Antiquity Understanding the past appears to be a universal human need, and the "telling of history" has emerged independently in civilizations around the world. What constitutes history is a philosophical question (see
philosophy of history). The earliest
chronologies date back to
ancient Egypt and
Sumerian/
Akkadian Mesopotamia, in the form of
chronicles and
annals. The earliest known fully narrative critical historical works were
The Histories, composed by
Herodotus of
Halicarnassus (484–425 BC) who became known as the "father of history". Herodotus attempted to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, and personally conducted research by travelling extensively, giving written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures. and these local histories continued to be written into
Late Antiquity, as long as the city-states survived. Two early figures stand out:
Hippias of Elis, who produced the lists of winners in the
Olympic Games that provided the basic chronological framework as long as the pagan classical tradition lasted, and
Hellanicus of Lesbos, who compiled more than two dozen histories from civic records, all of them now lost.
Thucydides largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, establishing a rationalistic element which set a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings. Biography, although popular throughout antiquity, was introduced as a branch of history by the works of
Plutarch ( – 125 AD) and
Suetonius ( – after 130 AD) who described the deeds and characters of ancient personalities, stressing their human side.
East Asia China '' The
Han dynasty eunuch Sima Qian (145–86 BC) was the first in China to lay the groundwork for
professional historical writing. His work superseded the older style of the
Spring and Autumn Annals, compiled in the 5th century BC, the
Bamboo Annals, the
Classic of History, and other court and dynastic
annals that recorded history in a
chronological form that abstained from
analysis and focused on moralistic teaching. Sima's
Shiji (
Records of the Grand Historian), initiated by his father the
court astronomer Sima Tan (165–110 BC), pioneered the "Annals-biography" format, which would become the standard for prestige history writing in China. In this genre a history opens with a chronological outline of court affairs, and then continues with detailed biographies of prominent people who lived during the period in question. The scope of his work extended as far back as the 16th century BC with the founding of the
Shang dynasty. It included many treatises on specific subjects and individual biographies of prominent people. He also explored the lives and deeds of commoners, both contemporary and those of previous eras. Whereas Sima's had been a universal history from the beginning of time down to the time of writing, his successor
Ban Gu wrote an annals-biography history limiting its coverage to only the
Western Han dynasty, the
Book of Han (96 AD). This established the notion of using dynastic boundaries as start- and end-points, and most later Chinese histories would focus on a single dynasty or group of dynasties. The Records of the Grand Historian and Book of Han were eventually joined by the
Book of the Later Han (AD 488) (replacing the earlier, and now only partially extant, Han Records from the Eastern Pavilion) and the
Records of the Three Kingdoms (AD 297) to form the "Four Histories". These became mandatory reading for the
Imperial Examinations and have therefore exerted an influence on Chinese culture comparable to the
Confucian Classics. More annals-biography histories were written in subsequent dynasties, eventually bringing the number to between twenty-four and twenty-six, but none ever reached the popularity and impact of the first four. Traditional Chinese historiography describes history in terms of
dynastic cycles. In this view, each new dynasty is founded by a morally righteous founder. Over time, the dynasty becomes morally corrupt and dissolute. Eventually, the dynasty becomes so weak as to allow its replacement by a new dynasty.
Middle Ages to Renaissance Christendom 's
Ecclesiastical History of the English People The shared author of the
Gospel of Luke and the
book of Acts has been considered to be the first Christian historian. The consensus among scholars is that Luke uses the methods of ancient historiographers to narrate a history with a number of sub-genres under discussion. Attitudes towards the historicity of Acts have ranged widely across scholarship in different countries. The first tentative beginnings of a specifically Christian historiography can be seen in
Clement of Alexandria in the second century. The
growth of Christianity and its enhanced status in the Roman Empire after
Constantine I led to the development of a distinct Christian historiography, influenced by both
Christian theology and the nature of the
Christian Bible, encompassing new areas of study and views of history. The central role of the Bible in Christianity is reflected in the preference of Christian historians for written sources compared to the classical historians' preference for oral sources, and is also reflected in the inclusion of politically unimportant people. Christian historians also focused on development of religion and society. This can be seen in the extensive inclusion of written sources in the
Ecclesiastical History of
Eusebius of Caesarea around 324 and in the subjects it covers. Christian theology considered time as linear, progressing according to divine plan. As God's plan encompassed everyone, Christian histories in this period had a universal approach. For example, Christian writers often included summaries of important historical events prior to the period covered by the work. Writing history was popular among Christian monks and clergy in the
Middle Ages. They wrote about the history of Jesus Christ, that of the Church and that of their patrons, the dynastic history of the local rulers. In the
