History

Introduction

History is a term used to describe information about the past. When used as the name of a field of study, history refers to the study and interpretation of the record of human people, family history, and societies. 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, 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.

Historians limit their study to events that have occurred since the introduction of the earliest known written and historical records, i.e. Narmer Palette of circa 3200 B.C.E. Events before that time (which includes more than 99 percent of the time humans have existed) are described as prehistory, a period informed by the fields of palaeontology 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.

Historians may or not not choose to ask moral questions about history, or to derive moral lessons from historial 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 confrim 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. Approaches that believe that history is a theatre within which the good and the bad struggle for victory and that the End of history is overseen by a divine reality willl interpret historical events as examples of movement towards or away from the divine purpose. Those who advocate such a view of history will find accounts of history that refrain from moral censure of immoral behavor or that regard every historical event as human action, ignoring the possibility of divine action, to be inadequate.

Classifications

Because history is such a large subject, organization is crucial. While several writers, such as H.G. Wells (his Short History of the World, 1922) and Will Durant and Ariel Durant (Story of Civilization, 1993), have written universal histories, most historians specialize. Arnold J Toynbee (1889-1975)combined philosophy and history in his writing, including his twelve volume A Study of History(1946; 1987), which traced outuniversal rhythms of the rise, flowering and decline of civilizations. He 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 usaully kill themselves, he argued (see 1987: 262). He pioneered the ;comparative study of civilization'.

There are several different ways of classifying historical information:

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

Some people have critized 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 not '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 who 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 present 'objective facts' and encourage us to challenge the type of omniscient, third person voice that claims to relate exactly what happened.

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.

.

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 15th 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 16th 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.

Historiography

See full article: 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 nontheless also recognizes human freedom to act. The article on the Indus Valley Civilization has 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.

Historical methods

Historians of note who have advanced the historical methods of study include Leopold von Ranke, Lewis Bernstein Namier (1888-1960), Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (1921-1994), G.M. Trevelyan (1876-1962) and A.J.P. Taylor (1906-1990). Von Ranke (1795-1886) 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; we 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 (Marxist misused history to prove their philosophy), while 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. He 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. In his book In Defence 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 straight forward 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 which arguably includes most people who set out to record history. Black history, feminist history, marxist history, and for example 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 (see Bennett, 2005: 209 -218 who describes the stories that Israelis and Palestinians tell as competing myths).

In Defense of History

What scholars call revisionist history, or the re-writing of history, can on the one hand uncover bias and assumptions of racial superiority but on the other it can 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 key to historical research is to read as many different accounts as possible, by a wide a range of writers, including women as well as men, the conquered as well as the conquerors, 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. Multi-vocality should be the goal of any historical reconstruction and openness about any agenda that a scholar may have, such as to question traditional accounts or to retrieve hidden or silences voices, are best declared. 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 can not 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) suggest that while 'it is right and proper that postermodern 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 their honesty,and 'desire to produce a true, fair and accurate account of the subject under consideration' fully recognising the 'limits' that the 'facts of history and the sources which reveal them ... place on the historical imagination'. Similarly, Oxford scholar Albert Hourani (1915-93) defended of Orientalist (Western) scholarship of the non-Western world. Edward Said (1935-2003) had heavily criticised 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 depite 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, tossing the proverbial baby out with the bath-water.

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. We 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, [[Cicero, Marcus Tullius |Marcus Tullius Cicero (c. 50B.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?"

Others express skeptism about our ability to learn lessons from 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." The German Philosopher. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel remarked in his Philosophy of history that: "What history and experience teach us is this: that people and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it." This was famously Paraphrased by the British Prime Minister statesman and the 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 persepctive of having helped to make the history about which he wrote, citing, the preface of both his World War histories (really personal memoirs) that he followed, 'as far as' he was 'able, the method of Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, in which the author hangs the chroncile 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).

