History

History (from the Greek ἱστορία) is the discipline studying the record of past events, usually for the purpose of documenting them or examining and drawing conclusions and explanations for them. Events that happened to humans before writing was adopted are generally considered prehistory and are usually handled by archaeologists. This article discusses historiography--that is, the writing of history by scholars and specialists.

Source material

Historians, the writers of history, have always focused their attention on written sources documenting past events.

Advances in historical research capabilities and techniques allowed historians to examine a wider variety of written and non-written sources, such as literary sources, coins, inscriptions on buildings and monuments.

Historical research methods

The historical research method takes three distinct stages: gathering of source material, estimating the source material value to the issue at hand, and deciding what happened.

With the first stage, historians try to collect all the source material available. With the second, a decision is made as to the value of each source. Usually, primary sources, such as a manuscript written at the time of the events, is considered more valuable than a secondary (e.g., a book written by another historian) or tertiary (e.g., an encyclopaedia) source.

The third and most crucial stage involves writing down the historical narrative, as the historian understands it. This stage almost always involves some type of decision on the part of the historian as to the degree of veracity of some depiction of the historical narrative, and rejection or playing down of alternative narratives.

Some historians, most especially in ancient historical account, tend to lay out or summarily describe the various narrative or contentions and usually determine, explain or hint which is truer in their view. Other historians just mention when relating some facts or opinions that are point in contention among sources or other historians. With some points, where making such a decision is hard or impossible, some historians may leave the point undecided or speculate as to what actually happened.

Historical methods

The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history.

Ibn Khaldun laid down the principles for the historical method in his book Muqaddimah, but was lost to scholars and not rediscovered until the 19th century.

Historians of note who have advanced the historical methods of study include Leopold von Ranke, Lewis Bernstein Namier, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard and E.P. Thompson.

In the 20th century, historians avoided epic nationalistic narratives, favoring more specialized studies looking as social, economic, political or intellectual forces. French demographic historians introduced quantitative history, using broad data to track the lives of average groupings. Other French historians were prominent in the establishment of cultural history (cf. histoire des mentalités). In the U.S. "Progressive" historians following Frederick Jackson Turner emphasized the frontier and sectionalism, while those following Charles Beard and C. Vann Woodward looked for conflicts of economic interest. After 1950 intellectual history replaced the older Progressive models. After 1960 neoabolitionist historians inspired by the American civil rights movement emphasized moralistic stories, with racism as the evil that triumphed or was defeated. The "new social history" in the 1970s took a comprehensive approach to include every man, woman and child, often using census, court and tax records. After the 1970s postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. This approach came under blistering attack by historians such as Granatstein (1998) in Canada, and Windschuttle (2000) in Australia, leading to lively debates.

Value

Historians often claim that the study of history teaches valuable lessons with regard to past successes and failures of leaders, military strategy and tactics, economic systems, forms of government, and other recurring themes in the human story. From history we may learn factors that result in the rise and fall of nation-states or civilizations, as explored by Arnold Toynbee. Other historians have explored various political, economic, and social systems, and the effects of factors such as religion, disease, warfare, trade and technology.

One of the most famous quotations about history and the value of studying history, by the Spanish philosopher George Santayana, reads: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel remarked in his Philosophy of History that "What history and experience teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it." This was famously paraphrased by the Winston Churchill, who said "The one thing we have learned from history is that we don't learn from history."

An alternative view is that the forces of history are too great to be changed by human deliberation, or that, even if people do change the course of history, the movers and shakers of this world are usually too self-involved to stop to look at the big picture.

Yet another view is that history does not repeat itself because of the uniqueness of any given historical event. In this view, the specific combination of factors at any moment in time can never be repeated, and so knowledge about events in the past can not be directly and beneficially applied to the present.

Such contrasts with regard to "history's value" serve as examples of history as an outlet for intellectual debate, and indeed many, both in and outside of academia, would argue that at least part of history's value lies simply in its ability to provoke such discussion. In turn, this can be seen as cultivating further intellectual interest.

Methods and tools

• Historical revisionism: A new interpretation based not on new facts but on a new moral judgment, reversing the previous "orthodox" interpretation. Originally used to discuss who was "guilty" of starting World War I.

Particular studies and fields

• Big History: study of history on a large scale across long time frames through a multi-disciplinary approach.
• Cultural history: the study of culture in the past, or the use of cultural sources
• Demographic history, studies entire populations with census data and demographic models; emphasis on births, deaths, family structure and dynamic trends
• Diplomatic history: the study of international relations in the past.
• Economic History: the study of economic structures and behavior, especially with use of modern economic models
• Family history, studies the structure and behavior of ordinary families, with emphasis on the strategies for survival and success; includes studies of marriage, childhood, and old age; closely tied to demographic history
• Military History: The study of military practice and theory; wars and battles; technology; organization of armies, leadership and soldiers; also Naval History.
• Oral history: creating new information by structured interviews with participants
• Paleography: study of ancient texts.
• Political history: the study of political institutions, theories, leadership and practical politics.
• Psychohistory: study of the psychological motivations of historical actors, often with emphasis on childhood
• Quantitative history use of statistical data and methods, especially in demographic, economic and political history
  • Prosopography: the statistical or systematic collection of facts about all the individuals in a given leadership group.
• Science History - History of scientists and their theories
  • • History of Biology
    • History of Medicine
• Social History: the study of ordinary individuals
• World History: the study of history from a global perspective.

Bibliography

• Geoffrey Barraclough and Michael Burns. Main Trends in History, (1991) online edition
• Thomas Bender. ed. Rethinking American History in a Global Age (2002) online edition
• Ernst Breisach. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (2007)
• Michael Bentley. Modern Historiography: An Introduction. (1999) online edition
• Michael Bentley. Companion to Historiography (2003)
• Peter Burke. French Historical Revolution: The Annales School, 1929-89 (1991)
• Norman F. Cantor. Inventing the Middle Ages. (1993)
• Evans, Richard J.; In Defence of History; W. W. Norton (2000), ISBN 0-393-31959-8
• Eric Foner, ed. New American History (1997)
• J. L. Granatstein. Who Killed Canadian History? (1998). attacks postmodernism and new social history
• Antonia Gransden; Historical Writing in England: c.550-c.1307 (1996) online edition
• Richard Hofstadter. Progressive Historians: Turner Beard Parrington (1969)
• Georg G. Iggers. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (2005)
• Georg G. Iggers, New Directions in European Historiography (rev. edn, 1985).
• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (1988).
• Melvyn Stokes; The State of U.S. History (2002) online edition
• James Westfall Thompson and Bernard J. Holm; A History of Historical Writing (1942) vol 1: From the Earliest Times to the End of the Seventeenth Century online edition vol 2: 18th and 19th centuries online edition
• Q. Edward Wang and Georg G. Iggers, eds. Turning Points in Historiography: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. (2005)
• Keith Windschuttle. The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past. (2000), Australian critique. online edition
• Harvey Wish; The American Historian: A Social-intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past, (1960) online edition
• Olivier Zunz, ed. Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History, (1985) online edition