History is a branch of knowledge concerned with the study of past events. Historians study records of events and prepare new accounts based on their research. These written accounts attempt to explain the causes and effects of events and offer interpretations of them.
The study and writing of history make the past meaningful by preserving structure, values, and continuity for present society. This article discusses history as a field of investigation and knowledge. For information on events in history, see World, History of the, and the History sections of the various articles on continents, countries, states, and provinces.
History is more than memory and different from myth. Unlike memory, history is constructed from evidence. Unlike myth, history is subject to critical examination and correction. Historians are committed to telling a verifiable account of the past and offering rational explanations for the course of events. Historians are required to offer evidence in support of assertions, create balanced and well-informed accounts, and make an honest, good-faith attempt to overcome personal bias.
How historians work
The questions.
A work of history begins with questions about the past. For example, how were societies formed, governed, or destroyed? How did law, religion, education, and art develop, and how did they influence life? How did people create wealth, and how was it distributed? The historian’s questions direct and focus research, act as a guide to selection of evidence, and help test the evidence for its meaning.
The questions that historians ask always reflect the concerns of the times in which they live. For example, an interest in the popularity of violent entertainment in today’s society might lead a historian to study why the ancient Romans found gladiatorial combat exciting. As a result, history is never “finished.” There is never a final, complete version that satisfies everyone. There will always be new questions to ask of the past, and historians will always incorporate these questions in the process of creating written history.
The evidence.
Historians use evidence in a great variety of forms, distinguishing broadly between primary sources and secondary sources. Primary sources are those that originate from the same period of time the historian is investigating. Secondary sources are works of history written later. A well-trained historian studies the work of other historians—that is, secondary sources—to learn basic information and the state of current knowledge. But an original interpretation that advances knowledge depends on the examination of primary sources.
Most primary sources are written documents. They include the official records of government institutions, churches, schools and universities, clubs and associations, industries, and trade groups. Among these records are court proceedings and other legal records; executive orders, diplomatic correspondence, and proceedings of legislatures; military records; taxation and treasury records; and birth, death, and marriage certificates. Copies of private letters and diaries, household accounts, and family documents are also important.
Published writings on all branches of learning—including philosophy, theology, medicine, social criticism, and contemporary news reports—make a central part of the historical record. Literature, music, and visual arts, including advertising, photography, and motion pictures, are also valuable sources for the historian.
The interpretation.
The quality of historical research depends on the skills the historian has in deciphering and interpreting documents and objects. Historians read documents in their original languages, and routinely master skills from other disciplines, ranging from art history and archaeology to statistics and economics. They also may extract statistical information from original records and translate it into a form that computers can read and analyze.
Historians must be aware of bias (prejudice), both in the evidence and in themselves. The cruder forms of bias, such as stereotyping and hostility toward particular groups, are fairly easy to detect. But historians also try to recognize the deep assumptions that the people who produced documents and other historical sources may have made about what events were significant, who was important enough to notice, and which aspects of life were worth recording. Historians must likewise be aware of such assumptions in themselves and in fellow historians. Whole groups of people and their lives, accomplishments, point of view, and voices can be effectively “erased” from history if historians do not see them as historically significant.
The writing.
Historical knowledge requires specialized forms of writing that combine narrative and interpretation and follow modern standards for accuracy and verification. A narrative is a storylike description of events unfolding over the course of time. Historical narratives include depictions of characters, concrete details, descriptions of actions, and explanations of the causes and effects of events, and they indicate the evidence for all these things. In historical writing, unlike fiction writing, the writer has an implied commitment to depict events that are verifiably true and based on reliable information.
Approaches to history
Different questions, different answers.
Historians approach their work with various research questions and strategies, and different interpretive theories. Traditionally, historians focused mainly on strategic decisions by political and military leaders. They ignored most of the population as well as impersonal forces and causes of change. In the 1900’s, however, historians turned their attention to subjects that were largely or completely left out of historical writing in the past. These subjects include economic history, social history, women’s history, gender history, and the history of minorities.
Economic history analyzes the large-scale, long-term developments of entire economies. It places great importance on the economic self-interest of individuals and classes of people. In studying imperialism, labor, and industrial practices, economic analysis has proved especially adapted to tracing the history of social inequalities.
Social history includes the study of large groups of the population, usually those who have little economic or political power. Social historians examine a variety of topics, including grass-roots political movements; voting patterns; migration between rural, urban, and suburban ways of life; immigration; and social attitudes.
The feminist movement that began in the late 1960’s and the 1970’s inspired a growing number of scholars to study women’s history. Women’s history had been largely ignored by most historians before then, but the field quickly grew in range and depth, covering all areas of history from ancient to modern society.
Women’s history led to the historical study of gender. Gender includes the behavior, manners, morals, speech, and emotions expected of men and women because of their sex. Historians of gender have analyzed many characteristics of “masculine” and “feminine” behavior in relation to social stereotypes and economic power. The historians’ studies have provided a means to understand a wide range of social behavior—from attitudes about sex to economic inequality—in terms of social conventions of gender.
People who share a common culture, ethnicity, or religion have increasingly become the focus of historical research. Such research does not aim to submerge the group into a common national identity but to respect the point of view and experience of the group itself. The history of African Americans, in particular, has produced a rich range of studies. People who have been ignored because of their sexual orientation are being restored to the historical record.
Development of historical writing and study
The ancient Greeks and Romans.
The first major works of history in the Western tradition were written by Herodotus and Thucydides, who lived in ancient Greece in the 400’s B.C. Herodotus is often called the “Father of History.” In his Histories, he tried to trace the hostility between the Persian Empire and Greece back to its earliest sources. Before writing the work, Herodotus traveled throughout the Near East. He observed local religions and cultures, spoke with priests and intellectuals, and collected traditions and historical anecdotes. The resulting history of the Persian invasion of Greece ranges widely over time and place. It includes the customs, traditions, myths, and conflicting beliefs that Herodotus recorded in his effort to understand the causes of great political and military events.
Thucydides used his own experience as an Athenian general to create his History of the Peloponnesian War. This history of the war between Athens and Sparta focuses on politics and strategy and is narrower but deeper than Herodotus’s work. Thucydides rejected conflicting traditional stories in favor of a combination of eyewitness evidence and reliable second-hand accounts. The works of Herodotus and Thucydides established what became the major, traditional subject matter of history—politics and war. They became the models for the special features of historical writing: detailed narrative based on evidence rather than invention, and analysis that distinguished between immediate and long-term causes.
The Romans learned historical writing from Greek models. An important history of Rome was written in the 100’s B.C. by a Greek named Polybius, who attempted to explain the rise of Roman political and military dominance to the Greek-speaking world.
The general and statesman Julius Caesar celebrated his own victories in Gaul (France) in a clear, direct style of Latin in his Commentaries on the Gallic War, written in the 50’s B.C. In the 40’s B.C., Gaius Sallustius Crispus, commonly called Sallust, analyzed the corruption and disintegration of the Roman Republic in Conspiracy of Catiline and War Against Jugurtha. His brilliant, vigorous style attracted and influenced other writers for centuries afterward. Livy based his history, called From the Founding of the City, on the national traditions and historical accounts of Roman military and political actions from the origins of Rome to the early imperial period. The Histories and Annals of Cornelius Tacitus examine Roman history from the death of the emperor Augustus in A.D. 14 through the reign of Domitian, which ended in A.D. 96. Tacitus’s intellect and elegant style had great impact on the writing of history. In general, Roman historical writing valued literary skill and upheld the values of the traditional governing classes.
The Bible and post-Roman history.
Beginning in the A.D. 300’s, Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire, and over the next several centuries, it became the main religion in much of Europe. As a result, the influence of the Bible came to touch every aspect of culture. Both the Jewish Hebrew Bible (called the Old Testament by Christians) and the Christian New Testament offered religious revelation in historical form, through narratives of human lives and events. The biblical narratives also suggested that ordinary people could be worthy of historical memory because of their spiritual courage or holiness. Christian historians attempted to find divine intentions and religious meaning in contemporary history and included spiritual as well as political events in their works. Medieval histories tend to lack the literary polish of the Roman period, but they often have greater realism and vitality, and a wider range of characters and subjects, than classical works have.