Early Middle Ages historical writing often took the form of
annals or
chronicles recording events year by year, but this style tended to hamper the analysis of events and causes. An example of this type of writing is the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was the work of several different writers: it was started during the reign of
Alfred the Great in the late 9th century, but one copy was still being updated in 1154. Some writers in the period did construct a more
narrative form of history. These included
Gregory of Tours and more successfully
Bede, who wrote both
secular and
ecclesiastical history and who is known for writing the
Ecclesiastical History of the English People. While earlier pagan rulers of the
Kingdom of Aksum produced autobiographical style
epigraphic texts in locations spanning
Ethiopia,
Eritrea, and
Sudan and in either Greek or the native
Ge'ez script, the 4th century AD
Ezana Stone commemorating
Ezana of Axum's conquest of the
Kingdom of Kush in
Nubia also emphasized his
conversion to Christianity (the first indigenous African head of state to do so). Aksumite manuscripts from the 5th to 7th centuries AD chronicling the
dioceses and
episcopal sees of the
Coptic Orthodox Church demonstrate not only an adherence to Christian chronology but also influences from the non-Christian Kingdom of Kush, the
Ptolemaic dynasty of
Hellenistic Egypt, and the
Yemenite Jews of the
Himyarite Kingdom. The tradition of
Ethiopian historiography evolved into a matured form during the
Solomonic dynasty. Though works such as the 13th century
Kebra Nagast blended
Christian mythology with historical events in its narrative, the first proper biographical chronicle on an
Emperor of Ethiopia was made for
Amda Seyon I (r. 1314–1344), depicted as a Christian savior of his nation in conflicts with the Islamic
Ifat Sultanate. The 16th century monk
Bahrey was the first in Ethiopia to produce a historical
ethnography, focusing on the migrating
Oromo people who came into military conflict with the Ethiopian Empire. While royal biographies existed for individual Ethiopian emperors authored by court historians who were also clerical scholars within the
Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the reigns of
Iyasu II (r. 1730–1755) and
Iyoas I (r. 1755–1769) were the first to be included in larger general dynastic histories. During the
Renaissance, history was written about states or nations. The study of history changed during the
Enlightenment and
Romanticism.
Voltaire described the history of certain ages that he considered important, rather than describing events in chronological order. History became an independent discipline. It was not called
philosophia historiae anymore, but merely history (
historia). , pioneer of historiography,
cultural history, and the
philosophy of history Islamic world Muslim historical writings first began to develop in the 7th century, with the reconstruction of the Prophet
Muhammad's life in the centuries following his death. With numerous conflicting narratives regarding Muhammad and his
companions from various sources, it was necessary to verify which sources were more reliable. In order to evaluate these sources, various methodologies were developed, such as the "
science of biography", "
science of hadith" and "
Isnad" (chain of transmission). These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures in the
Islamic civilization. Famous historians in this tradition include
Urwah (d. 712),
Wahb ibn Munabbih (d. 728),
Ibn Ishaq (d. 761),
al-Waqidi (745–822),
Ibn Hisham (d. 834),
Muhammad al-Bukhari (810–870) and
Ibn Hajar (1372–1449). Historians of the
medieval Islamic world also developed an interest in world history. Islamic historical writing eventually culminated in the works of the Arab Muslim historian
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who published his historiographical studies in the
Muqaddimah (translated as
Prolegomena) and ''Kitab al-I'bar
(Book of Advice''). His work was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 19th century.
Jewish Jewish historiography built on biblical and medieval historiography with significant periods in the 16th and 19th centuries, building on works such as the chains of tradition of the oral law, Christian and Hellenistic historiography, and the
Josippon.
East Asia Japan The earliest works of history produced in Japan were the
Rikkokushi (Six National Histories), a corpus of six national histories covering the history of Japan from its mythological beginnings until the 9th century. The first of these works were the
Nihon Shoki, compiled by
Prince Toneri in 720.
Korea The tradition of Korean historiography was established with the
Samguk sagi, a history of Korea from its allegedly earliest times. It was compiled by
Goryeo court historian
Kim Pusik after its commission by King
Injong of Goryeo (r. 1122–1146). It was completed in 1145 and relied not only on earlier Chinese histories for source material, but also on the
Hwarang Segi written by the
Silla historian
Kim Taemun in the 8th century. The latter work is now lost.
China The
Shitong, published around 710 by the Tang Chinese historian
Liu Zhiji (661–721), was the first work to provide an outline of the entire tradition of Chinese historiography up to that point, and the first comprehensive work on
historical criticism, arguing that historians should be skeptical of primary sources, rely on systematically gathered evidence, and should not treat previous scholars with undue deference. The great Song Neo-Confucian
Zhu Xi found the Mirror to be overly long for the average reader, as well as too morally nihilist, and therefore prepared a didactic summary of it called the
Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu (Digest of the Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government), posthumously published in 1219. It reduced the original's 249 chapters to just 59, and for the rest of imperial Chinese history would be the first history book most people ever read.
