defense earlier in the day, he spoke with Perspectives at length about inspiration, mentorship, and how global forces shape historical inquiry.

You’ve written about mosquitoes, but I’d like to know how you got bitten by the history bug.

I was bitten by the history bug, I would say, during my undergraduate years, but it took some time. I was originally mainly interested in mathematics and physics, and I was briefly a mathematics major, until the professor who, in my freshman year, told me that I absolutely had to be a math major, at the end of my sophomore year told me that I should probably reconsider. And he was right!

So in my junior and senior year, I was doing mostly anthropology and history. I believe in the fall of my senior year, I decided to apply to history graduate school, for want of a better idea.

“I would expect that there are or were hundreds of historians in the US for whom military experience in World War II was important.”

In going into history, were you influenced by your father?

Certainly, in ways that are not always that easy for me to recognize—that is to say, he neither encouraged nor discouraged my migration into the field of history. He would answer questions if I asked them, but he would not offer advice or opinions.

If I were to indulge, and I will do this only reluctantly, in self-examination, I would say that I could tell when I was 20, which is when I made this decision [to become a historian], that if I wanted to have a lot to talk about with my father in the years and decades to come, the only reliable way to do it was to become a historian.

Your father was also a veteran of World War II. And right now, we’re seeing that generation of historians passing away. Do you have any thoughts about how that cohort of historians shaped history as a field of inquiry and what we might be losing now that they’re leaving us?

In my father’s case, the fact that he was a veteran of the US Army from 1941 to ’46 was a huge influence on his mind. In much of his work, he took military [life] seriously, and I won’t say necessarily sympathetically, but [with] a greater understanding than otherwise could have belonged to the subject. I think his experiences in the military, which took him to Hawaii, took him to the Caribbean, took him to North Africa, took him to Greece, helped him develop his global perspective.

And I would expect that there are or were hundreds, maybe more than hundreds, of historians in the US for whom military experience in World War II was also important, although probably in different ways. I would say that in several cases, [these] historians learned a language for military duty; they spent a lot of time, particularly after the war, as the US military occupations took shape, in one country and developed a basic familiarity and also an interest in, let us say, Japan. I think there’s probably a dozen or more US historians of Japan whose lives took that particular trajectory.

Who were your first mentors?

In my undergraduate days, I would say the most important example for me was a professor at Swarthmore [College] named Paul Beik, who was a specialist in French history but also taught Russian history. I admired him lavishly for his manner, his very gentle soul, very encouraging soul, but also one with severe standards.

When I got to graduate school [at Duke University], the most important figures for me were probably Charles Maier, who was at Duke between his [years] at Harvard, and John Cell. What was important for me about Maier was the depth of his engagement with 20th-century European history. I never took a class from John Cell, but he invited me to team-teach with him around my fourth year. It was a very interesting and intense experience for me. He was a specialist in British and British imperial history, but we were teaching about ancient China and pre-Columbian America—things that neither of us knew anything about.

“I do try to encourage students to be fearless and to be ambitious in what they take on, to avoid writing the definitive work of trivial subjects.”

That was a great experience for me. He legitimized exploration of fields that I had no credentials in, because he had no credentials in them, and yet we were teaching about these things. And that was a liberation for me. I have since taught several things that I know very little about. I tell my students it’s a mutual voyage of discovery.

As regards to mentorship, I do try to encourage students doing senior theses, master’s theses, and PhD theses to be fearless and to be ambitious in what they take on, to avoid writing—particularly PhD students—the definitive work of trivial subjects, which is an inclination that many scholars have.

What was your first AHA annual meeting like?

I actually went to one session of an AHA meeting when I was an undergraduate, because one of my professors was presenting a paper. I went only to this one session. I have to admit, I didn’t find it terribly exciting.

My first one after that was probably, as it is for many, the occasion of my first job interviews. My experience of the AHA was colored by the fact that I had high-stress, hour-long engagements with total strangers, and my whole life and career seemed— seemed —to hinge on the outcomes of these. I know that one of those early ones was in Washington, held, as is often the case, in the two hotels in Woodley Park, because I remember vividly going to the wrong hotel for one of my interviews.

I vaguely, vaguely remember going to see some of the big-name historians in those days—Philip Curtin, Eugene Genovese—and one of the things I learned from that is that even the really big, famous, successful historians are just people like anybody else.

What goals should the AHA have for the next year?

An AHA presidency lasts only one year, and it’s very hard for any president to have much impact on any institution such as the AHA or any profession such as ours in the span of one year. And my observation from my three years as the vice president of the Research Division [2012 through 2014] suggests to me that whatever ambitions a given president might have for doing X, Y, or Z while in office for a year are likely to be overtaken by events. So the position turns out to be much more reactive than one might imagine if one has not witnessed the Council and the AHA mothership in operation.

Climate change “is likely to have an impact on historians’ understanding of causation, by which I mean the array of forces that drive history.”

But if nothing unexpected were to come up in the year 2019, I think that the main agenda that I would like to see the AHA attend to is to broaden its activities and attention more than it has been able to do in years and decades past, so as to include historians operating in all kinds of institutional settings. The AHA just prepared this magnificent [database], Where Historians Work , [which] tells us in detail things that we knew in a fuzzy sort of way [about where history PhDs get jobs]. But the implication of that is that the AHA as a professional organization and as an institution needs to take account of these findings and attend to the interests—intellectual and professional interests—of all these historians in all these different settings. I have been a beneficiary of the AHA’s focus on academia. And I don’t for a moment suggest that the AHA neglect academia. But the fact of the matter is that historians are found in all different settings.

Given your expertise, how you think climate change will affect us in the future—“us” meaning historians—whether in the short term or long term?

Climate change is going to affect everybody. It already is affecting everybody to some extent, but some people around the world much more than others. Beyond that, I think it’s already begun to affect historians by inviting them to take climate shifts and climate shocks more carefully into account when thinking about, teaching about, and writing about history.

I also think that it’s likely to have an impact on historians’ understanding of causation, by which I mean the array of forces that drive history in one direction or another. It is likely to broaden our sense of what the driving forces behind history are. I think it will likely have the effect of broadening our conception of what is relevant to the trajectory of history. History has always been shaped by the world in which historians currently operate, and insofar as climate looms larger in the world in which we operate, then it’s going to loom larger in our understandings of the past.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length .

Allison Miller is editor of Perspectives . She tweets @Cliopticon.

Tags: AHA Activities Global History Environmental History

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Lapham’s quarterly.

On feigning fearlessness.

When a boy, I read a passage in one of Frederick Marryat’s books which always impressed me.

The captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough, it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it. This was the theory upon which I went. There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to “mean” horses and gunfighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually ceased to be afraid. Most men can have the same experience if they choose. They will first learn to bear themselves well in trials which they anticipate and which they school themselves in advance to meet. After a while the habit will grow on them, and they will behave well in sudden and unexpected emergencies which come upon them unawares.

