Definitions of the word history

This article is about the academic discipline. For a general history of human beings, see Human history. For other uses, see History (disambiguation).

History (derived from Ancient Greek ἱστορία (historía) ‘inquiry; knowledge acquired by investigation’)^[1] is the systematic study and documentation of human activity.^[2][3] The time period of events before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory.^[4] «History» is an umbrella term comprising past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of these events. Historians seek knowledge of the past using historical sources such as written documents, oral accounts, art and material artifacts, and ecological markers.^[5] History is not complete and still has debatable mysteries.

History is also an academic discipline which uses narrative to describe, examine, question, and analyze past events, and investigate their patterns of cause and effect.^[6][7] Historians often debate which narrative best explains an event, as well as the significance of different causes and effects. Historians also debate the nature of history as an end in itself, as well as its usefulness to give perspective on the problems of the present.^{[6][8][9][10]}

Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources (such as the tales surrounding King Arthur), are usually classified as cultural heritage or legends.^[11][12] History differs from myth in that it is supported by verifiable evidence. However, ancient cultural influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries and continue to change today. The modern study of history is wide-ranging, and includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematic elements of historical investigation. History is often taught as a part of primary and secondary education, and the academic study of history is a major discipline in university studies.

Herodotus, a 5th-century BC Greek historian, is often considered the «father of history» (as he was one of the first historians) in the Western tradition,^[13] although he has also been criticized as the «father of lies».^[14][15] Along with his contemporary Thucydides, he helped form the foundations for the modern study of past events and societies.^[16] Their works continue to be read today, and the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In East Asia, a state chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals, was reputed to date from as early as 722 BC, although only 2nd-century BC texts have survived.

Etymology

The word history comes from historía (Ancient Greek: ἱστορία, romanized: historíā, lit. ‘inquiry, knowledge from inquiry, or judge’^[17]). It was in that sense that Aristotle used the word in his History of Animals.^[18] The ancestor word ἵστωρ is attested early on in Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes’ oath, and in Boeotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either «judge» or «witness», or similar). The Greek word was borrowed into Classical Latin as historia, meaning «investigation, inquiry, research, account, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, story, narrative». History was borrowed from Latin (possibly via Old Irish or Old Welsh) into Old English as stær («history, narrative, story»), but this word fell out of use in the late Old English period.^[19] Meanwhile, as Latin became Old French (and Anglo-Norman), historia developed into forms such as istorie, estoire, and historie, with new developments in the meaning: «account of the events of a person’s life (beginning of the 12th century), chronicle, account of events as relevant to a group of people or people in general (1155), dramatic or pictorial representation of historical events (c. 1240), body of knowledge relative to human evolution, science (c. 1265), narrative of real or imaginary events, story (c. 1462)».^[19]

It was from Anglo-Norman that history was borrowed into Middle English, and this time the loan stuck. It appears in the 13th-century Ancrene Wisse, but seems to have become a common word in the late 14th century, with an early attestation appearing in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis of the 1390s (VI.1383): «I finde in a bok compiled | To this matiere an old histoire, | The which comth nou to mi memoire». In Middle English, the meaning of history was «story» in general. The restriction to the meaning «the branch of knowledge that deals with past events; the formal record or study of past events, esp. human affairs» arose in the mid-15th century.^[19] With the Renaissance, older senses of the word were revived, and it was in the Greek sense that Francis Bacon used the term in the late 16th century, when he wrote about natural history. For him, historia was «the knowledge of objects determined by space and time», that sort of knowledge provided by memory (while science was provided by reason, and poetry was provided by fantasy).^[20]

In an expression of the linguistic synthetic vs. analytic/isolating dichotomy, English like Chinese (史 vs. 诌) now designates separate words for human history and storytelling in general. In modern German, French, and most Germanic and Romance languages, which are solidly synthetic and highly inflected, the same word is still used to mean both «history» and «story». Historian in the sense of a «researcher of history» is attested from 1531. In all European languages, the substantive history is still used to mean both «what happened with men», and «the scholarly study of the happened», the latter sense sometimes distinguished with a capital letter, or the word historiography.^{[18][further explanation needed]} The adjective historical is attested from 1661, and historic from 1669.^[21]

Description

Historians write in the context of their own time, and with due regard to the current dominant ideas of how to interpret the past, and sometimes write to provide lessons for their own society. In the words of Benedetto Croce, «All history is contemporary history». History is facilitated by the formation of a «true discourse of past» through the production of narrative and analysis of past events relating to the human race.^[22] The modern discipline of history is dedicated to the institutional production of this discourse.

All events that are remembered and preserved in some authentic form constitute the historical record.^[23] The task of historical discourse is to identify the sources which can most usefully contribute to the production of accurate accounts of past. Therefore, the constitution of the historian’s archive is a result of circumscribing a more general archive by invalidating the usage of certain texts and documents (by falsifying their claims to represent the «true past»). Part of the historian’s role is to skillfully and objectively use the vast amount of sources from the past, most often found in the archives. The process of creating a narrative inevitably generates a silence as historians remember or emphasize different events of the past.^{[24][clarification needed]}

The study of history has sometimes been classified as part of the humanities and at other times as part of the social sciences.^[25] It can also be seen as a bridge between those two broad areas, incorporating methodologies from both. Some individual historians strongly support one or the other classification.^[26] In the 20th century the Annales school revolutionized the study of history, by using such outside disciplines as economics, sociology, and geography in the study of global history.^[27]

Traditionally, historians have recorded events of the past, either in writing or by passing on an oral tradition, and have attempted to answer historical questions through the study of written documents and oral accounts. From the beginning, historians have also used such sources as monuments, inscriptions, and pictures. In general, the sources of historical knowledge can be separated into three categories: what is written, what is said, and what is physically preserved, and historians often consult all three.^[28] But writing is the marker that separates history from what comes before.

Archeology is especially helpful in unearthing buried sites and objects, which contribute to the study of history. Archeological finds rarely stand alone, with narrative sources complementing its discoveries. Archeology’s methodologies and approaches are independent from the field of history. «Historical archaeology» is a specific branch of archeology which often contrasts its conclusions against those of contemporary textual sources. For example, Mark Leone, the excavator and interpreter of historical Annapolis, Maryland, US, has sought to understand the contradiction between textual documents idealizing «liberty» and the material record, demonstrating the possession of slaves and the inequalities of wealth made apparent by the study of the total historical environment.

There are varieties of ways in which history can be organized, including chronologically, culturally, territorially, and thematically. These divisions are not mutually exclusive, and significant intersections are often present. It is possible for historians to concern themselves with both the very specific and the very general, although the modern trend has been toward specialization. The area called Big History resists this specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. History has often been studied with some practical or theoretical aim, but also may be studied out of simple intellectual curiosity.^[29]

Prehistory

Human history is the memory of the past experience of Homo sapiens sapiens around the world, as that experience has been preserved, largely in written records. By «prehistory», historians mean the recovery of knowledge of the past in an area where no written records exist, or where the writing of a culture is not understood. By studying painting, drawings, carvings, and other artifacts, some information can be recovered even in the absence of a written record. Since the 20th century, the study of prehistory is considered essential to avoid history’s implicit exclusion of certain civilizations, such as those of Sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America. Historians in the West have been criticized for focusing disproportionately on the Western world.^[30] In 1961, British historian E. H. Carr wrote:

The line of demarcation between prehistoric and historical times is crossed when people cease to live only in the present, and become consciously interested both in their past and in their future. History begins with the handing down of tradition; and tradition means the carrying of the habits and lessons of the past into the future. Records of the past begin to be kept for the benefit of future generations.^[31]

This definition includes within the scope of history the strong interests of peoples, such as Indigenous Australians and New Zealand Māori in the past, and the oral records maintained and transmitted to succeeding generations, even before their contact with European civilization.