South East Asia Philippines Historiography of the Philippines refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the
Philippines. It includes historical and archival research and writing on the history of the Philippine archipelago including the islands of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The Philippine archipelago was part of many empires before the Spanish Empire arrived in the 16th century. Southeast Asia is classified as part of the
Indosphere and the
Sinosphere. The archipelago had direct contact with
China during the
Song dynasty (960–1279), and was a part of the
Srivijaya and
Majapahit empires. The pre-colonial Philippines widely used the
abugida system in writing and seals on documents, though it was for communication and no recorded writings of early literature or history. Ancient Filipinos usually wrote documents on bamboo, bark, and leaves, which did not survive, unlike inscriptions on clay, metal, and ivory, such as the
Laguna Copperplate Inscription and
Butuan Ivory Seal. The discovery of the
Butuan Ivory Seal also proves the use of paper documents in ancient Philippines. After the Spanish conquest, pre-colonial Filipino manuscripts and documents were gathered and burned to eliminate pagan beliefs. This has been the burden of historians in the accumulation of data and the development of theories that gave historians many aspects of Philippine history that were left unexplained.
Enlightenment 's works of history are an excellent example of
Enlightenment era advances in accuracy. During the
Age of Enlightenment, the modern development of historiography through the application of scrupulous methods began. Among the many Italians who contributed to this were
Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444),
Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), and
Cesare Baronio (1538–1607).
Voltaire French
philosophe Voltaire (1694–1778) had an enormous influence on the development of historiography during the Age of Enlightenment through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past. Guillaume de Syon argues: Voltaire's best-known histories are
The Age of Louis XIV (1751), and his
Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations (1756). He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. He was the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and emphasizing economics, culture and political history. Although he repeatedly warned against political bias on the part of the historian, he did not miss many opportunities to expose the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages. Voltaire advised scholars that anything contradicting the normal course of nature was not to be believed. Although he found evil in the historical record, he fervently believed reason and educating the illiterate masses would lead to progress. Voltaire's
History of Charles XII (1731) about the Swedish warrior king (
Swedish: Karl XII) is also one of his most famous works. It is not least known as one of
Napoleon's absolute favorite books. Voltaire explains his view of historiography in his article on "History" in Diderot's
Encyclopédie: "One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture, population." Already in 1739 he had written: "My chief object is not political or military history, it is the history of the arts, of commerce, of civilization—in a word—of the human mind." Voltaire's histories used the values of the Enlightenment to evaluate the past. He helped free historiography from antiquarianism,
Eurocentrism, religious intolerance and a concentration on great men, diplomacy, and warfare.
Peter Gay says Voltaire wrote "very good history", citing his "scrupulous concern for truths", "careful sifting of evidence", "intelligent selection of what is important", "keen sense of drama", and "grasp of the fact that a whole civilization is a unit of study".
David Hume At the same time, philosopher
David Hume was having a similar effect on the study of history in
Great Britain. In 1754 he published
The History of England, a 6-volume work which extended "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688". Hume adopted a similar scope to Voltaire in his history; as well as the history of Kings, Parliaments, and armies, he examined the history of culture, including literature and science, as well. His short biographies of leading scientists explored the process of scientific change and he developed new ways of seeing scientists in the context of their times by looking at how they interacted with society and each other—he paid special attention to
Francis Bacon,
Robert Boyle,
Isaac Newton and
William Harvey. He also argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past, and concluded that after considerable fluctuation, England at the time of his writing had achieved "the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind".
Edward Gibbon 's
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776) was a masterpiece of late 18th-century history writing. The apex of Enlightenment history was reached with
Edward Gibbon's monumental six-volume work,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published on 17 February 1776. Because of its relative objectivity and heavy use of
primary sources, its methodology became a model for later historians. This has led to Gibbon being called the first "modern historian". The book sold impressively, earning its author a total of about £9000. Biographer
Leslie Stephen wrote that thereafter, "His fame was as rapid as it has been lasting." Gibbon's work has been praised for its style, its piquant epigrams and its effective irony.
Winston Churchill memorably noted, "I set out upon ... Gibbon's
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [and] was immediately dominated both by the story and the style. ... I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all." Gibbon was pivotal in the secularizing and 'desanctifying' of history, remarking, for example, on the "want of truth and common sense" of biographies composed by
Saint Jerome. Unusually for an 18th-century historian, Gibbon was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible (though most of these were drawn from well-known printed editions). He said, "I have always endeavoured to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend." In this insistence upon the importance of primary sources, Gibbon broke new ground in the methodical study of history: In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the 'History' is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive. ... Whatever its shortcomings the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period.
