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Historical method is the collection of techniques and guidelines that historians use to research and write histories of the past. Secondary sources, primary sources and material evidence such as that derived from archaeology may all be drawn on, and the historian's skill lies in identifying these sources, evaluating their relative authority, and combining their testimony appropriately in order ...
Herodotus (c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was a Greek historian who lived in the fifth century BC and one of the earliest historians whose work survives. A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. [1] Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events ...
A historical source encompasses "every kind of evidence that human beings have left of their past activities — the written word and spoken word, the shape of the landscape and the material artefact, the fine arts as well as photography and film."
The Allegory On the Writing of History shows Truth (top) watching the historian write history, while advised by Wisdom.(Jacob de Wit,1754)Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject.
Historians think of those sources as the closest to the origin of the information or idea under study. [23] [24] These types of sources can provide researchers with, as Dalton and Charnigo put it, "direct, unmediated information about the object of study." [25] Historians use other types of sources to understand history as well.
Carr's views about the nature of historical work in What Is History? were controversial. In his 1967 book The Practice of History, Geoffrey Elton criticized Carr for his "whimsical" distinction between the "historical facts" and the "facts of the past", saying that it reflected "an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it". [3]
Historians carry out original research, often using primary sources. Historians often have a PhD or advanced academic training in historiography, but may have an advanced degree in a related social science field or a domain specific field; other scholars and reliable sources will typically use the descriptive label historian to refer to an historian.
For instance, Ginzburg's 1976 work The Cheese and the Worms – "probably the most popular and widely read work of microhistory" [2] – investigates the life of a single sixteenth-century Italian miller, Menocchio. The individuals microhistorical works are concerned with are frequently those whom Richard M. Tristano describes as "little people ...