Approaches To History
How a historian approaches historical events is one of the most important decisions within historiography. It is commonly recognised by historians that, in themselves, individual historical facts dealing with names, dates and places 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.
The most influential historiographical approaches are:
- Comparative history
- Cultural history
- Diplomatic history
- Economic history
- Environmental history, a relatively new field
- Ethnohistory
- Family history
- Feminist history
- History of Religion and Church History; the history of theology is usually handled under Theology
- Intellectual History and History of ideas
- Labor history
- Latin American History
- Local History and Microhistory
- Marxist historiography and Historical materialism
- Military history, including naval and air
- Oral history
- Political history
- Public history, especially museums and historic preservation
- Quantitative history, Cliometrics (in economic history); Prosopography using statistics to study biographies
- Shared historical authority
- Social history and History from below; along with the French version the Annales School and the German Bielefeld School
- Women's history and Gender history
- World history and Universal history
Scholars typically specialize in a particular theme and region. see:
- Dark Ages (historiography)
- Historiography of the British Empire
- Historiography of the causes of World War I
- Historiography of China
- Historiography of the Cold War
- Historiography of the Crusades
- Historiography of early Islam
- Historiography of feudalism
- Historiography and nationalism
- Historiography of the French Revolution
- Historiography of science
- Historiography of Switzerland
- Historiography of the United States
- Historiography of World War II
- Soviet historiography
Read more about this topic: Historiography
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