19th century 's horror at the burning of his manuscript
The French Revolution: A History The tumultuous events surrounding the
French Revolution inspired much of the historiography and analysis of the early 19th century. Interest in the 1688
Glorious Revolution was also rekindled by the
Reform Act of 1832 in
England. Nineteenth century historiography, especially among American historians, featured conflicting viewpoints that represented the times. According to 20th-century historian Richard Hofstadter:
Thomas Carlyle Thomas Carlyle published his three-volume
The French Revolution: A History, in 1837. The first volume was accidentally burned by
John Stuart Mill's maid. Carlyle rewrote it from scratch. Carlyle's style of historical writing stressed the immediacy of action, often using the present tense. He emphasised the role of forces of the spirit in history and thought that chaotic events demanded what he called 'heroes' to take control over the competing forces erupting within society. He considered the dynamic forces of history as being the hopes and aspirations of people that took the form of ideas, and were often ossified into ideologies. Carlyle's
The French Revolution was written in a highly unorthodox style, far removed from the neutral and detached tone of the tradition of Gibbon. Carlyle presented the history as dramatic events unfolding in the present as though he and the reader were participants on the streets of Paris at the famous events. Carlyle's invented style was epic poetry combined with philosophical treatise. It is rarely read or cited in the last century.
French historians: Michelet and Taine In his main work
Histoire de France (1855), French historian
Jules Michelet (1798–1874) coined the term
Renaissance (meaning "rebirth" in
French), as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The 19-volume work covered French history from
Charlemagne to the outbreak of the
French Revolution. His inquiry into manuscript and printed authorities was most laborious, but his lively imagination, and his strong religious and political prejudices, made him regard all things from a singularly personal point of view. Michelet was one of the first historians to shift the emphasis of history to the common people, rather than the leaders and institutions of the country. He had a decisive impact on scholars. Gayana Jurkevich argues that, led by Michelet,
Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), although unable to secure an academic position, was the chief theoretical influence of French
naturalism, a major proponent of
sociological positivism, and one of the first practitioners of
historicist criticism. He pioneered the idea of "the milieu" as an active historical force which amalgamated geographical, psychological, and social factors. Historical writing for him was a search for general laws. His brilliant style kept his writing in circulation long after his theoretical approaches were passé.
Cultural and constitutional history One of the major progenitors of the history of
culture and
art, was the Swiss historian
Jacob Burckhardt.
Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the
Renaissance, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well." His most famous work was
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860; it was the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century and is still widely read. According to
John Lukacs, he was the first master of cultural history, which seeks to describe the spirit and the forms of expression of a particular age, a particular people, or a particular place. His innovative approach to historical research stressed the importance of art and its inestimable value as a primary source for the study of history. He was one of the first historians to rise above the narrow nineteenth-century notion that "history is past politics and politics current history." By the mid-19th century, scholars were beginning to analyse the history of institutional change, particularly the development of constitutional government.
William Stubbs's
Constitutional History of England (3 vols., 1874–1878) was an important influence on this developing field. The work traced the development of the English constitution from the Teutonic invasions of Britain until 1485, and marked a distinct step in the advance of English historical learning. He argued that the theory of the unity and continuity of history should not remove distinctions between ancient and modern history. He believed that, though work on ancient history is a useful preparation for the study of modern history, either may advantageously be studied apart. He was a good
palaeographer, and excelled in textual criticism, in examination of authorship, and other such matters, while his vast erudition and retentive memory made him second to none in interpretation and exposition.
Von Ranke and professionalization in Germany established history as a professional academic discipline in Germany. The modern academic study of history and methods of historiography were pioneered in 19th-century German universities, especially the
University of Göttingen.
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) at Berlin was a pivotal influence in this regard, and was the founder of modern source-based history. According to Caroline Hoefferle, "Ranke was probably the most important historian to shape historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century." Specifically, he implemented the seminar teaching method in his classroom, and focused on archival research and analysis of historical documents. Beginning with his first book in 1824, the
History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, Ranke used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses". Over a career that spanned much of the century, Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on
primary sources, an emphasis on
narrative history and especially international politics (). Sources had to be solid, not speculations and rationalizations. His credo was to write history the way it was. He insisted on primary sources with proven authenticity. Ranke also rejected the 'teleological approach' to history, which traditionally viewed each period as inferior to the period which follows. In Ranke's view, the historian had to understand a period on its own terms, and seek to find only the general ideas which animated every period of history. In 1831 and at the behest of the
Prussian government, Ranke founded and edited the first historical journal in the world, called . Another important German thinker was
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose theory of historical progress ran counter to Ranke's approach. In Hegel's own words, his philosophical theory of "World history ... represents the development of the spirit's consciousness of its own
freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom." This realization is seen by studying the various cultures that have developed over the millennia, and trying to understand the way that freedom has worked itself out through them: World history is the record of the spirit's efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself. The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves. And because they do not know that, they are not themselves free. They only know that
One is free. ... The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the
Greeks, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that
Some, and not all men as such, are free. ... The
Germanic nations, with the rise of
Christianity, were the first to realize that
All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.