Historiography

Historiography has a number of related meanings.^[32] Firstly, it can refer to how history has been produced: the story of the development of methodology and practices (for example, the move from short-term biographical narrative toward long-term thematic analysis). Secondly, it can refer to what has been produced: a specific body of historical writing (for example, «medieval historiography during the 1960s» means «Works of medieval history written during the 1960s»).^[32] Thirdly, it may refer to why history is produced: the philosophy of history. As a meta-level analysis of descriptions of the past, this third conception can relate to the first two in that the analysis usually focuses on the narratives, interpretations, world view, use of evidence, or method of presentation of other historians. Professional historians also debate the question of whether history can be taught as a single coherent narrative or a series of competing narratives.^[33][34]

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.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 BC–c. 425 BC)^[35] has generally been acclaimed as the «father of history». However, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 460 BC–c. 400 BC) is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in his work the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as being the product of the choices and actions of human beings, and looked at cause and effect, rather than as the result of divine intervention (though Herodotus was not wholly committed to this idea himself).^[35] In his historical method, Thucydides emphasized chronology, a nominally neutral point of view, and that the human world was the result of the actions of human beings. Greek historians also viewed history as cyclical, with events regularly recurring.^[36]

There were historical traditions and sophisticated use of historical method in ancient and medieval China. The groundwork for professional historiography in East Asia was established by the Han dynasty court historian known as Sima Qian (145–90 BC), author of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji). For the quality of his written work, Sima Qian is posthumously known as the Father of Chinese historiography. Chinese historians of subsequent dynastic periods in China used his Shiji as the official format for historical texts, as well as for biographical literature.^{[citation needed]}

Saint Augustine was influential in Christian and Western thought at the beginning of the medieval period. Through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, history was often studied through a sacred or religious perspective. Around 1800, German philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought philosophy and a more secular approach in historical study.^[29]

In the preface to his book, the Muqaddimah (1377), the Arab historian and early sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, warned of seven mistakes that he thought that historians regularly committed. In this criticism, he approached the past as strange and in need of interpretation. The originality of Ibn Khaldun was to claim that the cultural difference of another age must govern the evaluation of relevant historical material, to distinguish the principles according to which it might be possible to attempt the evaluation, and lastly, to feel the need for experience, in addition to rational principles, in order to assess a culture of the past. Ibn Khaldun often criticized «idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data». As a result, he introduced a scientific method to the study of history, and he often referred to it as his «new science».^[37] His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history,^[38] and he is thus considered to be the «father of historiography»^[39]
[40] or the «father of the philosophy of history».^[41]

In the West, historians developed modern methods of historiography in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and Germany. In 1851, Herbert Spencer summarized these methods:

From the successive strata of our historical deposits, they [Historians] diligently gather all the highly colored fragments, pounce upon everything that is curious and sparkling and chuckle like children over their glittering acquisitions; meanwhile the rich veins of wisdom that ramify amidst this worthless debris, lie utterly neglected. Cumbrous volumes of rubbish are greedily accumulated, while those masses of rich ore, that should have been dug out, and from which golden truths might have been smelted, are left untaught and unsought^[42]

By the «rich ore» Spencer meant scientific theory of history. Meanwhile, Henry Thomas Buckle expressed a dream of history becoming one day science:

In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This have been done because men of ability and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought have studied events with the view of discovering their regularity, and if human events were subject to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results^[43]

Contrary to Buckle’s dream, the 19th-century historian with greatest influence on methods became Leopold von Ranke in Germany. He limited history to «what really happened» and by this directed the field further away from science. For Ranke, historical data should be collected carefully, examined objectively and put together with critical rigor. But these procedures «are merely the prerequisites and preliminaries of science. The heart of science is searching out order and regularity in the data being examined and in formulating generalizations or laws about them.»^[44]

As Historians like Ranke and many who followed him have pursued it, no, history is not a science. Thus if Historians tell us that, given the manner in which he practices his craft, it cannot be considered a science, we must take him at his word. If he is not doing science, then, whatever else he is doing, he is not doing science. The traditional Historian is thus no scientist and history, as conventionally practiced, is not a science.^[45]

In the 20th century, academic historians focused less on epic nationalistic narratives, which often tended to glorify the nation or great men, to more objective and complex analyses of social and intellectual forces. A major trend of historical methodology in the 20th century was a tendency to treat history more as a social science rather than as an art, which traditionally had been the case. Some of the leading advocates of history as a social science were a diverse collection of scholars which included Fernand Braudel, E. H. Carr, Fritz Fischer, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Bruce Trigger, Marc Bloch, Karl Dietrich Bracher, Peter Gay, Robert Fogel, Lucien Febvre, and Lawrence Stone. Many of the advocates of history as a social science were or are noted for their multidisciplinary approach. Braudel combined history with geography, Bracher history with political science, Fogel history with economics, Gay history with psychology, Trigger history with archeology, while Wehler, Bloch, Fischer, Stone, Febvre, and Le Roy Ladurie have in varying and differing ways amalgamated history with sociology, geography, anthropology, and economics. Nevertheless, these multidisciplinary approaches failed to produce a theory of history. So far only one theory of history came from the pen of a professional Historian.^[46] Whatever other theories of history we have, they were written by experts from other fields (for example, Marxian theory of history). More recently, the field of digital history has begun to address ways of using computer technology to pose new questions to historical data and generate digital scholarship.

In sincere opposition to the claims of history as a social science, historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper, John Lukacs, Donald Creighton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Gerhard Ritter argued that the key to the historians’ work was the power of the imagination, and hence contended that history should be understood as an art. French historians associated with the Annales School introduced quantitative history, using raw data to track the lives of typical individuals, and were prominent in the establishment of cultural history (cf. histoire des mentalités). Intellectual historians such as Herbert Butterfield, Ernst Nolte and George Mosse have argued for the significance of ideas in history. American historians, motivated by the civil rights era, focused on formerly overlooked ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. Another genre of social history to emerge in the post-WWII era was Alltagsgeschichte (History of Everyday Life). Scholars such as Martin Broszat, Ian Kershaw and Detlev Peukert sought to examine what everyday life was like for ordinary people in 20th-century Germany, especially in the Nazi period.

Marxist historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Rodney Hilton, Georges Lefebvre, Eugene Genovese, Isaac Deutscher, C. L. R. James, Timothy Mason, Herbert Aptheker, Arno J. Mayer, and Christopher Hill have sought to validate Karl Marx’s theories by analyzing history from a Marxist perspective. In response to the Marxist interpretation of history, historians such as François Furet, Richard Pipes, J. C. D. Clark, Roland Mousnier, Henry Ashby Turner, and Robert Conquest have offered anti-Marxist interpretations of history. Feminist historians such as Joan Wallach Scott, Claudia Koonz, Natalie Zemon Davis, Sheila Rowbotham, Gisela Bock, Gerda Lerner, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, and Lynn Hunt have argued for the importance of studying the experience of women in the past. In recent years, 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. In his 1997 book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans defended the worth of history. Another defense of history from postmodernist criticism was the Australian historian Keith Windschuttle’s 1994 book, The Killing of History.

Today, most historians begin their research process in the archives, on either a physical or digital platform. They often propose an argument and use their research to support it. John H. Arnold proposed that history is an argument, which creates the possibility of creating change.^[5] Digital information companies, such as Google, have sparked controversy over the role of internet censorship in information access.^[47]

Marxian theory

The Marxist theory of historical materialism theorises that society is fundamentally determined by the material conditions at any given time – in other words, the relationships which people have with each other in order to fulfill basic needs such as feeding, clothing and housing themselves and their families.^[48] Overall, Marx and Engels claimed to have identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.^[49] Marxist historiography was once orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, but since the collapse of communism there in 1991, Mikhail Krom says it has been reduced to the margins of scholarship.^[50]

Potential shortcomings in the production of history

Many historians believe that the production of history is embedded with bias because events and known facts in history can be interpreted in a variety of ways. Constantin Fasolt suggested that history is linked to politics by the practice of silence itself.^[51] He also said: «A second common view of the link between history and politics rests on the elementary observation that historians are often influenced by politics.»^[51] According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the historical process is rooted in the archives, therefore silences, or parts of history that are forgotten, may be an intentional part of a narrative strategy that dictates how areas of history are remembered.^[24] Historical omissions can occur in many ways and can have a profound effect on historical records. Information can also purposely be excluded or left out accidentally. Historians have coined multiple terms that describe the act of omitting historical information, including: «silencing»,^[24] «selective memory»,^[52] and erasures.^[53] Gerda Lerner, a twentieth century historian who focused much of her work on historical omissions involving women and their accomplishments, explained the negative impact that these omissions had on minority groups.^[52]

Environmental historian William Cronon proposed three ways to combat bias and ensure authentic and accurate narratives: narratives must not contradict known fact, they must make ecological sense (specifically for environmental history), and published work must be reviewed by scholarly community and other historians to ensure accountability.^[53]