It is of course much pleasanter if one is naturally fearless, and I envy and respect those who are. But it is a good thing to remember that the man who does not enjoy this advantage can nevertheless stand beside the man who does, and can do his duty with the like efficiency, if he chooses to . Let him dream about being a fearless man, and the more he dreams the better he will be, always provided he does his best to realize the dream in practice. He can do his part honorably and well, provided only he sets fearlessness before himself as an ideal, schools himself to think of danger merely as something to be faced and overcome, and regards life itself as he should regard it, not as something to be thrown away but as a pawn to be promptly hazarded whenever the hazard is warranted by the larger interests of the great game in which we are all engaged.

Theodore Roosevelt

From his Autobiography . In 1915, six years after leaving the White House, Roosevelt spoke to a mostly Irish audience of the Knights of Columbus at New York City’s Carnegie Hall. “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism,” he said. An originator of this nativist phrase, he expanded on the idea: “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

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On Basketball

A History of Fearlessness

By Jeré Longman

Aug. 24, 2011

When Pat Summitt became head coach of the Tennessee Lady Vols in 1974, she drove the team van and began to shift gears on the long uphill climb for women’s sports.

Not until 1982 would the N.C.A.A. begin sponsoring a basketball tournament for women. The gender equity law known as Title IX had been enacted in 1972, but it was force of personality more than federal mandate that forged Summitt’s career and those of her contemporaries.

“Title IX gave us some clout, but it didn’t give us our motivation,” said Jody Conradt, the Hall of Fame former women’s coach at the University of Texas.

In those early days when female athletes lacked scholarships and widespread respect — at reigning champion Texas A&M, the first women’s basketball locker room was a men’s dressing room with camouflaging flowers placed in the urinals — Summitt survived at Tennessee on a coaching stipend of $250 a month and washed the team uniforms.

Those were the days, Conradt said only half-jokingly, that “if you had a car you made the team because we needed it to go to games.”

Summitt overcame athletic inequality with a stoicism and determination that came from growing up on a farm in Tennessee, chopping tobacco and baling hay as part of her sunup to sundown chores while her father admonished, “Cows don’t take a day off.” Basketball games were played at night in a hayloft with her three older brothers.

“They would just run over me,” Summitt said in a 2008 interview. “But that was O.K.”

She would not be run over for long. At 22, Summitt became head coach at Tennessee, barely older than her players. Thirty-seven seasons later, she has won eight national titles and more games (1,071) than any major-college basketball coach, man or woman, while avoiding scandal and graduating the vast majority of her players.

“In modern history, there are two figures that belong on the Mount Rushmore of women’s sports — Billie Jean King and Pat Summitt,” said Mary Jo Kane, a sports sociologist at the University of Minnesota. “No one else is close to third.”

Her stature made it all the more shocking Tuesday when Summitt announced that she had early-onset Alzheimer’s disease at age 59. Fellow coaches were stunned by the diagnosis of dementia but hardly surprised that Summitt approached it the way she confronted everything else — head-on, open, resolute, determined to keep coaching.

“It might not be curable, but I’m sure she has a plan to deal with this,” said Tara VanDerveer, the Hall of Fame coach at Stanford. “All those things she has taught in sports — discipline — could be exactly what she needs. I give her a lot of credit for being so open in sharing this and being so courageous in continuing to coach. A lot of people would say, ‘That’s it,’ and do crossword puzzles. But she’s bringing visibility to something that a lot of people have a hard time talking about and dealing with.”

In an athletic context, this is precisely what Summitt has done for nearly four decades, bringing widespread attention to something that made many people uncomfortable — the ascendance of women’s sports.

She attended Tennessee-Martin where, she once told Time magazine, her team played three consecutive road games in the same unwashed uniforms because it had only one set. Early in her coaching career, the Lady Vols once slept on mats in an opponent’s gym because money for hotels was scarce.

“We played because we loved the game,” Summitt told Time in 2009. “We didn’t think anything about it.”

Her father, Richard Head, was a stern man, but he moved the family to a neighboring county so that Tricia, as he called her, could play basketball in high school. She played on the 1976 Olympic team and won a silver medal. And when Summitt lost her inaugural game coaching at Tennessee, her father gave her this enduring device: “Don’t take donkeys to the Kentucky Derby.”

By this, he meant, the best teams have the best players. She became a fierce recruiter and motivator, supple enough with Xs and Os to change from a plodding, half-court style to a full-court style built on aggressive defense and rebounding. And she became an ambassador as much as coach, allowing television cameras into the locker room, willing to play almost any team on almost any court.

She is fearless, tough, even blistering, in her approach. This, after all, is a woman who dislocated her shoulder three years ago while forearming a raccoon off her deck to protect her Labrador retriever. At times, Summitt has had to have her rings rerounded after pounding them flat on the court. Yet she has also managed to be forceful without being considered shrill or arrogant, avoiding a double standard that often confronts women in the workplace.

“She was wildly successful but never was she too big for anyone,” said Doris Burke, a former point guard at Providence and now an ESPN commentator. “There’s a humility and groundedness that make her special. That Kipling line, ‘If you can walk with kings and still keep the common touch,’ that captures Pat Summitt.”

She is not without her critics. Summitt’s refusal in recent seasons to play archrival Connecticut — she was upset by what she considered the improper recruiting of Maya Moore — was met with disapproval even by some of her former players. But the balance of her career swings far in the other direction. Summitt brought record victory to women’s basketball along with something even more valuable — legitimacy. Attitudes changed. Coaching salaries elevated along with general acceptance. She made it O.K. to aspire and perspire.

“Pat Summitt is our John Wooden in the women’s game,” Baylor Coach Kim Mulkey said, referring to the U.C.L.A. legend. “There may be coaches that win more than Pat, but there will never be another Pat Summitt.”

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A History of Fearlessness / No Dream Is Impossible

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No Dream Is Impossible” and are intended for the high school course English I, but can be used with any high school reading level.

Genre The genre of the selections is Nonfiction (Paired Passages).

Question Types It features 17 total questions. There are 10 multiple choice, 3 inline choice, 2 dropdown, 1 multiselect, and 1 short answer.

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Better Habits, Better Life

Why Fearlessness Is More Important Than Confidence

Some of the benefits of confidence are the ability to be yourself, possessing greater courage, speaking your mind, feeling good about yourself, staying calm despite unfavorable circumstances, and having greater appeal as a friend or a mate. But there is one thing that’s even stronger than confidence. Fearlessness.

Why Fearlessness Is So Powerful

Fearlessness and confidence are related. If you don’t fear anything, you will naturally be confident, because a lack of confidence is primarily caused by fear of rejection, danger, or failure. So you could say that confidence is a byproduct of fearlessness.

Fearlessness enables people to do unbelievable things like climb skyscrapers, launch their body across the goal line (in football), and most importantly, boldly live their ideal life!