Karl Marx introduced the concept of
historical materialism into the study of world historical development. In his conception, the economic conditions and dominant modes of production determined the structure of society at that point. In his view five successive stages in the development of material conditions would occur in
Western Europe. The first stage was
primitive communism where property was shared and there was no concept of "leadership". This progressed to a
slave society where the idea of
class emerged and the
State developed.
Feudalism was characterized by an
aristocracy working in partnership with a
theocracy and the emergence of the
nation-state.
Capitalism appeared after the bourgeois revolution when the capitalists (or their merchant predecessors) overthrew the feudal system and established a
market economy, with
private property and
parliamentary democracy. Marx then predicted the eventual proletarian revolution that would result in the attainment of
socialism, followed by
communism, where property would be communally owned. Previous historians had focused on cyclical events of the rise and decline of rulers and nations. Process of
nationalization of history, as part of
national revivals in the 19th century, resulted with separation of "one's own" history from common
universal history by such way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that constructed history as history of a nation. A new discipline,
sociology, emerged in the late 19th century and analyzed and compared these perspectives on a larger scale.
Macaulay and Whig history was the most influential exponent of the
Whig history. The term "
Whig history", coined by
Herbert Butterfield in his short book
The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931, means the approach to historiography which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of
liberal democracy and
constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasized the rise of
constitutional government,
personal freedoms and
scientific progress. The term has been also applied widely in historical disciplines outside of
British history (the
history of science, for example) to criticize any
teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and
transhistorical narrative.
Paul Rapin de Thoyras's history of England, published in 1723, became "the classic Whig history" for the first half of the 18th century. It was later supplanted by the immensely popular
The History of England by
David Hume. Whig historians emphasized the achievements of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. This included
James Mackintosh's
History of the Revolution in England in 1688,
William Blackstone's
Commentaries on the Laws of England, and
Henry Hallam's
Constitutional History of England. The most famous exponent of 'Whiggery' was
Thomas Babington Macaulay. His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the
Whig interpretation of history. He published the first volumes of his most famous work of history,
The History of England from the Accession of James II, in 1848. It proved an immediate success and replaced Hume's history to become the new orthodoxy. His 'Whiggish convictions' are spelled out in his first chapter: His legacy continues to be controversial;
Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote that "most professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay, as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about history as he did." However, J. R. Western wrote that: "Despite its age and blemishes, Macaulay's
History of England has still to be superseded by a full-scale modern history of the period". The Whig consensus was steadily undermined during the post-
World War I re-evaluation of European history, and Butterfield's critique exemplified this trend. Intellectuals no longer believed the world was automatically getting better and better. Subsequent generations of academic historians have similarly rejected Whig history because of its
presentist and teleological assumption that history is driving toward some sort of goal. Other criticized 'Whig' assumptions included viewing the British system as the apex of human political development, assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (
anachronism), considering British history as a march of progress with inevitable outcomes and presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph. J. Hart says "a Whig interpretation requires human heroes and villains in the story."
20th century 20th-century historiography in major countries is characterized by a move to universities and academic research centers. Popular history continued to be written by self-educated amateurs, but scholarly history increasingly became the province of PhD's trained in research seminars at a university. The training emphasized working with primary sources in archives. Seminars taught graduate students how to review the historiography of the topics, so that they could understand the conceptual frameworks currently in use, and the criticisms regarding their strengths and weaknesses. Western Europe and the United States took leading roles in this development. The emergence of
area studies of other regions also developed historiographical practices.
France: Annales school 's focus on social history rather than traditional political history. The French
Annales school radically changed the focus of historical research in France during the 20th century by stressing long-term social history, rather than political or diplomatic themes. The school emphasized the use of quantification and the paying of special attention to geography. The ''Annales d'histoire économique et sociale
journal was founded in 1929 in Strasbourg by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive Annales
approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the Année Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians whom Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (la
longue durée) over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called mentalités
, or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. The goal of the Annales
was to undo the work of the Sorbonnistes'', to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history. For early modern Mexican history, the work of
Marc Bloch's student
François Chevalier on the formation of landed estates (
haciendas) from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth had a major impact on Mexican history and historiography, setting off an important debate about whether landed estates were basically feudal or capitalistic. An eminent member of this school,
Georges Duby, described his approach to history as one that relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation. The Annalistes, especially
Lucien Febvre, advocated a
histoire totale, or
histoire tout court, a complete study of a historical problem. The second era of the school was led by
Fernand Braudel and was very influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of
Philip II of Spain. Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time: ''l'histoire quasi immobile
(motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (la
longue durée''), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures. His 'longue durée' approach stressed slow, and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past. The
Annales historians, after living through two world wars and major political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress slow change and the longue durée. They paid special attention to geography, climate, and demography as long-term factors. They considered the continuities of the deepest structures were central to history, beside which upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries. Noting the political upheavals in Europe and especially in France in 1968,
Eric Hobsbawm argued that "in France the virtual hegemony of Braudelian history and the
Annales came to an end after 1968, and the international influence of the journal dropped steeply." Multiple responses were attempted by the school. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe. By the time of crisis the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world. Influence indeed spread out from Paris, but few new ideas came in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history. However, the
Annales ignored the developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political and demographic research.