Areas of study

Particular studies and fields

These are approaches to history; not listed are histories of other fields, such as history of science, history of mathematics and history of philosophy. Ancient history: the study of history from the beginning of human history until the Early Middle Ages. Atlantic history: the study of the history of people living on or near the Atlantic Ocean. Art history: the study of changes in and the social context of art. Comparative history: the historical analysis of social and cultural entities not confined to national boundaries. Contemporary history: the study of recent historical events. Counterfactual history: the study of historical events as they might have happened in different causal circumstances. Cultural history: the study of culture in the past. Digital history: the use of computing technologies to do massive searches in published sources. Economic history: the use of economic models fitted to the past. Intellectual history: the study of ideas in the context of the cultures that produced them and their development over time. Maritime history: the study of maritime transport and all connected subjects. Material history: the study of objects and the stories they can tell. Modern history: the study of Modern Times, the era after the Middle Ages. Military history: the study of warfare, historical wars, and Naval history, which is sometimes considered to be a sub-branch of military history. Oral history: the collection and study of historical information by utilizing spoken interviews with people who have lived past events. Palaeography: the study of ancient texts. People’s history: historical work from the perspective of common people. Political history: the study of politics in the past. Psychohistory: the study of the psychological motivations for historical events. Pseudohistory: studies about the past that fall outside the domain of mainstream history (sometimes equivalent to pseudoscience). Social history: the study of the process of social change throughout history. Women’s history: the history of female human beings. Gender history is related and covers the perspective of gender. World history: the study of history from a global perspective, with special attention to non-Western societies.

Periods

Historical study often focuses on events and developments that occur in particular blocks of time. Historians give these periods of time names in order to allow «organising ideas and classificatory generalisations» to be used by historians.^[54] The names given to a period can vary with geographical location, as can the dates of the beginning and end of a particular period. Centuries and decades are commonly used periods and the time they represent depends on the dating system used. Most periods are constructed retrospectively and so reflect value judgments made about the past. The way periods are constructed and the names given to them can affect the way they are viewed and studied.^[55]

Prehistoric periodization

The field of history generally leaves prehistory to archeologists, who have entirely different sets of tools and theories. In archeology, the usual method for periodization of the distant prehistoric past is to rely on changes in material culture and technology, such as the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, with subdivisions that are also based on different styles of material remains. Here prehistory is divided into a series of «chapters» so that periods in history could unfold not only in a relative chronology but also narrative chronology.^[56] This narrative content could be in the form of functional-economic interpretation. There are periodizations, however, that do not have this narrative aspect, relying largely on relative chronology, and that are thus devoid of any specific meaning.

Despite the development over recent decades of the ability through radiocarbon dating and other scientific methods to give actual dates for many sites or artefacts, these long-established schemes seem likely to remain in use. In many cases neighboring cultures with writing have left some history of cultures without it, which may be used. Periodization, however, is not viewed as a perfect framework, with one account explaining that «cultural changes do not conveniently start and stop (combinedly) at periodization boundaries» and that different trajectories of change need to be studied in their own right before they get intertwined with cultural phenomena.^[57]

Geographical locations

Particular geographical locations can form the basis of historical study, for example, continents, countries, and cities. Understanding why historic events took place is important. To do this, historians often turn to geography. According to Jules Michelet in his book Histoire de France (1833), «without geographical basis, the people, the makers of history, seem to be walking on air».^[58] Weather patterns, the water supply, and the landscape of a place all affect the lives of the people who live there. For example, to explain why the ancient Egyptians developed a successful civilization, studying the geography of Egypt is essential. Egyptian civilization was built on the banks of the Nile River, which flooded each year, depositing soil on its banks. The rich soil could help farmers grow enough crops to feed the people in the cities. That meant everyone did not have to farm, so some people could perform other jobs that helped develop the civilization. There is also the case of climate, which historians like Ellsworth Huntington and Ellen Churchill Semple cited as a crucial influence on the course of history. Huntington and Semple further argued that climate has an impact on racial temperament.^[59]

Regions

• History of Africa begins with the first emergence of modern human beings on the continent, continuing into its modern present as a patchwork of diverse and politically developing nation states.
• History of the Americas is the collective history of North and South America, including Central America and the Caribbean.
  • History of North America is the study of the past passed down from generation to generation on the continent in the Earth’s northern and western hemisphere.
  • History of Central America is the study of the past passed down from generation to generation on the continent in the Earth’s western hemisphere.
  • History of the Caribbean begins with the oldest evidence where 7,000-year-old remains have been found.
  • History of South America is the study of the past passed down from generation to generation on the continent in the Earth’s southern and western hemisphere.

• History of Antarctica emerges from early Western theories of a vast continent, known as Terra Australis, believed to exist in the far south of the globe.
• History of Eurasia is the collective history of several distinct peripheral coastal regions: the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, Southeast Asia, and Europe, linked by the interior mass of the Eurasian steppe of Central Asia and Eastern Europe.
  • History of Europe describes the passage of time from humans inhabiting the European continent to the present day.
  • History of Asia can be seen as the collective history of several distinct peripheral coastal regions, East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East linked by the interior mass of the Eurasian steppe.
    • History of East Asia is the study of the past passed down from generation to generation in East Asia.
    • History of the Middle East begins with the earliest civilizations in the region now known as the Middle East that were established around 3000 BC, in Mesopotamia (Iraq).
    • History of India is the study of the past passed down from generation to generation in the sub-Himalayan region.
    • History of Southeast Asia has been characterized as interaction between regional players and foreign powers.
• History of Oceania is the collective history of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.
  • History of Australia starts with the documentation of the Makassar trading with Indigenous Australians on Australia’s north coast.
  • History of New Zealand dates back at least 700 years to when it was discovered and settled by Polynesians, who developed a distinct Māori culture centered on kinship links and land.
  • History of the Pacific Islands covers the history of the islands in the Pacific Ocean.

Political

Political history covers the type of government, the branches of government, leaders, legislation, political activism, political parties, and voting.

Military

Military history concerns warfare, strategies, battles, weapons, and the psychology of combat.^[61] The «new military history» since the 1970s has been concerned with soldiers more than generals, with psychology more than tactics, and with the broader impact of warfare on society and culture.^[62]

Religious

The history of religion has been a main theme for both secular and religious historians for centuries, and continues to be taught in seminaries and academe. Leading journals include Church History, The Catholic Historical Review, and History of Religions. Topics range widely from political and cultural and artistic dimensions, to theology and liturgy.^[63] This subject studies religions from all regions and areas of the world where humans have lived.^[64]

Social history, sometimes called the new social history, is the field that includes history of ordinary people and their strategies and institutions for coping with life.^[65] In its «golden age» it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments. In two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%.^[66] In the history departments of British universities in 2007, of the 5723 faculty members, 1644 (29%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 1425 (25%).^[67] The «old» social history before the 1960s was a hodgepodge of topics without a central theme, and it often included political movements, like Populism, that were «social» in the sense of being outside the elite system. Social history was contrasted with political history, intellectual history and the history of great men. English historian G. M. Trevelyan saw it as the bridging point between economic and political history, reflecting that, «Without social history, economic history is barren and political history unintelligible.»^[68] While the field has often been viewed negatively as history with the politics left out, it has also been defended as «history with the people put back in».^[69]

Subfields

The chief subfields of social history include:

• Black history
• Demographic history
• Ethnic history
• Gender history
• History of childhood
• History of education
• History of the family
• Labor history
• LGBT history
• Rural history
• Urban history
  • American urban history
• Women’s history

Cultural

Cultural history replaced social history as the dominant form in the 1980s and 1990s. It typically combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at language, popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past knowledge, customs, and arts of a group of people. How peoples constructed their memory of the past is a major topic. Cultural history includes the study of art in society as well is the study of images and human visual production (iconography).^[70]

Diplomatic

Diplomatic history focuses on the relationships between nations, primarily regarding diplomacy and the causes of wars.^[71] More recently it looks at the causes of peace and human rights. It typically presents the viewpoints of the foreign office, and long-term strategic values, as the driving force of continuity and change in history. This type of political history is the study of the conduct of international relations between states or across state boundaries over time. Historian Muriel Chamberlain notes that after the First World War, «diplomatic history replaced constitutional history as the flagship of historical investigation, at once the most important, most exact and most sophisticated of historical studies».^[72] She adds that after 1945, the trend reversed, allowing social history to replace it.