Most people wanting to be more confident will aim directly for confidence, but I think they could have better success by aiming for fearlessness. In many ways, it’s a more direct approach to being more confident. When you try to be confident, you’re attempting to build yourself higher than your fears in a “I can do this” kind of way.

How Fearlessness Becomes Confidence

Imagine you see an attractive person and want to talk to him/her, but you aren’t confident enough. To try to gain confidence at this point is going to be very difficult. Confidence comes from within, so it takes time to improve your baseline confidence. Though there are some in the moment strategies like confident body language that can physiologically increase your confidence. But what if you attempted to conquer your fears as a way to become more confident?

Once you identify your fears, you can find some weaknesses in their “armor.”

First, you’d address your fear of rejection: The person might respond negatively to you. If you ask him/her out, they might say no. He/she could laugh at you and embarrass you. Ack!

However, these rejection scenarios are only scary or embarrassing for like 5 seconds. Can’t you handle that as a worst case scenario? Are you going to let yourself be scared of 5 seconds of awkwardness or discomfort? This applies to any possible rejection scenario, from asking for a raise, to asking for a job, to asking for a girl’s number.

Second, you’d address the fear of failure. The fear of failure is a level above the fear of rejection, and involves longer term evaluation of what the rejection means. You might feel that this one instance of rejection is representative of your general relationship with the opposite sex. You might feel like this person is the ambassador for their gender, and if they vote you out, then all hope is lost. I’ve had this fear before . 🙂

The fear of failure can be dissolved with some logic. There are 7 billion people on earth and every single one of us has different tastes and preferences. If you’re a good and honest person, then most people are going to at least like you as a friend. People tend to be irrationally scared of approaching strangers. The logic is that any single case of rejection is just that – a single instance. If you’re willing to keep trying , you’ll find success.

Jia Jiang decided to experience 100 days of rejection to conquer his fears. And he found that most people were nice and receptive to him (a complete stranger), but not all. What if he tried once, got rejected, and assumed that everyone would be that way? He would have held on to false beliefs. In statistics, the sample size is very important. The lower the sample size, the less reliable the data. Why can’t we see that this is true for our lives as well? And why can’t we see that for most things, all it takes is ONE successful result – for marriage, in business, and even investing. Investing in Apple stock in the year 2000 would be enough to overcome the collapse of the rest of your portfolio, as it has increased 80-fold since then!

What Happens When You Remove Fear

When you remove fear, confidence tends to emerge. Confidence is believing in a positive result, while fear is worrying about the potential of a negative result. Once fear of a negative result is gone, it’s easier to believe in a positive result (i.e. be confident).

Fearlessness means nothing is holding you back. 100% fearlessness isn’t healthy though. The L.A. Times interviewed Michael P. Ghiglieri about deaths in the Grand Canyon, and here was one Q&A that shows the consequences of careless fearlessness.

“ LA Times: Is it true that somebody once fell to his death in the canyon because he slipped while pretending to fall to his death? Ghiglieri: Sad to say this is true. In 1992, 38-year-old Greg Austin Gingrich leaped atop the guard wall and wind-milled his arms, playing-acting losing his balance to scare his teenaged daughter, then he comically “fell” off the wall on the canyon side onto a short slope where he assumed he could land safely. As his daughter walked on, trying not to fuel her father’s dangerous antics by paying attention to them, Gingrich missed his footing and fell silently about 400 feet into the void. It took rangers quite a while to locate his body — and to determine that his daughter was an orphan only due to his foolishness.” ( source )

The key in life seems to be knowing which fears are healthy and helpful to have (a fear of heights isn’t such a bad thing to have) and which fears simply hold you back (asking a question, trying something new, being embarrassed). Some people’s fear is so crippling that they can’t function normally. Others die because they don’t have enough fear. As with many things, balance is ideal. Be fearful of things that are worthy of your fear, but don’t ever let the word “no” scare you. Don’t ever let it hold you back from pursuing opportunities.

Opportunities only pay off if you’re willing to take them, which you can do by losing your fear and picking up confidence. The next time you’re struggling with confidence, think about what you’re most afraid of, and attack that root. Then you can move forward!

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Windows Onto History The Defenestrations of Prague (1419–1997)

By Thom Sliwowski

Throwing people out of windows (or defenestrating them, as the Latin has it) is an act imbued with longstanding political significance in Prague. From the Hussite revolt in the late Middle Ages through the Thirty Years’ War to modern instances of “autodefenestration”, Thom Sliwowski finds a national shibboleth imbued with ritual efficacy.

April 3, 2024

Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum getting defenestrated, which triggered the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), detail of an 1889 illustration from the Finnish magazine Kyläkirjaston Kuvalehti — Source .

It was the spring of 1618 and Matthias, Holy Roman Emperor and past King of Bohemia, had devised a plan that would prove calamitous. Seeking to reverse the concessions granted a decade prior by his brother and predecessor, Rudolf II, he tasked his deputies with reigning in the rights of Bohemian Protestants. But these Protestants lived in a tradition of religious dissidence preceding Martin Luther by a century: they were accustomed to a degree of autonomous rule and religious freedom uncommon elsewhere in Habsburg realms. When Matthias’ deputies halted the construction of chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau, Protestants, noblemen, and free burghers found themselves united in their indignation. Ordinarily, these groups had few interests in common. At the time, they could not see — as subsequent historians, painters, and poets would — that they were already becoming Czech, and were about to take part in what, centuries later, would be retrospectively recast as a kind of idiosyncratic national ritual. Nor could Matthias and his advisors see that the Holy Roman Empire was standing before a historical precipice. Keen to meddle in local affairs, Matthias was shrewd enough to act through his zealous deputies. And it was to them that the gravity of this situation would first become apparent.

Two Catholic deputies, Jaroslav Bořita of Martinice and Vilém Slavata of Chlum, had grown notorious for openly disavowing the Majestätsbrief : Rudolf II’s 1609 liberal guarantee of religious tolerance. When a Protestant assembly spurned by the shuttered chapels in Klostergrab and Braunau attracted a massive crowd, Martinice and Slavata began to worry. And when the count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, elected defender of the Protestant faith, called for their execution, they realized it was already too late. The Catholic deputies had overplayed their hand; the mood among the infuriated townspeople was rising to a fever pitch. A large crowd followed the Protestant nobles to Hradčany Castle. They poured inside and to the upper floors, cornering Martinice and Slavata in a tower chamber. Shouting at, threatening, and then grabbing the deputies, they chucked Martinice out the window first. Slavata, meanwhile, held onto the ledge, begging for the Virgin’s intercession. In one final push, the crowd expelled him from the castle window as well. Only the deputies’ secretary remained. Shaking with fear, he clung to the prominent Protestant nobleman Joachim von Schlick for protection, but the defenestrators, as they would come to be called, peeled him off Schlick and tossed him out the window too.

