History
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- For other uses, see History (disambiguation).
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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, families, and societies. Knowledge of history is often said to encompass both knowledge of past events and historical thinking skills.
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.
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 ideological 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.
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 stateman, 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.
See also
- 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.
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.
- History painter: painters of historical motifs and particularly the great events.
- Paleography: study of ancient texts.
- Psychohistory: study of the psychological motivations of historical events.
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.
- Social change: changes in the nature, the social institutions, the social behavior, or the social relations of a society or community of people.
Lists
- List of historians
- List of historians by area of study
- List of history journals
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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