Historiography
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 Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, though no historical writers in these early civilizations were so-called by name.
BCE who later became asked as the "father of history" Anabasis.
The Strabo 63 BCE – c. 24 Rome from city-state to empire. His speculation about what would construct happened if Alexander the Great had marched against Rome represents the first known exercise of alternate history.
In annalistic principles. Shiji Records of the Grand Historian, a monumental lifelong achievement in literature. Its scope extends as far back as the 16th century BCE, and it includes numerous treatises on particular subjects and individual biographies of prominent people and also explores the lives and deeds of commoners, both contemporary and those of previous eras.
Christian historiography began early, perhaps as early as Luke-Acts, which is the primary source for the Apostolic Age. Writing history was popular among Christian monks and clergy in the Middle Ages. They wrote approximately 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 cause of annals or chronicles recording events year by year, but this sort tended to hamper the analysis of events and causes. An example of this type of writing is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, which were the work of several different writers: it was started during the reign of Alfred the Great in the behind 9th century, but one copy was still being updated in 1154.
Wahb ibn Munabbih d. 728, al-Waqidi 745–822, Muhammad al-Bukhari 810–870 and Ibn Hajar 1372–1449.
During the Age of Enlightenment, the advanced development of historiography through the applications of scrupulous methods began.
French philosophe Voltaire 1694–1778 had an enormous influence on the art of history writing. His best-known histories are The Age of Louis XIV 1751, and Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations 1756. "My chief object," he wrote in 1739, "is not political or military history, it is the history of the arts, of commerce, of civilization – in a word, – of the human mind." 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 number one scholar to make a serious effort to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and emphasizing economics, culture, and political history.
At the same time, philosopher David Hume was having a similar impact on history in Great Britain. In 1754, he published the History of England, a six-volume work that extended from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. Hume adopted a similar scope to Voltaire in his history; as alive as the history of Kings, Parliaments, and armies, he examined the history of culture, including literature and science, as well. William Robertson, a Scottish historian, and the Historiographer Royal published the History of Scotland 1542 - 1603, in 1759 and his nearly famous work, The history of the reign of Charles V in 1769. His scholarship was painstaking for the time and he was able to access a large number of documentary authority that had previously been unstudied. He was also one of the first historians who understood the importance of general and universally applicable ideas in the shaping of historical events.
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 ownership of primary sources, at the time its methodology became a framework 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."
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 Great undergo a change Act of 1832 in England.
in 1837. The resulting work had a passion new to historical writing. Thomas Macaulay shown his almost famous work of history, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, in 1848. His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive advantage example 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 the freedom of opinion and expression. This model of human conduct has been called the Whig interpretation of history.
In his main work Histoire de France, French historian Jules Michelet coined the term Renaissance meaning "Re-birth" in French language, as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, making a innovative understanding of humanity and its place in the world.
The nineteen-volume work talked French history from Charlemagne to the outbreak of the Revolution. 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. Another important French historian of the period was Hippolyte Taine. He was the chief theoretical influence of French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practitioners of historicist criticism. Literary historicism as a critical movement has been said to originate with him.
One of the major progenitors of the history of culture and art, was the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt Burckhardt's best-known work is The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy 1860. 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. By the mid-19th century, scholars were beginning to explore the history of institutional change, especially the development of constitutional government. William Stubbs's Constitutional History of England 3 vols., 1874–78 was an important influence on this development 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 stay on of English historical learning.
Karl Marx proposed 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 sorting of society at that point. Previous historians had focused on the cyclical events of the rise and decline of rulers and nations. Process of nationalization of history, as component of national revivals in the 19th century, resulted with separation of "one's own" history from common universal history by such way of perceiving, apprehension 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.
The modern academic study of history and methods of historiography were pioneered in 19th-century German universities. Leopold von Ranke was a pivotal influence in this regard, and is considered as the founder of modern source-based history.
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 line 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, determine such ideas as reliance on primary sources empiricism, an emphasis on narrative history and particularly international politics aussenpolitik. Sources had to be hard, non speculations and rationalizations. His credo was to write history the way it was. He insisted on primary sources with proven authenticity.
The term 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. Butterfield's antidote to Whig history was "...to evoke asensibility towards the past, the sensibility which studies the past 'for the sake of the past', which delights in the concrete and the complex, which 'goes out to meet the past', which searches for 'unlikenesses between past and present'." Butterfield's formulation received much attention, and the kind of historical writing he argued against in generalised terms is no longer academically respectable.
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 usage of quantification and the paying of special attention to geography. An eminent unit of this school, Georges Duby, remanded his approach to history as one that
relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to manage 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.
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 creation historical outcomes. Friedrich Engels wrote The assumption of the works Class in England in 1844, which was salient in making the socialist impetus in British politics from then on, e.g. the Fabian Society. R. H. Tawney's 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. 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 a collection of things sharing a common attaches structure in early capitalist society. Members planned Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson.
World history, as a distinct field of historical study, emerged as an self-employed adult 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. Arnold J. Toynbee's ten-volume A Study of History, or done as a reaction to a question between 1933 and 1954, was an important influence on this developing field. He took a comparative topical approach to independent civilizations and demonstrated that they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. William H. McNeill wrote The Rise of the West 1965 to update upon Toynbee by showing 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 modify as right between traditional old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary.