History

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 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.

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.

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 and Ariel Durant (Story of Civilization, 1993), have written universal histories, most historians specialize. Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) combined philosophy and history in his writing, including his twelve volume A Study of History(1946; 1987), which traced out universal 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 usually kill themselves, he argued (see 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 oncemore on the move."

Many observers 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).

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 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 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 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 us to challenge the type of omniscient, third person voice that claims to relate exactly what happened.

Is History Objective?

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.

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 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.

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; 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). Taylor, on the other hand, 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.

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 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 (see Bennett 2005, 209-218).

In defense of history

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.

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, 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 our 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).

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 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.

The Directionality of History

Many scholars maintain that the totality of human history, in spite of the apparent arbitrariness of various historical events, contains a large organizing theme, meaning, or direction. This can be understood under three distinguishable categories: theological, metahistorical, and progressivist interpretations.

Theological interpretation

This approach falls in the area of theodicy or eschatology. It derives the end of history from 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 secular version of this approach would be Hegel's philosophy of history where

Progressivist interpretation

believe that history has its end given from God, whether it is to be realized in history or above history. Therefore, they have a linear and eschatological view of history, whereas other cultures including classical Hellenism are more inclined to have a cyclical view of history without a clear end. Usually the end of history in these traditions means the realization of God's original ideal lost due to some human failure, thus referring to the fulfillment of a new world order centering on that ideal of God, whether or not it is actually realized on the earth. Christianity may tend to adhere to the otherworldly version of history's end.

Following the Hegelian view of history, however, German Lutheran theologian Wolfhard Pannenberg in his influential book Revelation as History has suggested that the end of history should occur within history.

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' toward which it is moving, and God causes some events to happen in order to produce that End. Marxist theory is quasi-religious in its supposition that the material dialectic "causes" history to progress toward the abolition of capital, social equality and collective ownership.

Many variants of the Abrahamic religions teach that God is active in human history and that history has a purpose toward which it is moving. However, many of these 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. Christian Process Theology, Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, and Unification thought hold that ultimately the consummation 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 Pharaoh-like (tyrannical and self-centered; God saved Pharaoh as a 'portent,’ Q10: 92) or as Solomon-like (wise and just, Q27: 15-16). Christians might categorize historical figures as Cain-type and Abel-type. Mernissi (1994) comments how, during the Gulf War, many newspapers 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.

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.

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 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.

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 instinct 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. 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, Vol 1. 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, MA: 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, reprint edition. 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
• History  ^history
• Portal: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.