Marxist historiography Marxist historiography developed as a school of historiography influenced by the chief tenets of
Marxism, including the centrality of
social class and
economic constraints in determining historical outcomes (
historical materialism).
Friedrich Engels wrote
The Peasant War in Germany, which analysed social warfare in early Protestant Germany in terms of emerging capitalist classes. Although it lacked a rigorous engagement with archival sources, it indicated an early interest in
history from below and class analysis, and it attempts a dialectical analysis. Another treatise of Engels,
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, was salient in creating the
socialist impetus in British politics from then on, e.g. the
Fabian Society.
R. H. Tawney was an early historian working in this tradition.
The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912) and
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in
Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of
Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. His belief in the rise of the gentry in the century before the outbreak of the Civil War in England provoked the 'Storm over the Gentry' in which his methods were subjected to severe criticisms by
Hugh Trevor-Roper and John Cooper.
Historiography in the Soviet Union was greatly influenced by Marxist historiography, as
historical materialism was extended into the Soviet version of
dialectical materialism. A circle of historians inside the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946 and became a highly influential cluster of
British Marxist historians, who contributed to
history from below and class structure in early capitalist society. While some members of the group (most notably
Christopher Hill and
E. P. Thompson) left the CPGB after the
1956 Hungarian Revolution, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history. Christopher Hill's studies on 17th-century English history were widely acknowledged and recognised as representative of this school. His books include
Puritanism and Revolution (1958),
Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965 and revised in 1996),
The Century of Revolution (1961),
AntiChrist in 17th-century England (1971),
The World Turned Upside Down (1972) and many others.
E. P. Thompson pioneered the study of history from below in his work,
The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. It focused on the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below: Thompson's work was also significant because of the way he defined "class". He argued that class was not a structure, but a relationship that changed over time. He opened the gates for a generation of labor historians, such as
David Montgomery and
Herbert Gutman, who made similar studies of the American working classes. Other important Marxist historians included
Eric Hobsbawm,
C. L. R. James,
Raphael Samuel,
A. L. Morton and
Brian Pearce.
Biography Biography has been a major form of historiography since the days when
Plutarch wrote the parallel lives of great Roman and Greek leaders. It is a field especially attractive to nonacademic historians, and often to the spouses or children of famous people, who have access to the trove of letters and documents. Academic historians tend to downplay biography because it pays too little attention to broad social, cultural, political and economic forces, and perhaps too much attention to popular psychology. The "
Great Man" tradition in Britain originated in the multi-volume
Dictionary of National Biography (which originated in 1882 and issued updates into the 1970s); it continues to this day in the new
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the United States, the
Dictionary of American Biography was planned in the late 1920s and appeared with numerous supplements into the 1980s. It has now been displaced by the
American National Biography as well as numerous smaller historical encyclopedias that give thorough coverage to Great Persons. Bookstores do a thriving business in biographies, which sell far more copies than the esoteric monographs based on post-structuralism, cultural, racial or gender history.
Michael Holroyd says the last forty years "may be seen as a golden age of biography", but nevertheless calls it the "shallow end of history". Nicolas Barker argues that "more and more biographies command an ever larger readership", as he speculates that biography has come "to express the spirit of our age". Daniel R. Meister argues that:
British debates Marxist historian
E. H. Carr developed a controversial theory of history in his 1961 book
What Is History?, which proved to be one of the most influential books ever written on the subject. He presented a middle-of-the-road position between the empirical or (Rankean) view of history and
R. G. Collingwood's idealism, and rejected the empirical view of the historian's work being an accretion of "facts" that they have at their disposal as nonsense. He maintained that there is such a vast quantity of information that the historian always chooses the "facts" they decide to make use of. In Carr's famous example, he claimed that millions had crossed the Rubicon, but only Julius Caesar's crossing in 49 BC is declared noteworthy by historians. For this reason, Carr argued that
Leopold von Ranke's famous dictum
wie es eigentlich gewesen (show what actually happened) was wrong because it presumed that the "facts" influenced what the historian wrote, rather than the historian choosing what "facts of the past" they intended to turn into "historical facts". At the same time, Carr argued that the study of the facts may lead the historian to change his or her views. In this way, Carr argued that history was "an unending dialogue between the past and present". Carr is held by some critics to have had a deterministic outlook in history. Others have modified or rejected this use of the label "determinist". He took a hostile view of those historians who stress the workings of chance and contingency in the workings of history. In Carr's view, no individual is truly free of the social environment in which they live, but contended that within those limitations, there was room, albeit very narrow room for people to make decisions that affect history. Carr emphatically contended that history was a
social science, not an
art, because historians like scientists seek generalizations that helped to broaden the understanding of one's subject. One of Carr's most forthright critics was
Hugh Trevor-Roper, who argued that Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation. Trevor-Roper asserted that examining possible alternative outcomes of history was far from being a "parlour-game" was rather an essential part of the historians' work, as only by considering all possible outcomes of a given situation could a historian properly understand the period. The controversy inspired Sir
Geoffrey Elton to write his 1967 book
The Practice of History. Elton criticized Carr for his "whimsical" distinction between the "historical facts" and the "facts of the past", arguing that it reflected "...an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it". Elton, instead, strongly defended the traditional methods of history and was also appalled by the inroads made by
postmodernism. Elton saw the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analyzing what the evidence has to say. As a traditionalist, he placed great emphasis on the role of individuals in history instead of abstract, impersonal forces. Elton saw political history as the highest kind of history. Elton had no use for those who seek history to make myths, to create laws to explain the past, or to produce theories such as
Marxism.
