History

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For other uses, see History (disambiguation).

History Portal

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. 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.

Classifications

Because history is such a large subject, organization is crucial. While several writers, such as H.G. Wells and Will Durant & Ariel Durant, have written universal histories, most historians specialize.

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 the 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 *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 deological perspectives, such as Marxist historiography.

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, Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, G.M. Trevelyan and A.J.P. Taylor. 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.

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.

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."

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.

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

• 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 approach, 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.

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

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