Economic

Although economic history has been well established since the late 19th century, in recent years academic studies have shifted more and more toward economics departments and away from traditional history departments.^[73] Business history deals with the history of individual business organizations, business methods, government regulation, labour relations, and impact on society. It also includes biographies of individual companies, executives, and entrepreneurs. It is related to economic history. Business history is most often taught in business schools.^[74]

Environmental

Environmental history is a new field that emerged in the 1980s to look at the history of the environment, especially in the long run, and the impact of human activities upon it.^[75] It is an offshoot of the environmental movement, which was kickstarted by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s.

World

World history is the study of major civilizations over the last 3000 years or so. World history is primarily a teaching field, rather than a research field. It gained popularity in the United States,^[76] Japan^[77] and other countries after the 1980s with the realization that students need a broader exposure to the world as globalization proceeds.

It has led to highly controversial interpretations by Oswald Spengler and Arnold J. Toynbee, among others.

The World History Association publishes the Journal of World History every quarter since 1990.^[78] The H-World discussion list^[79] serves as a network of communication among practitioners of world history, with discussions among scholars, announcements, syllabi, bibliographies and book reviews.

People’s

A people’s history is a type of historical work which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective of common people. A people’s history is the history of the world that is the story of mass movements and of the outsiders. Individuals or groups not included in the past in other types of writing about history are the primary focus, which includes the disenfranchised, the oppressed, the poor, the nonconformists, and the otherwise forgotten people. The authors are typically on the left and have a socialist model in mind, as in the approach of the History Workshop movement in Britain in the 1960s.^[80]

Intellectual

Intellectual history and the history of ideas emerged in the mid-20th century, with the focus on the intellectuals and their books on the one hand, and on the other the study of ideas as disembodied objects with a career of their own.^[81][82]

Gender

Gender history is a subfield of History and Gender studies, which looks at the past from the perspective of gender. The outgrowth of gender history from women’s history stemmed from many non-feminist historians dismissing the importance of women in history. According to Joan W. Scott, «Gender is a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, and gender is a primary way of signifying relations of power»,^[83] meaning that gender historians study the social effects of perceived differences between the sexes and how all genders use allotted power in societal and political structures. Despite being a relatively new field, gender history has had a significant effect on the general study of history. Gender history traditionally differs from women’s history in its inclusion of all aspects of gender such as masculinity and femininity, and today’s gender history extends to include people who identify outside of that binary.
LGBT history deals with the first recorded instances of same-sex love and sexuality of ancient civilizations, and involves the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) peoples and cultures around the world.^[84]

Public

Public history describes the broad range of activities undertaken by people with some training in the discipline of history who are generally working outside of specialized academic settings. Public history practice has quite deep roots in the areas of historic preservation, archival science, oral history, museum curatorship, and other related fields. The term itself began to be used in the U.S. and Canada in the late 1970s, and the field has become increasingly professionalized since that time. Some of the most common settings for public history are museums, historic homes and historic sites, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, and all levels of government.^[85]

Historians

Professional and amateur historians discover, collect, organize, and present information about past events. They discover this information through archeological evidence, written primary sources, verbal stories or oral histories, and other archival material. In lists of historians, historians can be grouped by order of the historical period in which they were writing, which is not necessarily the same as the period in which they specialized. Chroniclers and annalists, though they are not historians in the true sense, are also frequently included.

Judgement

Since the 20th century, Western historians have disavowed the aspiration to provide the «judgement of history».^[86] The goals of historical judgements or interpretations are separate to those of legal judgements, that need to be formulated quickly after the events and be final.^[87] A related issue to that of the judgement of history is that of collective memory.

Pseudohistory

Pseudohistory is a term applied to texts which purport to be historical in nature but which depart from standard historiographical conventions in a way which undermines their conclusions. It is closely related to deceptive historical revisionism. Works which draw controversial conclusions from new, speculative, or disputed historical evidence, particularly in the fields of national, political, military, and religious affairs, are often rejected as pseudohistory.

Teaching

Scholarship vs teaching

A major intellectual battle took place in Britain in the early twentieth century regarding the place of history teaching in the universities. At Oxford and Cambridge, scholarship was downplayed. Professor Charles Harding Firth, Oxford’s Regius Professor of history in 1904 ridiculed the system as best suited to produce superficial journalists. The Oxford tutors, who had more votes than the professors, fought back in defense of their system saying that it successfully produced Britain’s outstanding statesmen, administrators, prelates, and diplomats, and that mission was as valuable as training scholars. The tutors dominated the debate until after the Second World War. It forced aspiring young scholars to teach at outlying schools, such as Manchester University, where Thomas Frederick Tout was professionalizing the History undergraduate programme by introducing the study of original sources and requiring the writing of a thesis.^[88][89]

In the United States, scholarship was concentrated at the major PhD-producing universities, while the large number of other colleges and universities focused on undergraduate teaching. A tendency in the 21st century was for the latter schools to increasingly demand scholarly productivity of their younger tenure-track faculty. Furthermore, universities have increasingly relied on inexpensive part-time adjuncts to do most of the classroom teaching.^[90]

Nationalism

From the origins of national school systems in the 19th century, the teaching of history to promote national sentiment has been a high priority. In the United States after World War I, a strong movement emerged at the university level to teach courses in Western Civilization, so as to give students a common heritage with Europe. In the U.S. after 1980, attention increasingly moved toward teaching world history or requiring students to take courses in non-western cultures, to prepare students for life in a globalized economy.^[91]

At the university level, historians debate the question of whether history belongs more to social science or to the humanities. Many view the field from both perspectives.

The teaching of history in French schools was influenced by the Nouvelle histoire as disseminated after the 1960s by Cahiers pédagogiques and Enseignement and other journals for teachers. Also influential was the Institut national de recherche et de documentation pédagogique, (INRDP). Joseph Leif, the Inspector-general of teacher training, said pupils children should learn about historians’ approaches as well as facts and dates. Louis François, Dean of the History/Geography group in the Inspectorate of National Education advised that teachers should provide historic documents and promote «active methods» which would give pupils «the immense happiness of discovery». Proponents said it was a reaction against the memorization of names and dates that characterized teaching and left the students bored. Traditionalists protested loudly it was a postmodern innovation that threatened to leave the youth ignorant of French patriotism and national identity.^[92]

Bias in school teaching

In several countries history textbooks are tools to foster nationalism and patriotism, and give students the official narrative about national enemies.^[93]

In many countries, history textbooks are sponsored by the national government and are written to put the national heritage in the most favorable light. For example, in Japan, mention of the Nanking Massacre has been removed from textbooks and the entire Second World War is given cursory treatment. Other countries have complained.^[94] Another example includes Turkey, where there is no mention of the Armenian Genocide in Turkish textbooks as a result of the denial of the genocide.^[95]

It was standard policy in communist countries to present only a rigid Marxist historiography.^[96][97]

In the United States, textbooks published by the same company often differ in content from state to state.^[98] An example of content that is represented different in different regions of the country is the history of the Southern states, where slavery and the American Civil War are treated as controversial topics. McGraw-Hill Education for example, was criticized for describing Africans brought to American plantations as «workers» instead of slaves in a textbook.^[99]

Academic historians have often fought against the politicization of the textbooks, sometimes with success.^[100][101]

In 21st-century Germany, the history curriculum is controlled by the 16 states, and is characterized not by superpatriotism but rather by an «almost pacifistic and deliberately unpatriotic undertone» and reflects «principles formulated by international organizations such as UNESCO or the Council of Europe, thus oriented towards human rights, democracy and peace.» The result is that «German textbooks usually downplay national pride and ambitions and aim to develop an understanding of citizenship centered on democracy, progress, human rights, peace, tolerance and Europeanness.»^[102]

See also

• Outline of history
• Glossary of history
•  History portal

References

Further reading

External links

• Official website of BestHistorySites
• Official website of BBC History
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project See also Internet History Sourcebooks Project (Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts for educational use)

Last Updated:
31 Mar 2023
— Updated example sentences

History is the study of the past – specifically the people, societies, events and problems of the past – as well as our attempts to understand them. It is a pursuit common to all human societies.

Stories, identity and context

History can take the form of a tremendous story, a rolling narrative filled with great personalities and tales of turmoil and triumph. Each generation adds its own chapters to history while reinterpreting and finding new things in those chapters already written.

History provides us with a sense of identity. By understanding where we have come from, we can better understand who we are. History provides a sense of context for our lives and our existence. It helps us understand the way things are and how we might approach the future.