Exuberant, the Protestant rebels mocked these appeals to the Virgin Mary. But when two of them leaned out the window to heap more insults down upon their oppressors, what they saw left them flummoxed. Martinice and Slavata were alive, as was their secretary, and the three were already getting up to reach for a ladder extended by allies from a lower window in the castle. How the Catholic deputies survived this forty-foot fall was a mystery that has turned the defenestration into an object lesson in framing. Catholic propagandists insisted that the Virgin Mary had saved them: Slavata’s prayer for intercession worked, effecting a miracle that legitimated their cause. Protestant pamphleteers, on the other hand, noted that a pile of trash and human shit directly below the window had broken their fall. They may have survived, but only to remind others how loathsome was their attempt to quash local rights. 1

Words seem inadequate to the task of describing something so outlandish, and yet “defenestration” comes close. This word is grammatically a compound nominalization — and a flagrantly Latinate one at that. “Fenestrate”, the verb ostensibly at its root, only appears a couple centuries later, carrying two unrelated technical usages in the fields of surgery and botany. From this we can surmise that “defenestration” was a linguistic artifact constructed intentionally. Perhaps it meant to lampoon the Latin of Bohemia’s Catholic rulers: in Czech it is simply “defenestrace”, a rare Latinate word in that language. The humor here derives from the fact that a form of free fall carries a name as clunky as the doctrines and mores of the Catholic rule it sought to swiftly overturn.

Woodcut from a 1618 German pamphlet depicting Martinice and Slavata’s fall — Source .

Almost immediately, the task of illustrating the defenestration became paramount. A 1618 Catholic Flugblatt (or pamphlet) depicts Martinice and Slavata falling onto a courtyard paved with stones. An accompanying caption renders the event as legend: thanks to the Virgin’s intercession, the deputies’ lives were saved and they took refuge in a nearby cloister. Foolhardy political revolt is here transfigured into a leap of faith that furnishes its own proof: they were, after all, still alive when this image was printed. Regrettably, opposing Protestant pamphlets, depicting the pile of excrement that broke their fall, are harder to come by.

Miracle or mere coincidence, the defenestration catalyzed a broader Bohemian uprising: the first eruption of what would become the Thirty Years’ War. News of the Prague defenestration traveled across Europe within the year; its images proliferated in contemporary pamphlets, fliers, and compendia of recent events. Centuries later, the act of defenestration would serve as a touchstone of Czech national identity and of Prague’s municipal history. But first it would be represented and re-invoked so many times that this concrete, historical event gradually became abstracted into a figure of thought.

We find the seeds of this abstraction in an engraving that was printed in the Theatrum Europaeum : a German historical chronicle published by Matthäus Merian in the mid-seventeenth century. Here, partisan framings are eschewed in favor of neutral representation. Within the castle, men are hoisting the Catholic deputies to the windowsills while their secretary awaits his turn in the center of the image. The focus on him as the engraving’s central figure suggests the perennial question that haunts all news about violent revolts: who will be next?

Engraving of the Second Defenestration of Prague (1618) by Matthäus Merian for the first volume of Theatrum Europaeum (1662) — Source .

Of course, the 1618 defenestration would not be the last one to take place in Prague — but neither was it the first. Two centuries earlier, Jan Hus, a wildly popular theologian, inveighed against the Church, denouncing its political authority and its system of monetary indulgences. He also called for Mass to be celebrated not in Latin but in the local tongue, which was then named Bohemian but which we would now call Czech. To this end, Hus wrote his Orthografia Bohemica (1406–1412): the first dictionary of the Czech language, in which he invented the haček and the vowel-length markers, which make Czech spelling unique among European languages. This religious reformer and fervent grammarian was subsequently arrested, found guilty of heresy, and burned at the stake in 1415. By making him into a martyr, the Church had all but guaranteed Hus’ legacy. 2 And his followers cemented this legacy by revolting. In 1419, they stormed the Novoměstská radnice, Prague’s “New Town Hall”, and threw three municipal consuls and seven citizens out of a window.

With this violent spectacle, Hus’ followers, who would come to be known as Hussites, won the right to rule themselves and to worship as they chose. They retained this right until 1483, when King Vladislaus II stormed Prague and reestablished Catholic rule. Another defenestration followed, as these proto-Protestants tossed the Burgomeister and the corpses of seven town counselors out of various halls across the city. Again the spectacle worked: a religious reconciliation at the 1485 Peace of Kutná Hora established the Hussite and Roman Catholic faiths as equal before the law. Were the two defenestrations that opened and closed the Hussite Wars decisive for their outcome, or merely incidental? One could be forgiven for thinking that the act of defenestration, as violent as it is theatrical, seemed to carry some magical efficacy.

A compelling ritual is one thing, but lasting historical efficacy is something else entirely. The Bohemian Revolt that followed the 1618 defenestration was decisively suppressed only two years later, in a battle on the outskirts of Prague between the Bohemian Confederation and the Holy Roman Empire. The 1620 Battle of White Mountain slammed shut the window of possibility for Czech self-determination, inaugurating a period of harsh Germanization lasting almost two centuries. Germanophone Catholic agents of the Empire suppressed the language and burned Czech books, under the pretext of a Counter-Reformation strategy aimed at stamping out the Hussite confession once and for all.

No surprise, then, that when the Czech National Revival broke out in the early nineteenth century, it was led largely by radical lexicographers and philologists. Josef Dobrovský published a Czech grammar in 1809, and Josef Jungmann a five-volume Czech-German dictionary over the years 1834–1839. 3 Together the two Josefs set down the medium in which Czech culture could flourish: poetry, painting, and history writing — all fueled by the heady currents of Romanticism — elaborated Czech-ness, making a nation out of the language’s speakers. The wave crested in 1848 with the eruption of the June Revolution in Prague. But this uprising, too, eventually failed.

The most enduring artifact of the Czech National Revival was a sense of historical consciousness that recast the Prague defenestrations as national revolts avant la lettre. Aberrant curios no longer, the early modern defenestrations found new life as links in a chain that led directly to the 1848 Spring of Nations. The visual archive from the nineteenth century appears like an anchor line plunging into the abyss of the past. It is here we find the earliest depictions of the fifteenth-century Hussite defenestrations, such as an engraving from the Česko-Moravská Kronika of 1872. Written by Karel Vladislav Zap, a writer and pedagogue best known for popularizing Czech history, this book aimed to instruct the Czechs about who they were. Defenestration came to be at this point a national shibboleth: because they had thrown their enemies from castle windows, the reasoning seems to go, these Hussite rebels were, in fact, ancestors of the nationalists that we are today. To be Czech meant not only to speak the language, but also to be aware of defenestration’s significance.

The 1483 defenestration of Prague, as imagined in Karel Vladislav Zap’s Česko-Moravská Kronika (1872) — Source .

