Approaches (Types) of History

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Approaches (Types) of History
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• The question of how a historian approaches
  historical events is one of the most important
  questions within historiography.
• It is commonly recognized by historians that, in
  themselves, individual historical facts are not
  particularly meaningful.
• Such facts will only become useful when assembled
  with other historical evidence, and the process
  of assembling this evidence is understood as a
  particular historiographical approach.

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• "Fields of history" refers to the categories
  professional historians use to classify their
  broad areas of work within the overall discipline
  of history.
• Some of these categories (e.g., cultural history,
  social history, intellectual history) refer to
  historical method rather than specific topic of
  study, while others coincide or partially overlap
  with the practical classification of history by
  topic.

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Approaches to History
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The Annales School

• The Annales School is a school of historical
  writing named after the French scholarly journal
  Annales d'histoire économique et sociale (later
  called Annales. Economies, sociétés,
  civilisations, then renamed in 1994 as Annales.
  Histoire, Sciences Sociales) where it was first
  expounded.
• Annales school history is best known for
  incorporating social scientific methods into
  history.

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• The Annales was founded and edited by Marc Bloch
  and Lucien Febvre in 1929, while they were
  teaching at the University of Strasbourg, France.
  
• These authors quickly became associated with the
  distinctive Annales approach, which combined
  geography, history, and the sociological
  approaches to produce an approach which rejected
  the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy
  and war of many 19th century historians.

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• Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of
  long-term historical structures (la longue durée)
  over events.
• Geography, material culture, and what later
  Annalistes called mentalités, or the psychology
  of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of
  study.
• An eminent member of this school, Georges Duby,
  wrote in the forward of his book Le dimanche de
  Bouvines that the history he taught
• relegated the sensational to the sidelines and
  was reluctant to give a simple accounting of
  events, but strived on the contrary to pose and
  solve problems and, neglecting surface
  disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term
  evolution of economy, society and civilization."

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• Marc Bloch was shot by the Gestapo during the
  German occupation of France in World War II, and
  Febvre carried on the Annales approach in the
  1940s and 1950s.

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• It was during this time (1930s-1940s) that he
  mentored Fernand Braudel, who would become one of
  the best known exponents of this school.
• Braudel's work came to define a 'second' era of
  Annales historiography and was very influential
  throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for
  his work on the Mediterranean region in the era
  of Philip II of Spain.
• While authors such as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and
  Jacques Le Goff continue to carry the Annales
  banner, today the Annales approach has been less
  distinctive as more and more historians do work
  in cultural history and economic history.

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BIG HISTORY
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• Big History examines history on a large scale
  across long time frames through a
  multi-disciplinary approach.
• Big History gives a focus on the alteration and
  adaptations in the human experience.
• Big History is a discrete field of historical
  study that arose in the late 1980s.
• It is related to, but distinct from, world
  history, as the field examines history from the
  beginning of time to the present day and is thus
  closer to the older concept of universal history.

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• The first courses in Big History were
  experimental ones taught in the late 1980s by
  John Mears at Southern Methodist University
  (Dallas, Texas) and by David Christian at
  Macquarie University (Australia), and more
  recently at San Diego State University.
• Since then, a number of other universities have
  offered similar courses.

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• The first book in Big History was published in
  1996 by Fred Spier entitled, The Structure of Big
  History From the Big Bang until Today, which
  offers an ambitious defense of the project and
  constructs a unified account of history across
  all time scales.

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• Another notable text in Big History is David
  Christian's Maps of Time An Introduction to Big
  History, which explores history from the first
  micro-seconds of the Big Bang, to the creation of
  the solar system, to the origins of life on
  earth, the evolution of humans, the agricultural
  revolution, modernity, and the 20th century.
• Christian examines large-scale patterns and
  themes, and provides perspective of time scales.
• It was David Christian who coined the term Big
  History in an effort to place human history
  within the context of the history of life, the
  earth, and the universe.

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Cliometrics
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Cliometrics

• Cliometrics refers to the systematic use of
  economic theory and econometric techniques to
  study economic history.
• The term was originally coined by Jonathan R.T.
  Hughes and Stanley Reiter in 1960 and refers to
  Clio, who was the muse of history and heroic
  poetry in Greek mythology.
• This term is also sometimes used referring to
  counterfactual history.