History teaches us what it means to be human, highlighting the great achievements and disastrous errors of the human race. History also teaches us through example, offering hints about how we can better organise and manage our societies for the benefit of all.

‘History’ and ‘the past’

Those new to studying history often think history and the past are the same thing. This is not the case. The past refers to an earlier time, the people and societies who inhabited it and the events that took place there. History describes our attempts to research, study and explain the past.

This is a subtle difference but an important one. What happened in the past is fixed in time and cannot be changed. In contrast, history changes regularly. The past is concrete and unchangeable but history is an ongoing conversation about the past and its meaning.

The word “history” and the English word “story” both originate from the Latin historia, meaning a narrative or account of past events. History is itself a collection of thousands of stories about the past, told by many different people.

Revision and historiography

Because there are so many of these stories, they are often variable, contradictory and conflicting. This means history is subject to constant revision and reinterpretation. Each generation looks at the past through its own eyes. It applies different standards, priorities and values and reaches different conclusions about the past.

The study of how history differs and has changed over time is called historiography.

Like historical narratives themselves, our understanding of what history is and the shape it should take is flexible and open to debate. For as long as people have studied history, historians have presented different ideas about how the past should be studied, constructed, written and interpreted.

As a consequence, historians may approach history in different ways, using different ideas and methods and focusing on or prioritising different aspects. The following paragraphs discuss several popular theories of history.

The study of great individuals

According to the ancient Greek writer Plutarch, true history is the study of great leaders and innovators. Prominent individuals shape the course of history through their personality, their strength of character, ambition, abilities, leadership or creativity.

Plutarch’s histories were written almost as biographies or ‘life-and-times’ stories of these individuals. They explained how the actions of these great figures shaped the course of their nations or societies.

Plutarch’s approach served as a model for many later historians. It is sometimes referred to as ‘top-down’ history because of its focus on rulers or leaders. 

One advantage of this approach is its accessibility and relative ease. Researching and writing about individuals is less difficult than investigating more complex factors, such as social movements or long-term changes. The Plutarchian focus on individuals is often more interesting and accessible to readers.

The main problem with this approach is that it might sidestep, simplify or overlook historical factors and conditions that do not emanate from important individuals, such as popular unrest or economic changes.

The study of ‘winds of change’

Other historians have focused less on individuals and taken a more thematic approach, looking at factors and forces that produce significant historical change. Some focus on what might broadly be described as the ‘winds of change’: powerful ideas, forces and movements that shape or affect how people live, work and think.

These great ideas and movements are often initiated or driven by influential people – but they become much larger forces for change. As the ‘winds of change’ grow, they shape or influence political, economic and social events and conditions.

One example of a notable ‘wind of change’ was Christianity, which shaped government, society and social customs in medieval Europe. Another was the European Enlightenment that undermined old ideas about politics, religion and the natural world. This triggered a long period of curiosity, education and innovation.

Marxism emerged in the late 19th century and grew to challenge the old order in Russia, China and elsewhere, shaping government and society in those nations. The Age of Exploration, the Industrial Revolution, decolonisation in the mid-1900s and the winding back of eastern European communism in the late-1900s are all tangible examples of the ‘winds of change’.

The study of challenge and response

Some historians, such as British writer Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), believed historical change is driven by challenges and responses. Civilisations are defined not just by their leadership or conditions but by how they respond to difficult problems or crises.

These challenges take many forms. They can be physical, environmental, economic or ideological. They can derive from internal pressures or external factors. They can come from their own people or from outsiders.

The survival and success of civilisations are determined by how they respond to these challenges. This itself often depends on its people and how creative, resourceful, adaptable and flexible they are.

Human history is filled with many tangible examples of challenge and response. Many nations have been confronted with powerful rivals, wars, natural disasters, economic slumps, new ideas, emerging political movements and internal dissent.

The process of colonisation, for example, involved major challenges, both for colonising settlers and native inhabitants. Economic changes, such as new technologies and increases or decreases in trade, have created challenges in the form of social changes or class tensions.

The study of dialectics

In philosophy, dialectics is a process where two or more parties with vastly different viewpoints reach a compromise and mutual agreement. The theory of dialectics was applied to history by German philosopher Georg Hegel (1770-1831).

Hegel suggested that most historical changes and outcomes were driven by dialectic interaction. According to Hegel, for every thesis (a proposition or ‘idea’) there exists an antithesis (a reaction or ‘opposite idea’). The thesis and antithesis encounter or struggle, from which emerges a synthesis (a ‘new idea’).

This ongoing process of struggle and development reveals new ideas and new truths to humanity. The German philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a student of Hegel and incorporated the Hegelian dialectic into his own theory of history – but with one important distinction.

According to Marx, history was shaped by the ‘material dialectic’: the struggle between economic classes. Marx believed the ownership of capital and wealth underpinned most social structures and interactions. All classes struggle and push to improve their economic conditions, Marx wrote, usually at the expense of other classes.

Marx’s material dialectic was reflected in his stinging criticisms of capitalism, a political and economic system where the capital-owning classes control production and exploit the worker, in order to maximise their profits.

The study of the unexpected

Some historians believe history is shaped by the accidental and the surprising, the spontaneous and the unexpected.

While history and historical change usually follow patterns, they can also be unpredictable and chaotic. Despite our fascination with timelines and linear progression, history does not always follow a clear and expected path. The past is filled with unexpected incidents, surprises and accidental discoveries.

Some of these have unleashed historical forces and changes that could not be predicted, controlled or stopped. A few have come at pivotal times and served as the ignition or ‘flashpoint’ for changes of great significance. The discovery of gold, for example, has triggered gold rushes that shaped the future of entire nations. 

In June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s car took a different route through Sarajevo and passed an aimless Gavrilo Princip, a confluence of events that led to World War I.

American historian Daniel Boorstin (1914-2004), an exponent of this fascination with historical accidents, claimed that if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter, thus diminishing her beauty, then the history of the world might have been radically different.

Citation information
Title: “What is history?”
Authors: Jennifer Llewellyn, Steve Thompson
Publisher: Alpha History
URL: https://alphahistory.com/what-is-history/
Date published: March 1, 2020
Date accessed: March 11, 2023
Copyright: Content on this page may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use.

History is a word of multiple meanings, all related to the past. When used as the name of a field of study, history traditionally refers to the study and interpretation of the written record of past human activity, people, societies, and civilizations leading up to the present day. More broadly, as explained in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, «history in the wider sense is all that has happened, not merely all the phenomena of human life, but those of the natural world as well. It is everything that undergoes change; and as modern science has shown that there is nothing absolutely static, therefore, the whole universe, and every part of it, has its history.»
The term history comes from the Greek historia (ἱστορία), «an account of one’s inquiries,» and shares that etymology with the English word story.

When considering history as an academic field of study, knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills. This includes analysis and interpretation of historical accounts (thinking about history), not just the learning of dates and names (knowing history). It involves asking whether alternative accounts might tell a different story, or whether the account contains any bias.

Traditionally, the study of history has been considered a part of the humanities, alongside a subject such as literature. However, in modern academia, history is increasingly classified as a social science, especially when chronology is the focus.

Events occurring before the introduction of the earliest known written and historical records, (which includes more than 99 percent of the time humans have existed) are described as prehistory, a period informed by the fields of paleontology and archaeology. In cultures where written records did not appear until more recent times, oral tradition is used, and even in cultures where written records are common, many historians supplement the written records with oral history. The history of, say, the Australian aborigines is almost all drawn from oral sources.

Thinkers differ as to whether the events of history are entirely arbitrary or whether history possesses an overall organizing theme, meaning, direction, or end. They also differ about the extent to which human beings individually or collectively can purposefully influence the direction of history. For people who sense their responsibility to history, the study of the past can disclose lessons for the present.

Etymology

The term history entered the English language in 1390, with the meaning of «relation of incidents, story» via the Old French historie, from Latin historia, «narrative, account.» This itself was derived from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, historía, meaning «a learning or knowing by inquiry, history, record, narrative,» from the verb ἱστορεῖν, historeîn, «to inquire.»

This, in turn, was derived from ἵστωρ, hístōr («wise man,» «witness,» or «judge»). Early attestations of ἵστωρ are from the Homeric Hymns, Heraclitus, the Athenian ephebes’ oath, and from Boiotic inscriptions (in a legal sense, either «judge» or «witness,» or similar). The spirant is problematic, and not present in cognate Greek eídomai («to appear»).

