INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
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refers to the history of human thoughts in written form.
This history cannot be considered without the knowledge of the men and women who
created, discuss
ed, wrote about and in other ways were concerned with ideas
.
Intellectual historians aim
to understand ideas from the past
by understanding the ideas
in the time they were written.
It is important to realize that intellectual history is not just
the hist
ory of intellectuals. It studies ideas as they are expressed in texts, and as such is
different from other forms of cultural history which deal also with visual and other non
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verbal forms of evidence