The Role of Historians

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The role of historians in shaping public discourse and policy, including debates about historical memory, and the ethical responsibilities of historians.

Historical methodology: This refers to the various techniques and processes used by historians to study and interpret historical data.
Historical schools of thought: These are different approaches historians use to study, interpret, and write about history.
Objectivity and subjectivity in history: This concerns the extent to which historians can be objective in their analysis of historical events and whether this is possible at all.
Bias and perspective in history: This relates to the influence of personal biases and perspectives on the interpretation of historical events.
The role of ideology in history: This examines how ideologies such as nationalism, socialism, and conservatism have influenced historical narratives.
The use of sources in history: This involves studying how historians evaluate and analyze diverse sources of historical data, including primary and secondary sources.
Historical context: This refers to the social, political, economic, and cultural milieu within which historical events occur.
Historical interpretation: This concerns how historians construct meaning from historical data and how historical interpretation changes over time.
Narrative history: This involves the creation of a coherent and compelling narrative that integrates disparate historical events into a larger story.
Historical memory: This involves the ways in which historical events are remembered, commemorated, and forgotten in different societies and cultures.
Political History: This is the dominant type of historiography that focuses on the political activities and events of a specific period or region.
Social and Cultural History: This type of historiography is concerned with the study of social systems, cultural practices, and the everyday lives of people.
Economic History: This type of historiography examines the economic activities and systems of a period or region.
Intellectual History: This type of historiography emphasizes the study of ideas, intellectual movements, and the development of knowledge.
Environmental History: This type of historiography explores the relationship between humans and their natural environment over time.
Military History: This type of historiography examines the wars, strategies, and tactics used in battles of a specific period or region.
Gender History: This type of historiography is concerned with studying the role of gender and its impact on society throughout history.
Diplomatic History: This type of historiography focuses on the relations between different states, diplomacy, and international affairs during a specific period or region.
Marxist History: This type of historiography is based on Marxist theories and analyzes history from the perspective of the working class and their struggle against capitalism.
Postcolonial History: This type of historiography focuses on the experiences of colonized people and their resistance to colonialism and imperialism.
- "Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline."
- "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."