More than any other defenestration, it was the 1618 instance that captured the imagination of Romantic revolutionaries agitating for the Czech cause. A somewhat earlier painting, from 1844 by Karel Svoboda, stages this defenestration with all the trappings of the nineteenth-century Czech National Revival. Open books and reams of paper litter the left foreground, invoking the work of the lexicographers who codified the language. A toppled chair suggests authority overturned — a motif that later painters will repeat — and the open window looks to be smashed in a curious way. Though this is a historical painting, its call to revolutionary violence is rendered here in the present tense.

Karel Svoboda, Defenestration at the Prague Council in 1618 , 1848 — Source .

Depictions like these elevated and abstracted the historical event of defenestration into something more significant than a milestone. Historical change might be called a “watershed” or a “turning point”, but certain events forge their own metaphors. The 1789 Storming of the Bastille evokes the tumult of the French Revolution, and the 1989 Fall of communism suggests the collapse of a system that turned out to be remarkably flimsy. “Defenestration” does something similar: for nineteenth-century Czech nationalists, these events (and how they model historical change) took on a poetic significance. Some historians surmise that the 1618 Protestant crowd was deliberately reenacting the earlier defenestrations; Czech nationalists certainly thought so, placing the Hussite and Protestant defenestrations in a line of succession that became a tradition and a figure for thinking about history. 4

The apogee of painterly depictions of the 1618 event came a half-century later, in two paintings by Václav Brožík from 1890 and 1891. In the first, Pražská defenestrace roku 1618 , the line of action moves leftward as the dynamic image expresses the eruption of affect that, for Brožík, defines this act. Martinice is halfway out the window while Slavata, stupefied, is being dragged the same direction. Their secretary is pinned to the desk among some papers, while in the foreground, under the window, lies a toppled chair. A throne overthrown, this chair perhaps embodies the anti-monarchic energy that nineteenth-century nationalists ascribed to the Protestant rebels fighting for political autonomy. The energy in this painting implies hydraulic forces at work: it is as if the upswell of revolutionary emotion tends naturally, automatically to the window, which is at once a release valve and an opening onto the future. If to look out a window is to imagine political possibility — the painting seems to say — then to throw somebody out a window is to make history happen.

Václav Brožík, The Prague Defenestration of 1618 , 1890 — Source .

Brožík’s 1891 painting depicts the defenestration’s aftermath, showing how even the most ardent collective revolts can be stymied. In the adjacent room, exhausted on a chair, one of the escaped Catholic deputies recovers from their terrifying ordeal: miraculous or odious, the defenestration they survived nevertheless shook them to their cores. Among the crowd one finds some characters from the previous painting, including Count Jindřich Matyáš Thurn, in red. This crowd is kept at bay by the Princess Polyxena of Lobkowitz, a politically-active figure who played a significant role in the Bohemian Counter-Reformation. All the way to the right, an empty chair with a scepter laid atop it invokes monarchical authority preserved. Princess Polyxena single-handedly stands between the Protestant rebels and the accomplishment of their task, representing the forces that stood in the way of Bohemian self-determination and Czech national consciousness. However, by placing her at the center of the painting — and in this powerful pose: index finger pointing downward, face stern — Brožík created a far more ambiguous scene. Here, at least, it could go both ways: perhaps Polyxena was right to protect these artifacts of divine intercession.

Václav Brožík’s 1891 painting, depicting Polyxena of Lobkowitz safeguarding Catholic officials after their 1618 defenestration — Source .

Already a figure for representing historical change, defenestration became the emblem of a uniquely Czech form of fatalism during the twentieth century. Writers took it up, elaborating and unfolding its significance, and made this idea into an object of obsession. The word’s curious meaning in this century is the strange son of its nineteenth-century usage: to grasp its significance we must briefly retrace its paternity.

Of all the heroes of the Czech national cause, none looms larger than Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Born into a working-class Moravian family, he pursued philosophy in Vienna and Leipzig, studying under Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl. He wrote a habilitation thesis on the sociology of suicide: a topic that would prove eerily prescient. A scientific and progressive thinker, he married the American Charlotte Garrigue after meeting her in Leipzig, taking her surname as his second name. In 1918, after a lifetime spent championing the Czech cause, including during speeches given at the Treaty of Versailles, Tomáš Masaryk found himself elected president of the newly independent Czechoslovakia.

Masaryk served as a widely beloved president until his death in 1935. Three years later, Hitler’s Third Reich would annex the Sudetenland: those border-regions of interwar Czechoslovakia inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans. So began the Second World War in Bohemia. If the 1618 defenestration spurred the Thirty Years’ War, what came to be known as the Fourth Defenestration of Prague concluded this one. The beginning of the end was heralded by the Soviet liberation of Prague in 1945. The Czech and Slovak Communist Parties, already popular in the 1946 elections, staged a coup d’état in February of 1948. They had reason to eliminate their opponents, and they soon set their sights on Czechoslovakia’s foreign minister, Jan Masaryk.

The son of Tomáš Masaryk, Jan had served as minister plenipotentiary for the new nation in London since 1925. In 1940, with his country swallowed up by the Third Reich, he was appointed foreign minister of the Czechoslovak government in exile. A reluctant supporter of Stalin, he traveled to Moscow in April, 1945, to agree on Czechoslovakia’s foreign policy. (He had signed a twenty-five-year alliance with the Soviet leader two years prior.) With increasing disappointment, he observed the postwar developments in Prague until, on March 10, 1948, Masaryk was found dead in the courtyard of the foreign ministry wearing only his pajamas. He had fallen from his bathroom window. The official cause of death was listed as suicide, but in the popular imagination this event came to be called the Fourth Defenestration of Prague.

Photograph by Walter Sanders of an unidentified woman overlooking Jan Masaryk’s 1948 funeral in the courtyard of Czernin Palace, where he also fell to his death — Source (not public domain).

The Czechoslovak authorities were quick to wrap up their investigation into Masaryk’s death, having determined that it was a suicide. But the case would be reopened, incredibly enough, half a century later. In 2004, the Prague Police enlisted forensic expert Jiři Straus to reexamine the evidence, and Straus found that Masaryk, “a heavy[set] man and certainly no athlete . . . would have landed much closer to the building if he had jumped.” 5 Because he had fallen so far away from the Foreign Ministry, he must have been pushed. This official finding confirmed what most Czechs had already suspected: no suicide, Masaryk had been murdered on Stalin’s orders.

While defenestrations both real and suggested continued to proliferate throughout the twentieth century after Masaryk’s death, many of them carry a dubious, autotelic quality: writers would pine to be defenestrated, but their desire comes to undo the act’s ritual efficacy. Can defenestration occur without the element of surprise, or without political rivals to carry it out? Is it possible to autodefenestrate? By fixating on the window, writers sprung the frames of what we could call traditional defenestration.