ἵστωρ is ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European language *wid-tor-, from the root *weid- («to know, to see»), also present in the English word wit, the Latin words vision and video, the Sanskrit word veda the Welsh word gwynn, and the Slavic word videti, as well as others. ‘ἱστορία, historía, is an Ionic derivation of the word, which with Ionic science and philosophy were spread first in Classical Greece and ultimately over all of Hellenism.

In Middle English, the meaning was «story» in general. The restriction to the meaning «record of past events» in the sense of Herodotus arises in the late fifteenth century (interestingly, in German, this distinction was never made, and the modern German word «Geschichte» means both history and story). A sense of «systematic account» without a reference to time in particular was current in the sixteenth century, but is now obsolete. The adjective historical is attested from 1561 and historic from 1669. Historian in the sense of a «researcher of history» in a higher sense than that of an annalist or chronicler, who merely record events as they occur, is attested from 1531.

Historical records

Historians obtain information about the past from different kinds of sources, including written or printed records, coins or other artifacts, buildings and monuments, and interviews (oral history). For modern history, photographs, audio recordings, and motion pictures may be primary sources. Different approaches may be more common in the study of some periods than in others, and perspectives of history (historiography) vary widely.

Historical records have been maintained for a variety of reasons, including administration (such as censuses and tax records), politics (glorification or criticism of leaders and notable figures), religion, art, records of sporting events (notably the Olympics), an interest in genealogy, personal letters, and entertainment.

Historical methods

Historians of note who have advanced the historical methods of study include Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960), Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1921-1994), G.M. Trevelyan (1876-1962), and A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990).

Von Ranke believed that the historian could “penetrate to a kind of intuitive feeling of the inner being of the past,” to what history “essentially was [like]” (wie es eigentlich gewesen). He also argued that the past has to be seen in its own terms; one must not judge “the past … by the standards of the present” (Evans 2000, 14-15).

Elton (an admirer of Churchill) was a fierce critic of postmodernism and disliked the multi-disciplinary approach to historical reconstruction that used sociology or anthropology as critical tools. He disliked the use of history for philosophical or political purposes, such as Marxism (Marxists misused history to prove their philosophy).

Taylor was sympathetic to Marxism, supported the Anti-Nuclear movement and did read meaning into history. He thought that accidents more often than not make history and leaders react to these rather than initiate. History is full of blunders. Taylor believed that capitalism was basically immoral and an obstacle to the creation of a just world order. He wanted government to be more open and allow greater access to documents and archives. In recent years, 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.

Historiography

Historiography is the study and analysis of history through a belief system or philosophy. Although there is arguably some intrinsic bias in historical studies (with national bias perhaps being the most significant), history can also be studied from ideological perspectives, such as Marxist historiography or as religions teach, from the perspective of a supervising providence that nonetheless also recognizes human freedom to act. The Indus Valley Civilization offers examples of what is called identity or cultural politics when alternative accounts of history are offered to counter the allegation of bias (Euro-centric in this case). The article on Cleopatra also discusses this issue.

A form of historical speculation known commonly as virtual history («counterfactual history») has also been adopted by some historians as a means of assessing and exploring the possible outcomes if certain events had not occurred or had occurred in a different way. This is somewhat similar to the alternative history genre of fiction.

Objectivity

Some people have criticized historical study, saying that it tends to be too narrowly focused on political events, armed conflicts, and famous people. Deeper and more significant changes in terms of ideas, technology, family life, and culture have received too little attention. Recent developments in history have sought to redress this. Others point out that history is too often just that, «his» story rather than «her» story and that the stories, lives, and achievements of women have been left out. Some point out that history is rather like a form of fiction, except that fiction makes people up while history uses characters that really did live. Contemporary approaches to history that ask such questions as “who wrote this account, in whose interests, and whose voices are silent?” challenge the traditional view that history presents «objective facts» and encourage people to challenge the type of omniscient, third person voice that claims to relate exactly what happened.

Historians may or may not choose to ask moral questions about history, or to derive moral lessons from historical accounts. History is often regarded as a neutral, objective, factual discipline. However, the questions that historiography asks about the bias of sources raises the issue whether complete objectivity is possible. Historians who write from various ideological perspectives will derive from history whatever they need to prove or to confirm their theories about history. For example, a Marxist account will show how the dialectic process of competition between classes explains such an event as the French Revolution. Alternatively, accounts based on the premise that history is a theater within which the good and the bad struggle for victory and that the end of history is overseen by a divine reality will interpret historical events as examples of movement toward or away from the divine purpose. Those who advocate such a view of history will evaluate as inadequate those accounts of history that refrain from moral censure of immoral behavior or that regard every historical event as human action, ignoring the possibility of divine action.

In defense of history

In his book In Defense of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. Until recently, history was thought to be a quite straightforward affair of recording facts. Texts, written by University-based scholars, were regarded as reliable. Owning history, however, has become something of a battleground, especially for those with ideological agendas that arguably include most people who set out to record history. The issue of ownership of history is found in such names as Black history, feminist history, and Marxist history. In the Middle East (and in many other territorially contested areas in the world), the most contested arena concerns who has the right to interpret the history of the region. In this example, Jews and Arabs tell very different stories about the creation of the State of Israel and about the subsequent history of the Palestinian people (Bennett 2005, 209-218).

What scholars call revisionist history, or the re-writing of history, can uncover bias and assumptions of racial superiority, and it can as well make all European explorers and missionaries into imperialists and capitalists, whether they were or not. Freedom from bias of any type may be impossible to achieve in historical reconstruction. The attempt to write less biased history is often seen to depend on conducting historical research by reading as many different accounts as possible, ideally by a wide a range of writers, including women as well as men, by the conquered as well as the conquerors, by dissidents as well as those who occupy the seats of power, so that a holistic picture can emerge. This may be the overriding moral responsibility of the serious and fair-minded historian, but achieving a balanced multiplicity of such sources may itself not be possible as those in dominance positions historically have tended to dominate the written record as well. Nonetheless, many historians today recognize multi-vocality as one goal of any historical reconstruction and one standard being that of open declaration of any agenda that a scholar may have, such as to question traditional accounts or to retrieve hidden or silenced voices.

The critical paradigm in scholarship can properly be used to right wrongs but the critical scholar should also be aware that two wrongs do not make a right. For example, uncovering the fact that Africans also profited from the slave trade and engaged in slavery cannot be used to get the European slavers off the moral hook. The contention that we can never write other people’s history, too, is overly pessimistic and even dangerous, since if we can only know and write about our own cultures or histories there is no chance of inter-cultural or inter-racial harmony. Evans (2000) suggests that while “it is right and proper that postmodern theorists and critics should force historians to rethink the categories and assumptions with which they work,” we “really can, if we are very scrupulous and careful and self-critical, find out ‘about the past’ and reach some tenable conclusions about what it meant” (220). The accuracy of an historian’s account, he suggests, will in large measure depend upon that historian’s honesty, and “desire to produce a true, fair and accurate account of the subject under consideration” fully recognizing the “limits…[that the] facts of history and the sources which reveal them … place on the historical imagination.”

Similarly, Oxford scholar Albert Hourani (1915-1993) defended Orientalist (Western) scholarship of the non-Western world. Edward Said (1935-2003) heavily criticized this view in his 1978 Orientalism as a dialectic of “knowledge and control” that belittled the non-Westerner as only worthy of domination by the West. Hourani argued that despite mistakes and bias, “a hundred years of study of these matters have produced a body of work which cannot be regarded as badly done” (1979: 29). Hourani accepted much of Said’s criticism, but warned against a blanket condemnation of Western scholarship.

Specialized and universal histories

Because history is such a large subject, most historical studies have specialized on a particular subject. Treatments of historical information may be

• Chronological (by date)
• Geographical (by region)
• National (by nation)
• Ethnic (by ethnic group)
• Topical (by subject or topic)

Several writers, such as H.G. Wells (his Short History of the World, 1922) and Will and Ariel Durant (Story of Civilization, 1993), have written universal histories. Most notable among them was Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975), who combined philosophy and history in his twelve volume A Study of History(1946; 1987), which traced out universal rhythms of the rise, flowering, and decline of civilizations. Toynbee focused on civilizations and on the challenges that they faced and on how they responded, suggesting that when they responded creatively they flourished, when they failed to respond, they fell. Civilizations usually kill themselves, he argued (1987: 262). He pioneered the «comparative study of civilization» (also called the «cultural-historical» school). He believed that world history could be studied by investigating 21 civilizations in 16 regions, and that a family relationship existed between civilizations in a given region (mother-daughter, or affiliated civilizations). Some civilizations were aborted, some were «arrested» in development, but he did not (unlike others) attribute this to racial characteristics (51). Toynbee thought that environmental factors caused certain civilizations to decline or stall while stimulation from outside and inter-cultural contact resulted in dynamic growth, as could imitation. The creative genius benefits from contact with other cultures. Civilizations emerge from primitive societies when transition occurs from “a static condition to a dynamic condition” (50), and this response to stimulus is a universal norm:

The genesis of all civilizations—the unrelated and the related class alike—could be described in the phrase of General Smuts, «Mankind is once more on the move.»