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• Cliometrics, originated in 1958 with the work of
  Alfred Conrad and John Meyer with the publication
  of "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante-Bellum
  South," in the Journal of Political Economy.

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• The cliometric revolution actually began in the
  mid-1960s and was particularly ugly because most
  economic historians were either historians or
  economists who had very little connection to
  mathematical techniques or statistics.

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Comparative History
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• Comparative history is the comparison between
  different societies at a given time or sharing
  similar cultural conditions.
• Proponents of this approach include American
  historians Barrington Moore and Herbert E.
  Bolton British historians Arnold Toynbee and
  Geoffrey Barraclough and German historian Oswald
  Spengler.

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• Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889 1975) was a British
  historian whose twelve-volume analysis of the
  rise and fall of civilizations, A Study of
  History, 1934-1961, was a synthesis of world
  history, a metahistory based on universal rhythms
  of rise, flowering and decline, which examined
  history from a global perspective.

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• Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of
  civilizations, rather than the history of
  nation-states or of ethnic groups.
• He identified his civilizations according to
  cultural and religious rather than national
  criteria.

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• Historians generally accept the comparison of
  particular institutions (banking, women's rights,
  ethnic identities) in different societies, but
  since the hostile reaction to Toynbee in the
  1950s, generally do not pay much attention to
  sweeping comparative studies.

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Cultural History
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• Cultural history (from the German term
  Kulturgeschichte), at least in its common
  definition since the 1970s, often combines the
  approaches of anthropology and history to look at
  popular cultural traditions and cultural
  interpretations of historical experience.

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• Cultural history involves the records and
  narrative descriptions of past knowledge,
  customs, and arts of a group of people.
• Cultural history encompasses the continuum of
  events occurring in succession leading from the
  past to the present and even into the future
  pertaining to a culture.

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• Cultural history, as a discipline, records and
  interprets past events involving human beings
  through the social, cultural, and political
  milieu of or relating to the arts and manners
  that a group favors.
• Cultural history studies and interprets the
  record of human societies by denoting the various
  distinctive ways of living built up by a group of
  people under consideration.
• Cultural history involves the aggregate of past
  cultural activity, such as ceremony, class in
  practices, and the interaction with locales.

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• Jacob Burckhardt (1818 1897) was a Swiss
  historian of art and culture, fields which he
  helped found.
• Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt's
  achievement in the following terms
• "The great discoverer of the age of the
  Renaissance, he first showed how a period should
  be treated in its entirety, with regard not only
  for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but
  for the social institutions of its daily life as
  well
• Burckhardt's best known work is The Civilization
  of the Renaissance in Italy (1860).

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• Burkhardt's historical writings did much to
  establish art history as an academic discipline,
  and also have literary value in their own right.
• His innovative approach to historical research
  emphasized the value of culture and art when
  analyzing the social and political trends
  underlying historical events.
• Jacob Burckhardt helped found cultural history as
  a discipline.

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• Cultural history overlaps in its approaches with
  the French movements of histoire des mentalités
  and the so-called new history, and in the U.S. it
  is closely associated with the field of American
  studies.
• Most often the focus is on phenomena shared by
  non-elite groups in a society, such as carnival,
  festival, and public rituals performance
  traditions cultural evolutions in human
  relations (ideas, sciences, arts, techniques)
  and cultural expressions of social movements such
  as nationalism.

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Political History
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• Political history is the narrative and analysis
  of political events, ideas, movements, and
  leaders.
• It is usually structured around the nation state.
  
• It is distinct from, but related to, other fields
  of history such as social history, economic
  history, and military history.

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• Generally, political history focuses on events
  relating to nation-states and the formal
  political process.
• According to Hegel, Political History "is an idea
  of the state with a moral and spiritual force
  beyond the material interests of its subjects it
  followed that the state was the main agent of
  historical change"
• This contrasts with, for instance, social
  history, which focuses predominantly on the
  actions and lifestyles of ordinary people, or
  people's history, which is historical work from
  the perspective of common people.

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Diplomatic History
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• Diplomatic history, sometimes referred to as
  "Rankian History in honor of Leopold von Ranke,
  focuses on politics, politicians and other high
  rulers and views them as being the driving force
  of continuity and change in history.
• This type of political history is the study of
  the conduct of international relations between
  states or across state boundaries over time.
• This is the most common form of history and is
  often the classical and popular belief of what
  history should be.

