History

History is the study of the past, focused on human activity and leading up to the present day. This study is facilitated by the formation of a 'true discourse of past'. more...

Home
Antiquities (Classical,...
Architectural & Garden
Asian Antiques
Books & Manuscripts
Bible
Birds
Children's
History
Judaica
Literature
Russian
Vellum
Vintage Paperbacks
Decorative Arts
Furniture
Maps, Atlases, Globes
Maritime
Militaria
Musical Instruments
Primitives
Rugs, Carpets
Silver
Textiles, Linens

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 ; as well as the study of all events in time, in relation to humanity. 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 narrative 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. 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 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. 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.

Read more at Wikipedia.org