- "Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline."
The broader social, economic, political, and cultural context within which historical events and processes occur and how this context shapes our understanding of the past.
Primary Sources: The original records or sources of information about a particular event, time period or historical figure. Primary sources can include manuscripts, documents, letters, diaries, photographs, maps and other artifacts.
Secondary Sources: Interpretations or analyses of primary sources by historians, researchers or scholars. Secondary sources can include textbook, biographies, articles, and monographs that provide the historians' understanding of the event or period.
Historical Methodology: The various approaches or methods used by historians to study the past, including source analysis, historical interpretation, and historiography.
Historical Periods: The various time periods in history, such as ancient, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary.
Historical Themes: The broad topics or subjects that span various historical periods, such as war, religion, politics, social movements, economy, and culture.
Historiography: The study of the methodology, interpretations, and debates among historians about specific historical topics.
Historical Context: The social, political, cultural, and economic circumstances that existed during a particular time period or event.
Cultural History: The study of the beliefs, values, and practices of societies and individuals throughout history.
Political History: The study of the governmental structures and policies in a particular time period or region.
Social History: The study of the lives and experiences of ordinary people in a particular society or time period.
Economic History: The study of the economic systems and trends during a specific historical period.
Intellectual History: The study of the ideas, beliefs, and intellectual developments in a specific time period or philosophy.
Gender History: The study of the social constructs and history of gender roles, including how gender has evolved throughout history.
Global History: The study of the interconnectedness of societies and cultures across different regions and continents throughout history.
Environmental History: The study of the relationship between humans and the natural environment throughout history, including effects of human activity on the environment.
Postcolonialism: The study of the impact of colonialism after the colonizing power departs.
Political Context: This explores the political environment of the time period studied.
Social Context: This looks at the different social structures, roles, and perspectives during a specific age.
Economic Context: This considers how economic factors, such as trade and commerce, impacted the historical time frame.
Cultural Context: This examines the customs, beliefs, and traditions of a particular era, region, or community.
Intellectual Context: This analyses the intellectual and philosophical movements during the historical era under study.
Gender Context: This investigates how constructs of gender impacted the historical time period.
Technological Context: This considers the advancements and innovations in technology that impacted the historical era.
Global Context: This explores the larger globalization trends in the historical era that shaped the world at that specific time.
Psychological Context: This considers how individual and collective psychological phenomena, such as trauma, fear, or motivation, overlap with historical events.
Environmental Context: This looks at how environmental factors, such as climate or geography, shaped the historical time period.
- "The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches."
- "Scholars discuss historiography by topic—such as the historiography of the United Kingdom, that of WWII, the pre-Columbian Americas, early Islam, and China—and different approaches and genres, such as political history and social history."
- "Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the development of academic history, there developed a body of historiographic literature."
- "The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties—such as to their nation state—remains a debated question."
- "The Histories of Herodotus, the founder of historiography."
- "The Roman statesman Cato the Elder produced the first Roman historiography, the Origines, in the 2nd century BCE."
- "Sima Tan and Sima Qian in the Han Empire of China established Chinese historiography, compiling the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian)."
- "Medieval historiography included the works of chronicles in medieval Europe, Islamic histories by Muslim historians, and the Korean and Japanese historical writings based on the existing Chinese model."
- "Figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, who among others set the foundations for the modern discipline."
- "There has been a shift away from traditional diplomatic, economic, and political history toward newer approaches, especially social and cultural studies."
- "From 1975 to 1995 the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history increased from 31 to 41 percent."
- "The proportion of political historians decreased from 40 to 30 percent."
- "Of 5,723 faculty in the departments of history at British universities, 1,644 (29 percent) identified themselves with social history and 1,425 (25 percent) identified themselves with political history."
- "Since the 1980s there has been a special interest in the memories and commemoration of past events—the histories as remembered and presented for popular celebration."