Philosophers have regarded this alternating rhythm of static and dynamic, of movement and pause in many different ages, as something fundamental in the nature of the Universe (51).

The lessons of history

In addition to being an interesting topic of study in its own right, historians often claim that the study of history teaches valuable lessons with regard to past successes and failures of leaders, economic systems, forms of government, and other recurring themes in the human story. One may learn from history factors that result in the rise and fall of nation-states or civilizations, motivations for political actions, the effects of social philosophies, and perspectives on culture and technology.

Many historiographies regard the study of history as having a moral purpose. They reject the idea that history or life is just «one damn thing after another,» as Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) famously put it. They aim to prevent the second part of Millay’s phrase, «it is one damn thing over and over,» by learning lessons. The Roman scholar and Senator, Marcus Tullius Cicero (c. 50 B.C.E.), is cited as having said, «To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?» One of the most famous quotations about history and the value of studying history by Spanish philosopher George Santayana, reads: «Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.»

Others express skepticism about the ability to learn lessons from history. 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 British Prime Minister, statesman, and Nobel Prize-winning author of A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill into: «The one thing we have learned from history is that we don’t learn from history.» Churchill himself wrote his historical works in the main from the perspective of having helped to make the history, about which he wrote: «As far as [he was] able, the method of Defoe’s Memoirs of a Cavalier, in which the author hangs the chronicle and discussion of great military and political events upon the thread of the personal experiences of an individual» (1986: xiii). History, for Churchill, was a branch of moral philosophy, and his motto was, «In War, Resolution; In Defeat, Defiance; In Victory, Magnamity; in Peace, Goodwill» (x).

The directionality of history

Many thinkers maintain that the totality of human history, in spite of the apparent arbitrariness of various historical events, possesses a large organizing theme, meaning, or direction. Of course, efforts to find meaning or direction in history have been criticized by thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze, who claim that it is a grave mistake to look for meaning where none can exist, because history is best characterized by discontinuities, ruptures, and various time-scales. But, many, in spite of the diversity of their religious, philosophical, and ideological backgrounds, have been much interested in finding the directionality of history. They can be put under three distinguishable categories: Theological, «metahistorical,» and progressivist interpretations.

On the other hand, skepticism about being able to learn lessons from history is sometime related to the view 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 cannot be directly and beneficially applied to the present. This approach is challenged in less metahistorical terms with the notion that historical lessons can and should be drawn from events, and that careful generalizations of unique events is useful. For example, emergency response to natural disasters can be improved, even though each individual disaster is, in itself, absolutely unique.

Theological interpretation

This approach falls in the area of theodicy or eschatology. It finds the end of history in divine will and relates to all historical events in terms of that end. It explains the problem of evil seen in the tragedies of history as compatible with the will of a God of benevolence that is to be realized at the end of history. The monotheistic traditions usually take this approach, having a linear theory of history. A classic example of this is St. Augustine’s view that the City of God (Civitas Dei) will be realized in heaven after many struggles between good and evil in history. Leibniz’s Théodicée (1710) was meant to directly address the problem of evil in history in light of divinely ordained plan. A little more philosophical and secular version of this approach would be Hegel’s philosophy of history which regards history as the dialectical process whereby the Absolute Spirit continues to unfold itself until the end, at which its complete unfolding is realized, and according to Hegel, its concrete realization was the Prussian state.

Metahistorical interpretation

The metahistorical interpretation consists in efforts to find historical patterns and generalities beyond history. Metahistorians such as Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee saw history in terms of these general patterns according to which civilizations rise and fall. In his famous The Decline of the West (1918-1922), Spengler maintained that all cultures coming from religions go through a life cycle like that of an organic evolution, from birth to maturation, and to inevitable decline, and that Western culture has already entered its last stage of decline. More optimistic than Spengler’s cyclical view is Toynbee’s insightful assertion that each cycle in history might make creative developments centering on a goal. In his A Study of History (1914-1961), Toynbee studied twenty-one or so civilizations in terms of genesis, growth, breakdown, and disintegration in the same manner as Spengler, but Toynbee added that if civilizations creatively respond to challenges, they can survive disintegration; that only four are seen to have survived disintegration so far: Christianity, Mahayana Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam; and that a syncretistic faith composed of these higher religions replaces the civilization in the world.

Progressivist interpretation

Enlightenment thinkers rejected any religious and theological interpretation of history centering on divine will but brought in their own humanistic version of teleology, saying that human nature will progress to the point of perfectibility. In his The Education of Humankind (1780), Lessing proposed three stages of human progress: Old Testament Age (the age of infancy), New Testament Age (the age of childhood), and the eighteenth century (the age of mature adulthood). This progressivist approach can be seen also in Condorect’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762). Adam Smith applied some of this optimism of human nature to his account of the unfolding of modern European economic system in his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Loosely connected to the Enlightenment tradition because of its humanistic, non-theological, and materialist stance was Karl Marx’s historical materialism, which predicted the coming of a classless utopia in history, although Marx’s approach came largely from the Hegelian dialectic after turning Hegel’s absolute idealism upside down. Marx’s thesis that the dialectical struggle is the reason for historical progress is notable, because for many Enlightenment thinkers the reason for progress was not very clear. An interesting outcome of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition is Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), although its conclusion is entirely opposite to that of Marx because it argues that when the Cold War ended, the progression of history reached its end where the world settled on liberal democracy.

Historical determinism vs. humans as history-makers

When the directionality of history is discussed, a question naturally arises: Does such an analysis imply that history is deterministic, giving no room for human responsibility to contribute to the future course of history? Spengler’s metahistorical interpretation seems basically deterministic and fatalistic, while Toynbee’s has some room for human responsibility when it says that civilizations can creatively respond to challenges in order to survive disintegration. The Enlightenment theory of progress also looks largely deterministic when it talks about the irreversible necessity of progress, but that can hardly be reconciled with the Enlightenment’s other important tenet that human beings are autonomous. It may be that after humans reach the point of autonomous maturity, determinism no longer obtains. Marx’s historical materialism is deterministic because of its dialectical necessity, although Marx modified it by saying: «Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.» Some call it «parametric determinism.»

When it comes to theological interpretations of the directionality of history, one can find a variety of positions: From Calvinist predestinarianism to Christian indeterminism. But one point common to all religious interpretations is that any free will humans have is given from God, who with his will is behind history. Based on this notion, most positions tend to believe that while history witnesses divine intervention, humans are supposed to respond to it, so that divine purpose may be realized through divine-human encounter. Augustine’s treatment of God’s cooperative grace (gratia cooperans) as cooperative with the human will in the more mature stage of human growth constituted the basic Catholic understanding of the unity of God’s will and the human will. For Methodists, who are Arminians to a considerable degree, the cooperation between God and humans is possible because of «synergism.» Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal also secured room for human responsibility in front of God. During the Great Awakening in America from around 1730 to 1760, its main revivalist Jonathan Edwards with Puritan heritage gave his postmillenarian message, encouraging people to take active responsibility morally and socially, that Christ might return.

Useful terms and definitions

• Historian: A person who studies history
• Pseudohistory: Term for information about the past that falls outside the domain of mainstream history (sometimes it is an equivalent of pseudoscience)

Methods and tools

• Contemporaneous corroboration: A method historians use to establish facts beyond their limited lifespan
• Prosopography: A methodological tool for the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period
• Periodization: The attempt to categorize or divide historical time into discrete named blocks
• Historical revisionism: Traditionally has been used in a completely neutral sense to describe the work or ideas of a historian who has revised a previously accepted view of a particular topic. Sometimes this can be ideologically driven, for example, to perpetuate racist attitudes or anti-Semitism by denying that the Holocaust happened or by depicting a history of religious and racial harmony as one of division and conflict. It can also be an attempt to tell an alternative story, for example, from the point of view of women, the conquered, or dissidents. A history of the Ottoman Empire, for example, might stress that religious minorities fared comparatively well (compared with how minorities were treated in Europe) or it might stress the disadvantages and restrictions that non-Muslims experienced.