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• Diplomatic history is the past aggregate of the
  art and practice of conducting negotiations
  between accredited persons representing groups or
  nations.
• It is the continuum of events occurring in
  succession leading from the past to the present
  and even into the future regarding diplomacy, the
  conduct of state relations through the
  intercession of individuals with regard to issues
  of peace-making, culture, economics, trade and
  war.
• Diplomatic history records or narrates events
  relating to or characteristic of diplomacy.

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• The first "scientific" political history was
  written by Leopold von Ranke in Germany in the
  19th century.
• An important aspect of political history is the
  study of ideology as a force for historical
  change.
• One author asserts that "political history as a
  whole cannot exist without the study of
  ideological differences and their implications.

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• Studies of political history typically center
  around a single nation and its political change
  and development.
• Some historians identify the growing trend
  towards narrow specialization in political
  history during recent decades "while a college
  professor in the 1940s sought to identify himself
  as a "historian", by the 1950s "American
  historian" was the designation.

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• From the 1970s onwards, new movements sought to
  challenge traditional approaches to political
  history.
• The development of social history and women's
  history shifted the emphasis away from the study
  of leaders and national decisions, and towards
  the role of ordinary citizens.

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• By the 1970s "the new social history" began
  replacing the older style.
• Emphasis shifted to a broader spectrum of
  American life, including such topics as the
  history of urban life, public health, ethnicity,
  the media, and poverty.
• As such, political history is sometimes seen as
  the more 'traditional' kind of history, in
  contrast with the more 'modern' approaches of
  other fields of history.

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Ethnohistory
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• Ethnohistory is the study of ethnographic
  cultures and indigenous customs by examining
  historical records.
• It is also the study of the history of various
  ethnic groups that may or may not exist today.

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• Ethnohistory uses both historical and
  ethnographic data as its foundation.
• Its historical methods and materials go beyond
  the standard use of books and manuscripts.
• Practitioners recognize the utility of maps,
  music, paintings, photography, folklore, oral
  tradition, ecology, site exploration,
  archaeological materials, museum collections,
  enduring customs, language, and place names.

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• Ethnohistorians have learned to use their special
  knowledge of the groups they study, linguistic
  insights, and the understanding of cultural
  phenomena in ways that make for a more in-depth
  analysis than the average historian is capable of
  doing based solely on written documents produced
  by and for one group.
• They try to understand culture on its own terms
  and according to its own cultural code.

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• Ethnohistory differs from other
  historically-related methodologies in that it
  embraces emic perspectives as tools of analysis.
• The field and it techniques are well suited for
  writing histories of Indian peoples because of
  its holistic and inclusive framework.

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Gender History
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• Despite its relatively short life, Gender History
  (and its forerunner Women's History) has had a
  rather significant effect on the general study of
  history.
• Since the 1960s, when the initially small field
  first achieved a measure of acceptance, it has
  gone through a number of different phases, each
  with its own challenges and outcomes, but always
  making an impact of some kind on the historical
  discipline.

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Great Man Theory of History
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• The Great man theory is a theory held by some
  that aims to explain history by the impact of
  "Great men", or heroes highly influential
  individuals, either from personal charisma,
  genius intellects, or great political impact.

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• For example, a scholarly follower of the Great
  Man theory would be likely to study the Second
  World War by focusing on the big personalities of
  the conflict Sir Winston Churchill, Adolf
  Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano
  Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, Hideki Tojo, etc. and
  view all of the historical events as being tied
  directly to their own individual decisions and
  orders.

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• It is often linked to 19th century commentator
  and historian Thomas Carlyle, who commented that
  "The history of the world is but the biography of
  great men."
• The Great Man approach to history was most
  popular with professional historians in the 19th
  century a popular work of this school is the
  Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1911)
  which contains lengthy and detailed biographies
  about the great men of history, but very few
  general or social histories.
• This heroic view of history was also strongly
  endorsed by some philosophical figures such as
  Hegel, Nietzsche, and Spengler, but it fell out
  of favor after World War II.

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History of Ideas
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• The history of ideas is a field of research in
  history that deals with the expression,
  preservation, and change of human ideas over
  time.
• The history of ideas is a sister-discipline to,
  or a particular approach within, intellectual
  history.
• Work in the history of ideas may involve
  interdisciplinary research in the history of
  philosophy, the history of science, or the
  history of literature.

