History

History is an academic discipline that examines the past. As an applied critical approach or for public policy development, it traces present conditions in human society and outlines future alternatives—considering likely societal and technological changes. The most popular historic theme for centuries was war and related issues of military conquest and governance, and many European authors, typically writing from a Eurocentric perspective, disproportionately focused on ancient history, particularly Greece and Rome. The discipline evolved slowly in Europe as the continent saw increasing literacy, education, exploration, and travel. In a trend that grew rapidly during the twentieth century, the study of history expanded its focus to include deeper examinations of civilizations and societal issues. Sociology, demography, geography, political science, economics, anthropology, and many other fields contributed to the growing breadth of the discipline.

Perspective and context are important processes in analyzing history: viewing actions by the standards of their times and acknowledging influences on the author’s (and reader’s) thinking. In addition to multidisciplinary and self-critical approaches, public history, which typically involves activities outside normal academic practices or conducted by people not involved in academia, has had an impact on the field. In many Western societies, starting in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians began to broaden their scope beyond studies of war and major figures to include examinations of social movements, popular history, and other emerging disciplines. A future challenge will be attracting larger audiences through videography, storytelling, genealogy, and new and evolving forms of media.

Background

This article focuses primarily on the development and practice of history in "Western" countries, particularly those in Europe and North America. In these countries, history only recently assumed so many diverse forms and formats, and for a long time focused on major events, such as wars, diplomacy, and the actions of political and military leaders. The first known Western practitioners of history, Herodotus (c. 484–425 BCE) and Thucydides (c. 460–400 BCE), are still widely remembered for their histories of Ancient Greece. Breaking from oral tradition and writing for their contemporaries, the Greek authors thus became accountable for their facts or opinions. Later history of ancient Eurasia can be gleaned from early Roman writers, such as Cicero (c. 107–43 BCE), who offered a different perspective. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, these written histories became valuable, if flawed, written records of ancient European societies.

Towards the end of the first millennium CE, modern universities began to emerge in the Islamic world in the Middle East and North Africa. The oldest continually operating university in the world, the University of Al-Qarawiyyin, was founded in 859 CE in Fez, Morocco; institutions in other Islamic cities, including Baghdad, Iraq, were founded in subsequent centuries. By the height of the Middle Ages, universities also began to develop in Europe, and some of the continent's earliest and most enduring universities were founded in Bologna (1088), Oxford (c. 1187), and Paris (c. 1170, later known as the Sorbonne). Welsh historian Jan Morris described Oxford as a "fully-fledged medieval university" with a seven-year general Master’s program. Its curriculum boasted: "The Seven Liberal Arts . . . The Three Philosophies . . . The Two Tongues." History was not explicitly mentioned as part of the curriculum. Latin surfaced as the "lingua franca" or common language; Greek and Hebrew were formally taught. Over time, knowledge of these languages declined in importance among Western historians.

In Western approaches to the study of history, the 1770 publication of English historian Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is considered a landmark event. Consisting of six volumes detailing the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, Gibbon's work contains hundreds of footnotes and incorporated many primary sources, both key features of modern academic works. Gibbon also wrote in detail about non-European nationalities and territories contained within the Roman Empire.

While war and other major events continued to be a point of focus for many historians in Europe, the United States, and other Western countries, other academic disciplines began to influence how historians approached their study of the past. By the end of the nineteenth century, scholars, students, and later hobbyists could pursue archaeology, using tangible relics of the past to verify (or refute) ancient military and religious interpretations of history. Cultural anthropology, the study of cultural differences among human societies, soon followed. Columbia University faculty member and curator Franz Boas (1858–1942) encouraged his students to observe and record—in a structured way—the language, customs, and values of relatively unknown or marginalized cultures.