U.S. approaches Classical and European history was part of the 19th-century grammar curriculum. American history became a topic later in the 19th century. In the historiography of the United States, there were a series of major approaches in the 20th century. In 2009–2012, there were an average of 16,000 new academic history books published in the U.S. every year.
Progressive historians The
Progressive historians were a group of 20th century historians of the United States associated with a historiographical tradition that embraced an economic interpretation of American history. Most prominent among these was
Charles A. Beard, who was influential in academia and with the general public. In 1948 Hofstadter made a compelling statement of the consensus model of the U.S. political tradition:
New Left history Consensus history was rejected by
New Left viewpoints that attracted a younger generation of radical historians in the 1960s. These viewpoints stress conflict and emphasize the central roles of class, race and gender. The history of dissent, and the experiences of racial minorities and disadvantaged classes was central to the narratives produced by New Left historians.
Quantification and new approaches to history Social history, sometimes called the "new social history", is a broad branch that studies the experiences of ordinary people in the past. It had major growth as a field in the 1960s and 1970s, and still is well represented in history departments. However, after 1980 the "cultural turn" directed the next generation to new topics. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in U.S. universities identifying with social history rose from 31 to 41 percent, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40 to 30 percent. The
Social Science History Association was formed in 1976 as an interdisciplinary group with a journal
Social Science History and an annual convention. The goal was to incorporate in historical studies perspectives from all the social sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics. The pioneers shared a commitment to quantification. However, by the 1980s the first blush of quantification had worn off, as traditional historians counterattacked.
Harvey J. Graff says: Meanwhile, "new" economic history became well-established. However, cliometrics has never been considered a historical field by the vast majority of historians so that cliometric articles have not been cited by historians. Economists mostly employed economic theories and econometric applications similar to typical economic papers. As a result, quantification remained central to demographic studies, but slipped behind in political and social history as traditional narrative approaches made a comeback. Recently, as the newest approach in economic history "new history of capitalism" appeared. In the first article of the related journal, Marc Flandreau defined their purpose as "crossing border" to create a truly interdisciplinary field.
Latin America Latin America is the former Spanish American empire in the Western Hemisphere plus Portuguese Brazil. Professional historians pioneered the creation of this field, starting in the late nineteenth century. The term "Latin America" did not come into general usage until the twentieth century and in some cases it was rejected. The historiography of the field has been more fragmented than unified, with historians of Spanish America and Brazil generally remaining in separate spheres. Another standard division within the historiography is the temporal factor, with works falling into either the early modern period (or "colonial era") or the post-independence (or "national") period, from the early nineteenth onward. Relatively few works span the two eras and few works except textbooks unite Spanish America and Brazil. There is a tendency to focus on histories of particular countries or regions (the Andes, the Southern Cone, the Caribbean) with relatively little comparative work. Historians of Latin America have contributed to various types of historical writing, but one major, innovative development in Spanish American history is the emergence of
ethnohistory, the history of indigenous peoples, especially in Mexico based on alphabetic sources in Spanish or in
indigenous languages. For the early modern period, the emergence of
Atlantic history, based on comparisons and linkages of Europe, the Americas, and Africa from 1450 to 1850 that developed as a field in its own right has integrated early modern Latin American history into a larger framework. For all periods, global or world history have focused on the connections between areas, likewise integrating Latin America into a larger perspective. Latin America's importance to world history is notable but often overlooked. "Latin America's central, and sometimes pioneering, role in the development of globalization and modernity did not cease with the end of colonial rule and the early modern period. Indeed, the region's political independence places it at the forefront of two trends that are regularly considered thresholds of the modern world. The first is the so-called liberal revolution, the shift from monarchies of the ancien régime, where inheritance legitimated political power, to constitutional republics... The second, and related, trend consistently considered a threshold of modern history that saw Latin America in the forefront is the development of nation-states." Historical research appears in a number of specialized journals. These include
Hispanic American Historical Review (est. 1918), published by the
Conference on Latin American History;
The Americas, (est. 1944);
Journal of Latin American Studies (1969);
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, (est.1976)
Bulletin of Latin American Research, (est. 1981);
Colonial Latin American Review (1992); and
Colonial Latin American Historical Review (est. 1992).