In a recently published academic journal article on the subject, Hana Pichova counted in Kafka’s notebooks at least ten instances of “falling, jumping, or being forcibly thrown from windows”, adding that though such “thoughts occupied the writer more than fleetingly”, they only occupied him so long as he remained in Prague. 6 Bohumil Hrabal, the pilsner-drinking bard of postwar Prague, was fixated enough on open windows and falling out of them that he wrote, in the spring of 1989, a text enigmatically entitled “The Magic Flute”, in which he assembles his own compendium of historical and literary defenestrations. This was far from the first time he wrote about defenestration, but never had he mustered such depressive pathos. The text meditates on the stymied protests in Prague, on the self-immolation of the student Jan Palach, and on the hopelessness of existence under the communist order, which would incidentally collapse just six months later.

Hrabal mentions the early twentieth century poet Konstantin Biebl, who “jumped out of the window, but [who] first, and this was a long time before, . . . had Štyrský paint him a picture, of a man falling backwards out of a window, just like turning the page of a book.” 7 This painting has unfortunately been lost to history, but Hrabal’s description of it prefigures his own end. Eight years later, in 1997, while in a hospital, Hrabal leaned out his window far enough to plummet to his death. He had said over the days prior that he really wanted to feed the pigeons. Could it be said that his obsession with defenestration was what killed him?

It is almost as if, by the twentieth century, the collective attention accorded to defenestration wound the coils of reason too tightly: in becoming an object of literary fixation, it came to occasion a kind of melancholy rumination, one that eats the fruit it bears for the mind. Already a violent form of political murder, the act took on a character even darker and more sinister. Nevertheless, retracing its history reveals a trajectory at least as astounding as the competing claims of Protestant and Catholic pamphleteers after 1618. Here we have concrete historical events that congeal first into an evocative image, then into a figure of thought for historical change in the Czech style, and finally into a style of suicide. But maybe it is simply a trick of historical perspective that makes it possible to excavate defenestration in this way: the early modern defenestrators were probably not reenacting anything, nor were nineteenth-century Romantic painters necessarily aware that they were instantiating a metaphor for historical shifts. There is something off-putting, even suffocating about trying to concoct a grand theory of defenestration. One is compelled to throw open the window, let in some fresh air, perhaps lean out to get a better look . . .

Notes Show Notes

This historical account I take from C.V. Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War (New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2005).
His lovable charm is imprinted in his very name, which in Czech means “goose”.
James Naughton, “Czech Literature, 1774 TO 1918” (2002). Available here .
See Stephen Jay Gould, “This View of Life: The Diet of Worms and the Defenestrations of Prague”, Natural History 9 (1996).
Rob Cameron, “Police close case on 1948 death of Jan Masaryk - murder, not suicide”, Radio Prague International (June 1, 2004). Available here .
Hana Pichova, “‘The Magic Flute’ as an Ode to Defenestration: On the Twentieth Anniversary of Bohumil Hrabal’s Death”, in Slavic and East European Journal , vol. 61, no. 2 (Summer 2017): 331–42.
Bohumil Hrabal, “The Magic Flute”, in Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka , trans. James Naughton (Prague: Twisted Spoon Press, 1998), 9–22.

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SECTION II : Extracts From Letters

[ from selected works of mahatma gandhi : vol - 4 ].

Gandhi Books
Online Books
Selected Letters

SELECTED LETTERS from Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi Volume IV

Table of contents.

Publisher's Note

SECTION I : LETTERS

1. To Dadabhai Naoroji
2. To G. K. Gokhale
3. To G. K. Gokhale
4. To Tolstoy
4A. From Count Leo Tolstoy
5. To Count Leo Tolstoy
6. To Leo Tolstoy
6A. From Count Leo Tolstoy
7. To Leo Tolstoy
7A. From Count Leo Tolstoy
8. To Maganlal Gandhi
9. To Maganlal Gandhi
10. To Narhar Shabhurao Bhave
11. To Mr Maffey, Private secretary To Viceroy
12. To W. B. Heycock
13. To Shankarlal on Ideas About Satyagraha
14. To Vinoba Bhave
15. To C F Andrews
16. To C F Andrews
17. To C F Andrews
18. To Kasturba Gandhi
19. To Kishorelal Mashruwala
20. To Sarojini Naidu
21. To Srinivas Sastri
22. To Srinivas Sastri
23. To Rabindranath Tagore
23A. From Rabindranath Tagore
24. To Rabindranath Tagore
25. From Rabindranath Tagore
25A. To Rabindranath Tagore
26. From Rabindranath Tagore
26A. To Rabindranath Tagore
27. To Rabindranath Tagore
28. To Rabindranath Tagore
29. To Rabindranath Tagore
30. To Rabindranath Tagore
31. To Rabindranath Tagore
32. From Rabindranath Tagore
32A. To Rabindranath Tagore
33. From G S Arundale
33A. To G S Arundale
34. To Every Englishman In India
35. To Viceroy
36. To Jawaharlal Nehru
37. To Jawaharlal Nehru
38. To Jawaharlal Nehru
39. To Jawaharlal Nehru
40. From Jawaharlal Nehru
41. To Jawaharlal Nehru
42. To Konda Venkatappayya
43. To T Prakasam
44. To Hakim Ajmal Khan
45. To Jamnalal Bajaj
46. To Mohomed Ali
47. To Motilal Nehru
48. To Motilal Nehru
49. To C Rajagopalachari
50. To C Rajagopalachari
51. To Kakasaheb Kalelkar
52. To A Friend
53. From Madeleine Slade or Miraben
53A. To Madeleine Slade
54. To Romain Rolland
55. To Romain Rolland
56. To Shri Shankaran
57. To Hermann Kallenbach
58. To Gulzarilal Nanda
59. To Dr Kailas Nath Kaju
60. To Dhan Gopal Mukherjee
61. To Henry S Salt
62. To The Viceroy
63. To Lord Irwin
64. To Reginald Reynolds
65. To Richard B Gregg
66. To Sir Samuel Hoare
67. To Ramsay MacDonald
68. To Pandit Malaviyaji
69. To The Secretary To The Government of Bombay, (Home Dept.), Poona
70. To Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru
71. To Carl Heath
72. To Carl Heath
73. To Carl Heath
74. To M A Jinnah
75. To M A Jinnah
76. To M A Jinnah
76A. From M A Jinnah
77. To M A Jinnah
78. From Subhash Chandra Bose
78A. To Subhash Chandra Bose
79. To Herr Hitler
80. To Every Briton
81. To Every Briton
82. To Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek
83. To Every Japanese
84. To American Friends
85. To Lord Linlithgow
86. To Lord Linlithgow
86A. From Lord Linlithgow
87. To Lord Linlithgow
87A. From Lord Linlithgow
88. To Lord Linlithgow
88A. From Lord Linlithgow
89. To Lord Linlithgow
90. To Agatha Harrison
91. To Winston Churchill
92. To Shriman Narayan
93. To Lord Pethick Lawrence
94. To Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel
95. To The Viceroy
96. To The Viceroy
96A. From Lord Mountbatten
97. To Abdul Ghaffar Khan
97A. From Abdul Ghaffar Khan
98. To A Friend
99. To Madame Edmond Privat
100. To The People of Gujarat
Appendix I: Who Should Be Provincial Governors?
Appendix II: A Psychological Explanation
Appendix III: The Gandhian Constitutions for Free India

SECTION II : EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS

Faith in God
Religions and Scriptures
Value of Prayer
Truth and Non-violence
The Science of Satyagraha
Fasting in Satyagraha
Unto This Last
Khadi and Village Industry
East and West
Hindu-Muslim Unity
Upliftment of Women
The Good of All
India's Freedom
Caste System and Untouchability
Brahmacharya
Fearlessness
Health and Hygene
Self-restraint
Self-development
Selfless Service
Voluntary Poverty

About This Volumes

Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi comprises of Five volumes.