Particular studies and fields

• Historical Anthropology: Traditionally, anthropologists researched societies that did not possess written records and were disinterested in history, attempting to record a snap-shot of a particular society at a specific point in time. However, increasingly anthropologists have used textual material to supplement fieldwork, for example, to study how culture changes over time. This has resulted in an approach called Historical Anthropology, of which Charles Lindholme’s work is an example. His The Islamic Middle East: An Anthropological History (1996) uses anthropological theory to investigate what was going on behind official accounts. This type of research is less interested in the grand narratives of history, more in how local people lived their lives, often pursuing interests out-of-sympathy with what was officially approved.
• Archaeology: Study of prehistoric and historic human cultures through the recovery, documentation and analysis of material remains and environmental data
• Archontology: Study of historical offices and important positions in state, international, political, religious and other organizations and societies
• Futurology: Study of the future: researches the medium to long-term future of societies and of the physical world. Some religious or providential understandings of, and writing about, history engage in futurology in that they foretell what is going to happen or predict what might happen in certain circumstances.
• History painter: Painters of historical motifs and particularly the great events
• Paleography: Study of ancient texts. Much of what we know about Ancient Egypt, for example, is due to paleography
• Psychohistory: Study of the psychological motivations of historical events. This methodology asks questions about why people did what they did. It explains historical events in terms of the personality types of those who can be said to make history.
• Human evolution: Process of change and development, or evolution, by which human beings emerged as distinct species. Some believe that evolution remains the key to understanding human progress. That is, our survival instinct drives us to scientific and technological discovery and to try to control the environment, which causes historical events to occur. Some think that war and planetary collapse will eventually be avoided because of this instinct to survive.
• Social change: Changes in the nature, the social institutions, the social behavior, or the social relations of a society or community of people

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bennett, Clinton. 2005. Muslims and Modernity: An Introduction to the Issues and Debates. London: Continuum. ISBN 082645481X.
• Churchill, Winston S. 1948. The Gathering Storm: History of the Second World War. New York: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, 1986. ISBN 039541055 X.
• Evans, Richard J. 2000. In Defense of History. New York: W. W. Norton and Co. ISBN 0393319598.
• Hourani, Albert. “On the Road to Morocco.” New York Review of Books March 1979: 27-30.
• Lindholme, Charles. 1996. The Islamic Middle East: An Anthropological History. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 1557864217.
• Mernissi, Fatima. 1994. Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World (trans. by Mary Jo Lakeland). Cambridge: Perseous Books. ISBN 0738207454.
• Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 039474067X.
• Toynbee, Arnold. 1987. A Study of History. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195050800.

External links

All links retrieved December 26, 2020.

• American Historical Association
• Timelines of History — A collection of timelines organized by time, location and subject matter
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project Collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.

English[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

• Hx, hx (chiefly medicine)
• historie (obsolete)
• hystory (nonstandard)
• hystorie (obsolete)

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English historie, from Old French estoire, estorie (“chronicle, history, story”) (French histoire), from Latin historia, from Ancient Greek ἱστορίᾱ (historíā, “learning through research”), from ἱστορέω (historéō, “to research, inquire (and) record”), from ἵστωρ (hístōr, “the knowing, wise one”), from Proto-Indo-European *weyd- (“see, know”). Doublet of story and storey.

Attested in Middle English in 1393 by John Gower, Confessio Amantis,^[1] which was aimed at an educated audience familiar with French and Latin.

Pronunciation[edit]

• enPR: hĭsʹt(ə)rē, hĭsʹtrĭ, IPA^(key): /ˈhɪs.t(ə).ɹi/, /ˈhɪs.tɹɪ/
• Rhymes: -ɪstəɹi, -ɪstɹi
• Hyphenation: his‧to‧ry,

hist‧ory

Noun[edit]

history (countable and uncountable, plural histories)

1. The aggregate of past events.

   Synonyms: background, past

   • 1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter VII, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, →OCLC:

     With some of it on the south and more of it on the north of the great main thoroughfare that connects Aldgate and the East India Docks, St. Bede’s at this period of its history was perhaps the poorest and most miserable parish in the East End of London.

   • 2012 March-April, Jan Sapp, “Race Finished”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, page 164:

     Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution. But is the tragic history of efforts to define groups of people by race really a matter of the misuse of science, the abuse of a valid biological concept?

   • 2017 June 24, James O’Shea, quoting Gerry Adams, “BREAKING: Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams says end to partition of Ireland “in a few short years””, in IrishCentral:

     So, we have a shared history — we will also have a shared future.

   History repeats itself if we don’t learn from its mistakes.

2. The branch of knowledge that studies the past; the assessment of notable events.

   • 2013 September 6, Peter Beaumont, “Lessons of past cast shadows over Syria”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 13, page 18:

     History and experience act as a filter that can distort as much as elucidate. It is largely forgotten now, overlooked in the one-line description of Tony Blair and George W Bush as the men who lied about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but there was a wider context to their conviction.

   He teaches history at the university.

   History will not look kindly on these tyrants.

   He dreams of an invention that will make history.

3. The portion of the past that is known and recorded by this field of study, as opposed to all earlier and unknown times that preceded it (prehistory).

   in all of human history and prehistory

   in all recorded history

4. (countable) A set of events involving an entity.

   What is your medical history?

   The family’s history includes events best forgotten.

   a long and sordid history

   • 2014 October 21, Oliver Brown, “Oscar Pistorius jailed for five years”, in The Daily Telegraph (Sport)‎^[1]:

     [I]n the 575 days since [Oscar] Pistorius shot dead his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, there has been an unseemly scramble to construct revisionist histories, to identify evidence beneath that placid exterior of a pugnacious, hair-trigger personality.

5. (countable) A record or narrative description of past events.

   Synonyms: account, chronicle, story, tale

   I really enjoyed Shakespeare’s tragedies more than his histories.

   a short history of post-Columbian colonization

6. (countable, medicine) A list of past and continuing medical conditions of an individual or family.

   Synonym: medical history

   A personal medical history is required for the insurance policy.

   He has a history of cancer in his family.

   This diagnosis is usually based solely on the history and physical examination, although laboratory tests are occasionally also obtained.

7. (countable, computing) A record of previous user events, especially of visited web pages in a browser.

   Synonym: log

   I visited a great site yesterday but forgot the URL. Luckily, I didn’t clear my history.

   • 2006, Todd Stauffer; Kirk McElhearn, Mastering Mac OS X, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 344:

     When you do that, the browser window has no browser history, so it doesn’t report a referrer page to the first site you visit.

8. (informal) Something that no longer exists or is no longer relevant.

   I told him that if he doesn’t get his act together, he’s history.

9. (uncountable) Shared experience or interaction.

   There is too much history between them for them to split up now.

   He has had a lot of history with the police.

Usage notes[edit]

The chief polysemic ambiguity of the word history in natural language (in a nutshell, «the past» versus «that portion of the past for which written records exist») is handled with the help of a coordinate term pair (prehistory and history) or a qualifier (recorded history), yielding clarifying (disambiguating) phrases such as in all of human history and prehistory or in all recorded history.

Derived terms[edit]

Descendants[edit]

• Pitcairn-Norfolk: histrei

Translations[edit]

Verb[edit]

history (third-person singular simple present histories, present participle historying, simple past and past participle historied)

1. (obsolete) To narrate or record.

   • c. 1596–1599 (date written), William Shakespeare, “The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, […]”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, →OCLC, [Act IV, scene i]:

     And therefore will hee wipe his Tables cleane,
     And keepe no Tell-tale to his Memorie,
     That may repeat, and Historie his losse

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• history on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• history at OneLook Dictionary Search
• history in Keywords for Today: A 21st Century Vocabulary, edited by The Keywords Project, Colin MacCabe, Holly Yanacek, 2018.
• «history» in Raymond Williams, Keywords (revised), 1983, Fontana Press, page 146.
• “history”, in The Century Dictionary […], New York, N.Y.: The Century Co., 1911, →OCLC.

Anagrams[edit]

• Toryish, Troyish, roytish

Middle English[edit]

Noun[edit]

history

1. Alternative form of historie