These relatively recent innovations are now established research tools. Contemporary historians rely on published works (books, articles), increasingly digitized archival material (personal papers, maps, photographs, illustrations), and oral histories (usually structured, videotaped interviews) as sources. Thus, the term artifacts has come to mean far more than simply remnants from archaeological digs. The definition extends to include three-dimensional objects of any era that add a real, living quality to museum and other educational displays or that can be studied on their merits. New media are proliferating so rapidly that archivists sometimes find themselves unable to systematize their preservation, data retrieval, and permanent storage before the technologies become outdated. Some museums in Europe and North America have also been criticized for continuing to possess items and artifacts taken from Indigenous cultures around the world; while Indigenous people and activists had voiced their complaints for years, these demands for repatriation of valuable cultural artifacts gained more attention in the early twenty-first century. In a particularly contentious case, the British Museum in London, England, has been criticized by Aboriginal Australians for refusing to return hundreds of Indigenous Australian cultural artifacts that contain human remains.

History Today

Public history, which involves activities outside normal academic historical studies or actions conducted by people typically not involved in academia, grew in importance in the US in the second half of the twentieth century. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) of 1969 mandates that proposed physical or structural changes to historical structures must be accompanied by careful review. When cultural resources are threatened, teams of archaeologists, preservationists, and historians (often content experts) are contracted to produce environmental impact statements or reports outlining alternative plans. This process has expanded local and regional history, though the studies may be difficult to acquire because of related goals, such as site protection (also legislated). Even if that is not an issue, the reports are often published in relatively small quantities and narrowly distributed.

The rise of public history in the second half of the twentieth century reflected a growing interest on the part of historians to increase the breadth of their focus. English historian Arnold J. Toynbee’s twelve-volume A Study of History (p. 1934–61) delved into civilizations, historical ages, and renaissances. Prepared with only a bachelor’s degree, American historian Barbara W. Tuchman, author of the widely read The Guns of August (1962), enticed general audiences by presenting interesting details on far-ranging subjects relating to the start of World War I. Another American historian, David McCullough, also became popular for his in-depth analyses of singular events (such as the 1889 Johnstown flood) and historic figures (Theodore Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman). Other far-reaching historical works include Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain's Four Hundred Souls (2021), a community history of African Americans from 1619 to 2019, and Covered by Night, by Nicole Eustace, about Indigenous justice in early America. The narrative style of such authors is sometimes disparaged by academic historians who publish more often in professional specialty journals or through university presses. Some scholars and journalists cross boundaries from teaching to popular nonfiction and back again. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, historical biographies, which began to shift away from their disproportionate focus on figures who were White and male, also began to give readers increasingly personalized perspectives of historical eras, through people who typified—or were out of sync with—their own times.

A growing trend in historical research is specialization, or microhistory. Specialization on all sides may erode the meeting ground between historians and their prospective audiences. In California's public school system, history is fused with other social sciences during the elementary school years. The subject does not formally enter the curriculum until the sixth grade, reducing its potential for early—and sometimes lifelong—engagement. Unification may lie in contemporary media, which have the potential to build large audiences and require a different investment of time than do hefty history books. Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his television series, Finding Your Roots (2012–), expanded the sometimes insular field of genealogy, first by using celebrity guests willing to plunge into their past, then introducing a range of topics, such as the Greek Revolution of 1821, Mexican cattle ranching, and many others. Documentarian Ken Burns tackled topics such as the US Civil War (1861–5), baseball, and the National Park Service in documentary films and miniseries such as The Civil War (1990), The War (2007), The Vietnam War (2017), The U.S. and the Holocaust (2022), and The American Buffalo (2023) with considerable breadth, using pictures in much the same way that earlier historians published illustrated history books.

Historical revisionism is also a key aspect of contemporary historical studies. At its most basic level, historical revisionism involves a reexamination of existing facts and sources to derive a new historical interpretation and understanding of what happened, based on either new data or a new perspective. When existing historical interpretations are affected by biases such as sexism, Eurocentrism, or racism, historical revisionism can be useful for developing an interpretation free of such biases and reframing events in a more inclusive and possibly more accurate way. Historical revisionism is also essential for historians when they need to incorporate newly discovered data or information. However, historical revisionism can also be used to rewrite history to pursue political or nationalist agendas, as well as fuel conspiracy theories such as Holocaust denial.

Bibliography

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