The title page to The Historians' History of the World.

History is the study of the past, focused on human activity and leading up to the present day.^[1] This study is facilitated by the formation of a 'true discourse of past'. The modern discipline of History is dedicated to the institutional production of this discourse. More precisely, history is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race ^[1]; as well as the study of all events in time, in relation to humanity.^[2] Those who study it as a profession are called historians. This emphasis on the 'human' has made human subjects central to the narratives of the classical discourse of modern history. Consequently, history has assumed a sense which is broader than being solely the true narratives of human past.History is not just the past as an object of systematic knowledge or the discipline that produces knowledge out of that object; history also carries a sense that is implicit in the expression :'making history'. Thus History often signifies the production of events having transformative potentials that ushers in the future. This is how a temporal schema connecting the past, the present and the future is foregrounded through the signifier history. The historical temporality is grounded within the idea of autonomous human subjects endowed with 'historical subjectivity' which aids them in the production of events and at once helps them to record and narrate past events as history.

All events that are remembered and preserved in some form (that cannot be invalidated as unhistorical /remains amenable to historical discourse) constitute the historical record.^[2] The self-assigned task of historical dicourse is to identify the sources which can contribute to the production of trurhful accounts of past.Thus the constitution of the historian's archive is a result of circumscribing a more general archive by invalidating the usage of certain texts and documents (by falsifying their claims to represent the 'true past'). Some historians study universal history. Others focus on certain methods, such as chronology, demography, historiography, genealogy, paleography, or cliometrics, or on certain areas, such as History of Brazil (1889–1930), History of China, or History of Science.

Broad discipline

The study of history has sometimes been classified as part of the humanities and at other times as part of the social sciences^[3] It can also be seen as a bridge between those two broad areas, incorporating methodologies from both. Some individual historians strongly support one or the other classification.^[4] In modern academia, history is increasingly classified as a social science. In the 20th century the study of history was revolutionized by French historian Fernand Braudel, by using such outside disciplines as economics, anthropology, and geography in the study of global history.

Traditionally, historians have attempted to answer historical questions through the study of written documents, although historical research is not limited merely to these sources. Writing is a marker that separates history from what comes before.In general, the sources of historical knowledge can be separated into three categories: what is written, what is said, and what is physically preserved, and historians often consult all three.^[5] Archaeology is a discipline which is especially helpful in dealing with buried sites and objects which ,once unearthed,can contribute to history writing. But Archaeology rarely stands alone since it utilizes narrative contents of prevalent histories to build up its theories. Historians frequently emphasize the importance of written records, which would limit history to times after the development of writing. This emphasis has led to the term prehistory^[6] to refer to any period of human history predating surviving written records.There are a variety of ways in which history can be organized, including chronologically, culturally, territorially and topically. These divisions are not mutually exclusive, and significant overlaps are often present, as in "The Argentine Labor Movement in an Age of Transition, 1930–1945." It is possible for historians to concern themselves with both the very specific and the very general, although the modern trend has been toward specialization. The area called Big History resists this specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. History has often been studied with some practical or theoretical aim, but also may be studied out of simple intellectual curiosity.^[7]

History and Prehistory

Further information: Protohistory

Stonehenge, United Kingdom

The development, transmission, and transformation of cultural practices and events are the subject of history.The idea of prehistory is a late development in history of thought. It is an attempt to qualitatively mark off the origin of history from the origin of earth.The separability of these two origins emerged as modern Geology proved that the age of earth is considerably older than what has been claimed in Biblical literature.With time the idea of creation as depicted in Bible came to be refuted and the origin of civil (human) history was chronologically separated from the origin of natural history. Since writing emerged at different times throughout the world, and since some kinds of written records are more perishable than others, the distinction between prehistory and history is often blurred. In the 20th century, the division between history and prehistory has been considered problematic. Criticism arose because of history's implicit exclusion of certain civilizations, such as those of Sub-Saharan Africa and pre-Columbian America. Historians in the West have been criticized for focusing disproportionately on the Western world.^[8]

Historiography

Works by Arnold J. Toynbee at Project Gutenberg

Asimov, Isaac; Asimov's Chronology of the World; Harper Collins, 1991, .

Durant, Will & Ariel; The Lessons of History; MJF Books, 1997, .

Durant, Will & Ariel; The Story of Civilization; 11 vols., Simon & Schuster.

Evans, Richard J.; In Defence of History; W. W. Norton (2000),

Gonick, Larry; The Cartoon History of the Universe; Doubleday, vol. 1 (1990) , vol. II (1994) , W. W. Norton, vol. III (2002) .

Wells, H. G.; An Outline of History; Reprint Services Corporation (1920), .

The World Almanac and Book of Facts (annual); World Almanac Education Group; 2005

External links

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Further reading

• Williams, H. S. (1907). The historians' history of the world. (ed., This is Book 1 of 25 Volumes; PDF version is available)
• Wells, H. G. (1921). The outline of history, being a plain history of life and mankind. (ed., This is Book 1 of multi-volume set.)

General Information

• 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.
• WWW-VL: History Central Catalogue first history on the WWW, located at European University Institute
• BBC History Site

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