Vol-I: Autobiography
Vol-II: Satyagraha in South Africa
Ethical Religion
Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule
From Yeravada Mandir
Discourses on the Gita
Constructive Programme
Key to Health
Vol-IV: Selected Letters
Vol-V: Voice of Truth

This book, Selected Letters, is volume-4.

Written by : M. K. Gandhi General Editor : Shriman Narayan Volume Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi : A set of five books ISBN: 81-7229-278-3 (set) Printed and Published by : Jitendra T. Desai Navajivan Mudranalaya, Ahemadabad-380014 India © Navajivan Trust, 1968

Vol-IV: Selected Letters. [PDF]

Chapter 17: Fearlessness

All fear is of the nature of a moral weakness and, so long as we are subject to it, we shall always have to face such misfortunes.

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XII, p. 93, 30-5-1913

Death should make us think of our duty and fill us with contempt for the body, but inspire no fear. It seems that a man does not suffer excessively even when he is burnt to death. When the pain becomes unbearable, he loses consciousness. Those who cling to the body so very tenaciously only suffer the more. One who knows the truth about the atman will have no fear of death.

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XII, pp. 365-66, 1-3-1914

I have not got rid of the fear of death, despite much thinking. But I feel no impatience. I keep on trying and I am sure I shall get rid off it one day. We should not let go a single occasion when we may try. That is our duty. It is for God to produce or will the result. Why worry then? When feeding her baby, the mother has no thought of the result. The result does follow, though. To get rid of the fear of death and to drive away desire, make the effort and keep cheerful; and they will disappear. Otherwise, it will be the same with you as with the man who, resolving not to think about a monkey, kept on thinking of one. We are born in sin, and we are enslaved in the body, because of our sinful deeds; how can you hope to cleanse yourself of all the impurity just in a minute? You may live as you like, Realize God anyhow. This is the teaching of Akha Bhagat. 1 Tulsidasji says: Whether in adversity or no, repeat over again the name of Rama and you will achieve all there is to be achieved.

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XII, pp. 375, 7-3-1914

No man can hasten or delay my death even by a minute. The best way of saving oneself from death is to go seeking it. It is no doubt our duty to take care of our life in a general way. More than this we need not do. We should rather welcome death whenever it comes.

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XII, p. 386, 14-3-1914

Death should cause no fear in us, if we have lived in the fear of God and have done nothing in violation of the voice of our conscience. Then, indeed, is death but a change for the better and, therefore, a welcome change which need not evoke any sorrow.

Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. XII, p. 390, 18-3-1914

The man who knows in his heart of hearts that this mortal frame is liable to perish any moment will be ever ready to meet death. That he might be so, the householder will limit his external activities and expand the inner and live accordingly.

To A Gandhian Capitalist, XIII, p. 30, 27-2-1915

The more I observe and study things, the more convinced I become that sorrow over separation and death is perhaps the greatest delusion. To realize that it is a delusion is to become free. There is no death, no separation of the substance. And yet the tragedy of it is that though we love friends for the substance we recognize in them, we deplore the destruction of the insubstantial that covers the substance for the time being. Whereas real friendship should be used to reach the whole through the fragment. You seem to have got the truth for the moment. Let it abide forever.

Bapu's Letters to Mira, p. 41, 27-4-1927

To wish to see the dearest ones as long as possible in the flesh is a selfish desire and it comes out of weakness or want of faith in the survival of the soul after the dissolution of the body. The form ever changes, ever perishes, the informing spirit neither changes nor perishes. True love consists in transferring itself from the body to the dweller within and then necessarily realizing the oneness of all life inhabiting numberless bodies.

Bapu's Letters to Mira, p. 156, 6-7-1931

Death as such leaves little impression on me; I only feel for the bereaved relatives. There can be no greater ignorance than to mourn over death.

The Diary of Mahadev Desai, Vol. I, p. 213, 5-7-1932

So long as we wear this vesture of clay, let us keep it clean, pure and healthy, and when we have to cast it off, let us discard it without any regret. It was given to us for use. Let the Giver take it away when He pleases. We have to use it for service only, and not for enjoyment.

The Diary of Mahadev Desai, Vol. I, p. 276, 7-8-1932

The human body is less durable even than a glass bangle, which, if we preserved, may continue to exist for hundreds of years. But our bodies, no matter how carefully preserved, cannot last beyond a certain period, and may be destroyed at any time during that period. We may not put our trust in them.

The Diary of Mahadev Desai, Vol. I, pp. 276-77, 7-8-1932

The spirit which you love is always with you. The body through which you learned to love the spirit is no longer necessary for sustaining that love. It is well that it lasts whilst there is use for it. It is equally well that it perishes when there is no use for it. And since we don't know when it will outlast its use, we conclude that death through whatever cause means that there was no longer any use of it.

Bapu's Letters to Mira, p. 210, 20-9-1932

I have personally ceased for years to grieve over death at all. The shock is felt when a comrade is torn away from me, but that is purely due to personal attachment which in other words is selfishness. But I immediately recover and realize that death is a deliverance and has to be welcomed, even as a friend is welcomed, and that it means dissolution of the body, not of the indwelling spirit.

Selected Letters-II, p. 28, 24-11-1932

We are born only to die and we die only to be born again. This is all old argument. Yet it needs to be driven home. Somehow or other we refuse to welcome death as we welcome birth. We refuse to believe even the evidence of our senses, that we could not possibly have any attachment for the body without the soul and that we have no evidence whatsoever that the soul perishes with the body.

Bapu's Letters to Mira, p. 260, 4-5-1933

The frank admission of one's proved helplessness does not make one a coward but may be the beginning of bravery.

Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, p. 29, 19-6-1935

So long as God wants me to work on this earth in this body, He will take care of it. Not all the physicians in the world can save me, when the hour strikes.

Letters to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, p. 99, 16-10-1936

We die to live once more, even as we live only to die at last. Life therefore is not an occasion for joy nor death an occasion for sorrow. But there is one thing needful. We must ascertain our duty in life and continue to discharge it till we die.

Selected Letters-I, p. 18

To be afraid of death is like being afraid of discarding an old and worn out garment. I have often thought of death and have the intellectual conviction that it is sheer ignorance which makes us afraid of death.

Selected Letters-I, p. 24

I am engaged in my present activities as I look upon them as essential to life. If I have to face death while thus engaged, I shall face it with equanimity. I am now a stranger to fear.

Selected Letters-I, p. 32

"Death is but a sleep and a forgetting." This is such a sweet sleep that the body has not to awake again, and the dead load of memory is thrown overboard.

Death is an event to be celebrated and much more so than birth. For birth is preceded by nine months of life in a solitary cell and is also followed by much unhappiness. But death for some of us spells the attainment of the end of life. To qualify for such a death one should devote one's life to work done in a spirit of detachment.

Selected Letters-I, p. 49

1. A mystic Gujarati poet of the 17th century known for his satire; a devotee and vedantist.

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A History of Fearlessness

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23 Reading the following dictionary entry. Which definition most closely matches the use of the word clout in paragraph #3

Definition 1

Definition 2

Definition 3

Definition 4

24 Read this sentence from paragraph 16. In this sentence, the author is trying to show that Summitt --

frequently sought out opportunities to appear on television

was able to pick and choose which teams to play

took on a role in women's sports that went beyond coaching

compromised her standards occasionally

25 Why does the author end the article with a quotation?

To show how Pat Summitt will likely be remembered over time

To suggest that Pat Summitt's accomplishments may soon be eclipsed

To imply that female coaches will never win as many games as male coaches

To provide an opinion that differs from those expressed in the rest of the article

26 Which of these best summarizes the article?

Throughout her career, Pat Summitt has been an important figure in women’s sports. Although it was difficult for her to face the discrimination directed at female players and coaches, she managed to have successful seasons at the University of Tennessee.

The popularity of women’s sports today is largely the result of the enactment of Title IX in 1972. Before that, female athletes like Pat Summitt had little funding or support for their teams. Pat Summitt’s success is an example of how Title IX helped women athletes and

Although Pat Summitt had been a very successful basketball coach for many years, her primary accomplishment came after she developed Alzheimer’s disease. By refusing to hide her diagnosis from the public and vowing to continue coaching, she set a powerful example for others.

Through her determination to lead and succeed, Pat Summitt has become both a successful coach and an inspiration to female athletes. She applied the work ethic she learned as a child to her playing and coaching career, ultimately winning more games than any other college coach.

27 According to the author, Pat Summitt learning important lessons about how to face difficult circumstances from her time spent --

playing on the 1976 Olympic team

dealing with her Alzheimer's diagnosis

working on her family's farm

losing games as a new coach

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The History of Essay: Origin and Evolvement

These days, an essay is one of the key assignments at college. This particular task allows tutors to evaluate the student’s knowledge effectively. But it was not always a key assessment tool in the education sphere. So, when did an essay become so important for study purposes? And who invented the essay? According to Aldous Huxley, this particular literary piece can be used to describe almost everything. Essays have become very popular since the first day this type of paper was introduced. What is more, the first time the essay appeared in the far 16th century, it was a part of a self-portrayal done by Michel de Montaigne. The term essay was adopted from French “essayer”, which was adopted from Latin “exagere”. The last one means “to sort through”. In the far 16th century, the essay was mostly a form of a literary piece. Afterward, it has gained wider use in literature and study. It lost all its formality and has become quite a popular writing form. Besides, it has turned into quite a complicated study assignment. That is why many modern students need help writing an essay these days.

Difference Between Essay and Article

In contrast to an article that mostly has an informative purpose, an essay is more a literary paper. The “essay” concept can refer to practically any short piece of report or small composition. It can be a short story, some critical piece, etc. The essay differs from an article or other kinds of papers. Many prominent features distinguish essays from research papers, case studies, or reports. The essay paper has a standard structure in most cases. Sometimes, the layout can be a little bit creative. An article provides information on a certain topic. It has a mostly informative character and does not tend to deliver solutions or recommendations. Besides, it lacks a strict formatting style and outline. Still, it mostly refers to modern academic essays. In old times, essays had no defined format or structure. The origin of the essay does not affect its current usage. Now, it is an effective educational tool and one of the top college projects. Academic essays have an assigned structure and formatting style. You cannot ignore the provided requirements if you want to have a good grade. There are many strict rules to essays assigned at college. Students often check long tutorials to learn how to prepare a proper essay

Types of Essays and Its Characteristics

In the history of the essay, there were always different types of essays. First and foremost, essays were divided into formal and informal. Next, impersonal and familiar. Formal essays are mostly focused on the described topic. Informal essays are more personal and focused on the essayist.

Academic essays differ greatly with their wide variety of types and formats. You can count descriptive, argumentative, reflective, analytical, persuasive, narrative, expository essays’ types. The key types of academic essays include analytical, descriptive, persuasive, and critical.

Every of the mentioned types has its own essay format. They also differ by structure, length, main points to analyze, and purposes. In old times, writers were mostly concerned by the personal or impersonal tone of written composition. It takes more effort to learn all the types of academic essays these days. Besides, they all have a different focus and the final goal.

The most popular narrative essay is quite familiar to the one it was just a few centuries ago. In this paper, you tell the story and focus on a single idea. Such papers like argumentative or analytical essays are more like research papers. They require a thesis statement, strong arguments, and supporting evidence. You have to conduct research work. It is way more difficult than to tell a simple story. Still, even storytelling requires natural talents and a clever mind to be appreciated by readers.

Essay Evolvement and Modern Use

The essay history describes the way the traditional essay was turned into a decent educational tool. First, the essay was a typical literary form of expression. Authors were mostly concerned to share their point of view about some ideas or themselves in the composition. It gained more personal coloring than any other paper in years.

Since being parted from a self-portrayal, this particular piece was mostly essayist-focused originally. Afterward, once the essay writers have figured out it can describe particularly everything, an essay has gained wider use. Not every modern essay writer knows how the term “essay” was created. Still, modern writers face even bigger challenges with these particular kinds of written papers.

The key reasons include a set of strict rules and requirements for academic essays. They force writers to come up only with the most interesting and unique ideas. Also, they make writers prepare papers formatted due to an assigned formatting style only. Besides, many types of essays require strong analytical abilities.

An analytical essay is like a research paper. It also requires all the elements of a research piece. Thus, the ability to conduct proper research work and provide a complex analysis is mandatory for a modern author as well.

Final Thoughts

Preparing an essay can take a lot of time and great effort these days. With lots of complex requirements and difficult writing instructions, students often need outside writing essay help to succeed.

A modern essay differs greatly from the one it was in the far 16th century. In the first years, this particular writing form was introduced, it was a part of self-portrayal. In many following years, it turned into one of the most popular compositions and the top college assignment.

Nowadays, there is probably not a single student who has never dealt with an essay. Therefore, knowing how it was created and who introduced it to the world can be quite interesting and surely very informative for everyone. Knowing history helps to recognize yourself in the world better. Knowledge can always be quite a driving force for every person.

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Montaigne’s Essays : A Humanistic Approach to Fear

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