Latin American Research Review (est. 1969), published by the
Latin American Studies Association, does not focus primarily on history, but it has often published historiographical essays on particular topics.
General works on Latin American history have appeared since the 1950s, when the teaching of Latin American history expanded in U.S. universities and colleges. Most attempt full coverage of Spanish America and Brazil from the conquest to the modern era, focusing on institutional, political, social and economic history. An important, eleven volume treatment of Latin American history is
The Cambridge History of Latin America, with separate volumes on the colonial era, nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. There is a small number of general works that have gone through multiple editions. Major trade publishers have also issued edited volumes on Latin American history and historiography. Reference works include the
Handbook of Latin American Studies, which publishes articles by area experts, with annotated bibliographic entries, and the
Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture.
Africa Since most African societies
recorded their history orally, written records largely focussed on the actions of outsiders. Historiography in the colonial period was undertaken by European academics and historians from a European perspective, under the pretence of
Western superiority supported by
scientific racism. Oral sources were deprecated and dismissed by unfamiliar historians, giving them the impression Africa had history nor desire to create it.
African historiography became organised at the academic level in the mid 20th century.
Kenneth Dike, among others, pioneered a new methodology of reconstructing African history using the oral traditions, alongside evidence from European-style histories and other
historical sciences. This movement towards utilising oral sources in a multi-disciplinary approach culminated in
UNESCO commissioning the
General History of Africa, edited by specialists drawn from across the African continent, and publishing from 1981 to 2024.
Contemporary historians are still tasked with building the institutional frameworks incorporating African
epistemologies and representing an African perspective.
World history World history, as a distinct field of historical study, emerged as an independent academic field in the 1980s. It focused on the examination of history from a global perspective and looked for common patterns that emerged across all cultures. The basic thematic approach of this field was to analyse two major focal points:
integration—how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together, and difference—how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experience.
Arnold J. Toynbee's ten-volume
A Study of History, took an approach that was widely discussed in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1960s his work was virtually ignored by scholars and the general public. He compared 26 independent civilizations and argued that they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. He proposed a universal model to each of these civilizations, detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. The later volumes gave too much emphasis on spirituality to satisfy critics. Chicago historian
William H. McNeill wrote
The Rise of the West (1965) to show how the separate civilizations of Eurasia interacted from the very beginning of their history, borrowing critical skills from one another, and thus precipitating still further change as adjustment between traditional old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary. He then discusses the dramatic effect of
Western civilization on others in the past 500 years of history. McNeill took a broad approach organized around the interactions of peoples across the globe. Such interactions have become both more numerous and more continual and substantial in recent times. Before about 1500, the network of communication between cultures was that of Eurasia. The term for these areas of interaction differ from one world historian to another and include
world-system and
ecumene. His emphasis on cultural fusions influenced historical theory significantly.
The cultural turn The "cultural turn" of the 1980s and 1990s affected scholars in most areas of history. Inspired largely by anthropology, it turned away from leaders, ordinary people and famous events to look at the use of language and cultural symbols to represent the changing values of society. The British historian
Peter Burke finds that cultural studies has numerous spinoffs, or topical themes it has strongly influenced. The most important include
gender studies and
postcolonial studies, as well as memory studies, and
film studies. Diplomatic historian
Melvyn P. Leffler finds that the problem with the "cultural turn" is that the culture concept is imprecise, and may produce excessively broad interpretations, because it:
Memory studies Memory studies is a new field, focused on how nations and groups (and historians) construct and select their memories of the past in order to celebrate (or denounce) key features, thus making a statement of their current values and beliefs. Historians have played a central role in shaping the memories of the past as their work is diffused through popular history books and school textbooks. French sociologist
Maurice Halbwachs, opened the field with
La mémoire collective (Paris: 1950). Many historians examine how the memory of the past has been constructed, memorialized or distorted. Historians examine how legends are invented. For example, there are numerous studies of the memory of atrocities from World War II, notably
the Holocaust in Europe and
Japanese war crimes in Asia. British historian Heather Jones argues that the
historiography of the First World War in recent years has been reinvigorated by the cultural turn. Scholars have raised entirely new questions regarding military occupation, radicalization of politics, race, and the male body. Representative of recent scholarship is a collection of studies on the "Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe".
Sage has published the scholarly journal
Memory Studies since 2008, and the book series "Memory Studies" was launched by
Palgrave Macmillan in 2010 with 5–10 titles a year. ==Narrative==