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

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

History and Theories of Cause and Effect

Some historians believe that history is not a series of random events, or driven by evolutionary or developmental processes but that events are 'caused'. That is, historical events are the 'effects' of a 'cause' that stands behind or operates within history. Advocates of providential history, for example, believe that God causes events to happen, if not always directly. In this view, history has an 'End' towards which it is moving, and God causes some events to happen in order to produce that End. Marxist theory posits that the material dialectic causes history to progress towards the abolition of capital, social equality and collective ownership. The Unification view of History also posits God as the mover behind and within history. The questions it asks of an historical period are - were people living righteosly, did they enjoy the three blessings of a loving relationship with God, a loving family in the context of peaceful, safe and secure societies and a balanced, harmonious and respectful relationship with the created order (the natural environment), God's creation? It is also interested in asking whether the internal (God-centered) and external (worldly) aspects of life, as well as the masculine and the feminine (the yin and the yang) were in harmony, or not. Most religions teach that God is active in human history and that history has a purpose towards which it is moving. However, they also believe in human freedom and that history does not progress smoothly, since wrong actions can delay progress. Sometimes, the need to make reparation for the past means that history must repeat itself. In Unificationist Thought and in that of Christian process theology shared by some Muslim thinkers (such as Muhammad Iqbal the ultimate consumation of history is contingent on humanity shouldering responsibility for stewarding creation. Theological or religious understandings of history share with Marxism the idea that history is a struggle, though not between classes so much as between good and evil, or between the external and the internal aspects of life (the temporal - wealth, power and the internal - devotion, faith in God). Muslims use the 'rightly guided period' (the life of Muhammad and the first four caliphs as a template to measure the legitimacy of subsequent Islamic history, asking whether Muslims have lived up to the ideal. Personality typologies are also used to evaluate peoples' roles in history. Muslims may refer to their leaders as Pharoah-like (tyrannical and self-centered; God saved Pharaoh as a 'portent', Q10: 92) or as Solomon-like (wise and just, Q27: 15-16), while in Unification thoughtbthe typology of Cain and Able is used (self-centered or God-centered). Mernissi (1994) comments how, during the Gulf War, many newpapers in the Arab world referred to the rulers of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as 'Pharaoh', because they were perceived as acting in self-interest (112). Applied to an evaluation of World War II, for example, these typologies see Churchill and his allies as Abel and Solomon-types (upholding freedom and democracy) and Hitler and his allies as Cain and Pharaoh-types, suppressing freedom.

Some 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.
• Historical revisionism: Traditionally 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 women's, the conquered or dissidents' points of view. A history of the Ottoman Empire for example might stress that religious minorities fared comparitively 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 field work, 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 offically 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 predeict 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 has some similarity with a Unification view of History, which explains historical events in terms of the personality types of those who can be said to make history and analyses the nature of their relationship, if any with or attitudes towards God.

Other

• Changelog: log or record of changes made to a project, such as a website or software project.
• 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 instict to survive. Richard Dawkins the Oxford scientist believes that only good cultural traditions or practices will survive while unhealthy ones (which he calls diseases) will die. He places religion in the unhealthy category.
• Social change: changes in the nature, the social institutions, the social behavior, or the social relations of a society or community of people.

See Also

Historiography Periodization

External links

• American Historical Association official website
• History Forum Simaqian Studio - Online community for world history discussion
• History Forum - A world history discussion community
• History Forums - History is Happening -Discuss all historical topics, as well as current events, in an academic setting.
• "Timelines of History" - A collection of timelines organized by time, location and subject matter
• Internet History Sourcebooks Project See also Internet History Sourcebooks Project. Collections of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use.
• History Article from the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
• History of Nations - Offers a history of every nation in the world.
• World History Web Resources: An Annotated Guide - Librarian Michael Lorenzen gives advice on history searching on the Web.
• Free History - A search engine that indexes sites that deal with history
• An example of Family History
• Wikibooks:History

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Bennett, Clinton Muslims and Modernity: An Introduction to the Issues and Debates, London, Cointinuum, 2005 ISBN 082645481X
• Churchill, Winston S The Gathering Storm: History of the Second World War, Vol 1, NY: Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin, 1986 (original 1948) ISBN 039541055 X
• Evans, Richard J In Defense of History, NY: W. W Norton and Co, 2000 ISBN 0393319598
• Hourani, Albert 'On the Road to Morocco', 27-30, New York Review of Books, March 1979
• Lindholme, Charles The Islamic Middle East: An Anthropological History, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 ISBN 1557864217
• Mernissi, Fatima Islam and Democracy: Fear of the Modern World, translated by Lakeland, Mary Jo, Cambridge, MA: Perseous Books, 1994 ISBN 0738207454
• Said, Edward Orientalism, NY, Vintage, 1978 ISBN 039474067X
• Toynbee, Arnold A Study of History, NY: Oxford University Press, reprint edition 1987 ISBN 0195050800

Credits

New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation. To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats.The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:

• History  ^history

The history of this article since it was imported to New World Encyclopedia:

• History of "History"

Note: Some restrictions may apply to use of individual images which are separately licensed.