The histories produced in the new kingdoms that emerged in Europe during the Middle Ages combined spiritual with secular (nonreligious) content. These histories also expressed the emerging national identities of Europe. Important works from the early Middle Ages include History of the Franks (written in the A.D. 570’s to 590’s) by Gregory, bishop of Tours; Ecclesiastical History of the English People (completed in 731) by Saint Bede, an English monk; Life of Charlemagne (written about 829 to 836) by Einhard; and Life of King Alfred (about 893) by Asser, a Welsh monk. Among the many accomplished historians of the 1000’s to 1300’s are the Norman monk Ordericus Vitalis; the German bishop Otto of Freising; the English scholars William of Newburgh, John of Salisbury, and Matthew Paris; and the French priest Jean Froissart.
The Humanist movement,
which began in Italy in the 1300’s, inspired a renewed study of the Greek and Roman classics, including their style and form. Humanist scholars regarded themselves as the true heirs of Greek and Roman culture and considered their time a Renaissance (rebirth) of ancient standards. Histories written under this influence focused on secular concerns, especially politics, war, and diplomacy. Humanist Italian historians include Niccolò Machiavelli, the author of the political study The Prince (written in 1513, first printed in 1532), and Francesco Guicciardini, the author of History of Italy (completed in 1540, published 1561-1564). Humanist scholars divided Western history into three periods, which have become known as (1) Antiquity (ancient times); (2) the Middle Ages, which they considered a period of few accomplishments; and (3) the Renaissance, their own time. This division has had a lasting impact on how historians view the past, though they now recognize the creativity and vitality of medieval culture.
Antiquarian research and the philosophes.
A form of scholarship known as antiquarianism spread across Europe beginning in the 1500’s. Antiquarian scholars gathered, preserved, recorded, edited, and cataloged the basic materials for history. In England, for example, the antiquarians William Camden and Sir Robert Cotton collected early records and other historical materials, including many that had been scattered after monasteries were closed during the English Reformation. Other leading antiquarians included Jean Mabillon in France and a Jesuit religious order, the Bollandists, in Flanders (now part of Belgium). Without the research of the antiquarians, the primary sources for many fields of history throughout Europe might have been lost.
During the Enlightenment, which lasted from the late 1600’s to the late 1700’s, a group of French intellectuals called the philosophes became prominent. The philosophes found antiquarian scholarship dry and too detailed. They preferred to write broad historical narratives to illustrate large-scale theories of the progress and decline of civilization. In general, the works of the philosophes reflected the respect for rationality, critical thought, secular values, and scholarship that characterized the Enlightenment. Leading philosophes included the Marquis de Condorcet, Montesquieu, and Voltaire.
At the same time the philosophes were active in France, the British historian Edward Gibbon wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This masterpiece of historical writing was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Gibbon combined the strict scholarship of the antiquarians with the thoughtful interpretation and elegant style of the philosophes.
History in the universities.
During the 1800’s, history began to be taught as an independent intellectual discipline in universities. Previously, historians had trained for the clergy, law, diplomacy, or politics. They were self-taught in history. The emphasis in the 1800’s on the nation-state and its history and identity, however, changed attitudes toward history. The study and writing of history gained public importance, attracted more students, and finally achieved recognition as a university subject. Increasingly, historians became trained professionals. Students of history had to master difficult research methods and standards for accuracy and verification of facts before their work gained respect.
The German historian Leopold von Ranke had a major impact on the development of history in the 1800’s. His influence helped make archival research—that is, the analysis and evaluation of primary documents—a central part of historical training. German universities introduced the use of seminars for training future historians in methods of research.
The French historians Francois Guizot and Jules Michelet based their national histories on archival research performed within professional academic settings. By the middle to late 1800’s, “modern”— that is, post-Roman—history was established at Oxford University by William Stubbs and other English scholars. In the United States, universities adopted the German-style research seminar as the basis of graduate training in history, beginning in the late 1800’s. Also during the 1800’s, historians in France, Germany, Ireland, and the United Kingdom edited and published massive national collections of historical documents.
History today.
Developments in the historical discipline during, and since, the 1900’s have paralleled the political, social, cultural, and economic changes of the age. In the 1800’s, nearly all university-trained historians were male, white, and middle or upper class. Their historical perspectives reflected their world, which seemed stable and clear to many of them. Today, historians are more diverse, as are the subjects they study. Historians now research a wide variety of subjects that their forerunners ignored. These subjects include women; farmers; industrial workers; ethnic, sexual, and religious minorities; political dissenters; and private and domestic life.