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• In Sweden, the history of ideas has been a
  distinct university subject since the 1930s, when
  Johan Nordström, a scholar of literature, was
  appointed professor of the new discipline at
  Uppsala University.
• Today, several universities across the world
  provide courses in this field, usually as part of
  a graduate program.

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Marxist History
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• Marxist or historical materialist historiography
  is a school of historiography influenced by
  Marxism.
• The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are
  the centrality of social class and economic
  constraints in determining historical outcomes.
• Marxist historiography has made contributions to
  the history of the working class, oppressed
  nationalities, and the methodology of history
  from below.

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• Marxist history is generally teleological, in
  that it posits a direction of history, towards an
  end state of history as classless human society.
• Marxist historiography, that is, the writing of
  Marxist history in line with the given
  historiographical principles, is generally seen
  as a tool.
• Its aim is to bring those oppressed by history to
  self-consciousness, and to arm them with tactics
  and strategies from history it is both a
  historical and a liberatory project.

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• Historians who use Marxist methodology, but
  disagree with the mainstream of Marxism, often
  describe themselves as marxist historians (with a
  lowercase M).
• Methods from Marxist historiography, such as
  class analysis, can be divorced from the
  liberatory intent of Marxist historiography such
  practitioners often refer to their work as
  marxian or Marxian.

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Microhistory
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• Microhistory is a branch of the study of history.
  
• First developed in the 1970s, microhistory is the
  study of the past on a very small scale.
• The most common type of microhistory is the study
  of a small town or village.
• Other common studies include looking at
  individuals of minor importance, or analyzing a
  single painting.
• As the roots of major events are grounded in the
  actions of villagers these studies often have
  much larger ramifications.
• Microhistory is an important component of the
  "new history" that has emerged since the 1960s.
• It is usually done in close collaboration with
  the social sciences, such as anthropology and
  sociology.

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Military History
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• Military history is composed of the events in the
  history of humanity that fall within the category
  of conflict.
• This may range from a melee between two tribes to
  conflicts between proper militaries to a world
  war affecting the majority of the human
  population.
• Military historians record (in writing or
  otherwise) the events of military history.

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Oral History
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• Oral history is a method of historical
  documentation, using interviews with living
  survivors of the time being investigated.
• Contemporary oral history involves recording or
  transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical
  events.
• Some anthropologists started collecting
  recordings (at first especially of Native
  American folklore) on phonograph cylinders in the
  late 19th century.

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• In the 1930s the Works Progress Administration
  (WPA) sent out interviewers to collect accounts
  from various groups, including surviving
  witnesses of the American Civil War, Slavery, and
  other major historical events.
• The Library of Congress also began recording
  traditional American music and folklore onto
  acetate discs.
• With the development of audio tape recordings
  after World War II, the task of oral historians
  became easier.

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Post-Modern History
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• Postmodernism is a term applied to a wide-ranging
  set of developments in critical theory,
  philosophy, architecture, art, literature, and
  culture, which are generally characterized as
  either emerging from, in reaction to, or
  superseding, modernism.
• Postmodernism (sometimes abbreviated Pomo) was
  originally a reaction to modernism (not "post" in
  the purely temporal sense of "after").
• Largely influenced by the disillusionment induced
  by the Second World War, postmodernism tends to
  refer to a cultural, intellectual, or artistic
  state lacking a clear central hierarchy or
  organizing principle and embodying extreme
  complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, and
  diversity.

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• Post-modernity is a derivative referring to
  non-art aspects of history that were influenced
  by the new movement, namely the evolutions in
  society, economy and culture since the 1960s.
• The term was coined in 1949 to describe a
  dissatisfaction with modern architecture, leading
  to the postmodern architecture movement.
• Later, the term was applied to several movements,
  including in art, music, and literature, that
  reacted against modern movements, and are
  typically marked by revival of traditional
  elements and techniques.

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Prosopography
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• Prosopography, in historical studies, is an
  investigation of the common background
  characteristics of a historical group, whose
  individual biographies may be largely
  untraceable, by means of a collective study of
  their lives.
• Prosopography is an increasingly important
  approach within historical research.

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• Prosopographical research has the aim of learning
  about patterns of relationships and activities
  through the study of collective biography, and
  proceeds by collecting and analyzing
  statistically relevant quantities of biographical
  data about a well-defined group of individuals.
• A uniform set of criteria needs to be applied to
  the group in order to achieve meaningful results.
  

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Psycohistory
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• Psychohistory is the study of the psychological
  motivations of historical events.
• It combines the insights of psychotherapy with
  the research methodology of the social sciences
  to understand the emotional origin of the social
  and political behavior of groups and nations,
  past and present.
• This field of study is considered by some to have
  significant differences from the mainstream
  fields of history and psychology.

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• Psychohistory derives many of its insights from
  areas that are perceived to be ignored by
  conventional historians as shaping factors of
  human history, in particular, the effects of
  childbirth, parenting practice, and child abuse.
• The historical impact of incest, infanticide and
  child sacrifice are also considered.

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• There are three inter-related areas of
  psychohistorical study.
• The History of Childhood - which looks at such
  questions as
• How have children been raised throughout history
• How has the family been constituted
• How and why have practices changed over time
• The changing place and value of children in
  society over time
• How and why our views of child abuse and neglect
  have changed
• Psychobiography - which seeks to understand
  individual historical people and their
  motivations in history.
• Group Psychohistory - which seeks to understand
  the motivations of large groups, including
  nations, in history and current affairs.
• In doing so, psychohistory advances the use of
  group-fantasy analysis of political speeches,
  political cartoons and media headlines since the
  fantasy words therein offer clues to unconscious
  thinking and behaviors.

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Quantitative History
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• Quantitative History is an approach to historical
  research that makes use of quantitative,
  statistical and computer tools.
• It is considered a branch of social science
  history and has favorite journals, such as
  Historical Methods, Social Science History, and
  the Journal of Interdisciplinary History.

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Social History
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• Social history is a area of historical study
  considered by some to be a social science that
  attempts to view historical evidence from the
  point of view of developing social trends.
• In this view, it may include areas of economic
  history, legal history and the analysis of other
  aspects of civil society that show the evolution
  of social norms, behaviors and more.
• It is distinguished from political history,
  military history and the so-called history of
  great men.

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• While proponents of history from below and the
  French annales school of historians have
  considered themselves part of social history, it
  is seen as a much broader movement among
  historians in the development of historiography.
• Unlike other approaches, it tries to see itself
  as a synthetic form of history not limited to the
  statement of so-called historical fact but
  willing to analyze historical data in a more
  systematic manner.
• A question in social history is whether the
  masses follow the leaders or whether it is the
  other way around.

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• An example of social history can be seen in the
  American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and
  1960s.
• Typical history would focus on the who, what,
  when and where whereas social history focuses on
  the causes of the movement itself.
• Social historians would pose such questions as,
  "Why did the movement come about when it did?",
  and "What specific elements fostered the growth?"
  "What elements hindered the development?"
• This approach is favored by scholars because it
  allows for a full discussion on the sometimes
  less studied aspects.
• By understanding the past, we can begin to
  understand who we are now.

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Whig HistoryPositivist History
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• Whig historiography perceives the past as a
  teleological progression toward the present.
• In general, Whig historians look for and favour
  the rise of constitutional government, personal
  freedoms and scientific progress in any
  historical period.
• The term is often used pejoratively to denote any
  historian that adopts such positions, but it also
  connotes a specific set of British historians who
  embodied Whig ideals.
• Its antithesis can be seen in certain kinds of
  cultural pessimism.

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World History
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• World History is a field of historical study that
  emerged as a distinct academic field in the
  1980s.
• It examines human history from a global
  perspective.

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• Unlike most history writing of the 19th and most
  of the 20th centuries, which focused on
  narratives of individuals, and on national and
  ethnic perspectives, World History looks for
  common patterns that emerge across all cultures.
• World historians use a thematic approach, with
  two major focal points integration (how
  processes of world history have drawn people of
  the world together) and difference (how patterns
  of world history reveal the diversity of the
  human experience).

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• The study of world history is in some ways a
  product of the current period of accelerated
  globalization.
• This period is tending both to integrate various
  cultures and to highlight their differences.
• The advent of World History as a distinct field
  of study was heralded in the 1980s by the
  creation of the World History Association and of
  graduate programs at a handful of universities.

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• Over the past 20 years, scholarly publications,
  professional and academic organizations, and
  graduate programs in World History have
  proliferated.
• It has become an increasingly popular approach to
  teaching history in United States high schools
  and colleges.
• Many new textbooks are being published with a
  World History approach.