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This guide is an introduction to selected resources available for historical research.  It covers both primary sources (such as diaries, letters, newspaper articles, photographs, government documents and first-hand accounts) and secondary materials (such as books and articles written by historians and devoted to the analysis and interpretation of historical events and evidence).

"Research in history involves developing an understanding of the past through the examination and interpretation of evidence. Evidence may exist in the form of texts, physical remains of historic sites, recorded data, pictures, maps, artifacts, and so on. The historian’s job is to find evidence, analyze its content and biases, corroborate it with further evidence, and use that evidence to develop an interpretation of past events that holds some significance for the present.

Historians use libraries to

• locate primary sources (first-hand information such as diaries, letters, and original documents) for evidence
• find secondary sources (historians’ interpretations and analyses of historical evidence)
• verify factual material as inconsistencies arise"

( Research and Documentation in the Electronic Age, Fifth Edition, by Diana Hacker and Barbara Fister, Bedford/St. Martin, 2010)

This guide is meant to help you work through these steps.

Other helpful guides

This is a list of other historical research guides you may find helpful:

• Learning Historical Research Learning to Do Historical Research: A Primer for Environmental Historians and Others by William Cronon and his students, University of Wisconsin A website designed as a basic introduction to historical research for anyone and everyone who is interested in exploring the past.
• Reading, Writing, and Researching for History: A Guide for College Students by Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College Guide to all aspects of historical scholarship—from reading a history book to doing primary source research to writing a history paper.
• Writing Historical Essays: A Guide for Undergraduates Rutgers History Department guide to writing historical essays
• History Study Guides History study guides created by the Carleton College History Department

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• Last Updated: Mar 4, 2024 12:48 PM
• URL: https://researchguides.library.wisc.edu/introhist

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Philosophy of History

The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It invokes notions of human agency, change, the role of material circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. It raises the possibility of “learning from history.” And it suggests the possibility of better understanding ourselves in the present, by understanding the forces, choices, and circumstances that brought us to our current situation. It is therefore unsurprising that philosophers have sometimes turned their attention to efforts to examine history itself and the nature of historical knowledge. These reflections can be grouped together into a body of work called “philosophy of history.” This work is heterogeneous, comprising analyses and arguments of idealists, positivists, logicians, theologians, and others, and moving back and forth over the divides between European and Anglo-American philosophy, and between hermeneutics and positivism.

Given the plurality of voices within the “philosophy of history,” it is impossible to give one definition of the field that suits all these approaches. In fact, it is misleading to imagine that we refer to a single philosophical tradition when we invoke the phrase, “philosophy of history,” because the strands of research characterized here rarely engage in dialogue with each other. Still, we can usefully think of philosophers’ writings about history as clustering around several large questions, involving metaphysics, hermeneutics, epistemology, and ethics: (1) What does history consist of—individual actions, social structures, periods and regions, civilizations, large causal processes, divine intervention? (2) Does history as a whole have meaning, structure, or direction, beyond the individual events and actions that make it up? (3) What is involved in our knowing, representing, and explaining history? (4) To what extent do facts about human history create moral responsibilities for the present generation?

1.1 Actors, structures, and causes in history

1.2 selectivity and scale in history, 1.3 memory, history, and narrative, 2.1 universal or historical human nature, 2.2 does history possess directionality, 2.3 hegel’s philosophy of history, 2.4 hermeneutic approaches to history.

• 2.5 Conceptual philosophy of history

3.1 General laws in history?

3.2 historical objectivity, 3.3 causation in history, 3.4 recent topics in the philosophy of history, 4. historiography and the philosophy of history, 5. historical understanding and the twentieth century, 6. ethics, history, and memory, other internet resources, related entries, 1. history and its representation.

What are the intellectual tasks that define the historian’s work? In a sense, this question is best answered on the basis of a careful reading of some good historians. But it will be useful to offer several simple answers to this foundational question as a sort of conceptual map of the nature of historical knowing.

First, historians are interested in providing conceptualizations and factual descriptions of events and circumstances in the past. This effort is an answer to questions like these: “What happened? What was it like? What were some of the circumstances and happenings that took place during this period in the past?” Sometimes this means simply reconstructing a complicated story from scattered historical sources—for example, in constructing a narrative of the Spanish Civil War or attempting to sort out the series of events that culminated in the Detroit race riot / uprising of 1967. But sometimes it means engaging in substantial conceptual work in order to arrive at a vocabulary in terms of which to characterize “what happened.” Concerning the disorders of 1967 in Detroit: was this a riot or an uprising? How did participants and contemporaries think about it?

Second, historians often want to answer “why” questions: “Why did this event occur? What were the conditions and forces that brought it about?” What were the motivations of the participants? This body of questions invites the historian to provide an explanation of the event or pattern he or she describes: the rise of fascism in Spain, the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the occurrence of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in 1992 and later. And providing an explanation requires, most basically, an account of the causal mechanisms, background circumstances, and human choices that brought the outcome about. We explain an historical outcome when we identify the social causes, forces, events, and actions that brought it about, or made it more likely.

Third, and related to the previous point, historians are sometimes interested in answering a “how” question: “How did this outcome come to pass? What were the processes through which the outcome occurred?” How did the Prussian Army succeed in defeating the superior French Army in 1870? How did the Polish trade union Solidarity manage to bring about the end of Communist rule in Poland in 1989? Here the pragmatic interest of the historian’s account derives from the antecedent unlikelihood of the event in question: how was this outcome possible? This too is an explanation; but it is an answer to a “how possible” question rather than a “why necessary” question.

Fourth, often historians are interested in piecing together the human meanings and intentions that underlie a given complex series of historical actions. They want to help the reader make sense of the historical events and actions, in terms of the thoughts, motives, and states of mind of the participants. For example: Why did Napoleon III carelessly provoke Prussia into war in 1870? Why did the parties of the far right in Germany gain popular support among German citizens in the 1990s? Why did northern cities in the United States develop such marked patterns of racial segregation after World War II? Answers to questions like these require interpretation of actions, meanings, and intentions—of individual actors and of cultures that characterize whole populations. This aspect of historical thinking is “hermeneutic,” interpretive, and ethnographic.

And, of course, the historian faces an even more basic intellectual task: that of discovering and making sense of the archival and historical information that exists about a given event or time in the past. Historical data do not speak for themselves; archives are incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, and confusing. The historian needs to interpret individual pieces of evidence, and he or she needs to be able to somehow fit the mass of evidence into a coherent and truthful story. Complex events like the Spanish Civil War present the historian with an ocean of historical traces in repositories and archives all over the world; these collections sometimes reflect specific efforts at concealment by the powerful (for example, Franco’s efforts to conceal all evidence of mass killings of Republicans after the end of fighting); and the historian’s task is to find ways of using this body of evidence to discern some of the truth about the past.

In short, historians conceptualize, describe, contextualize, explain, and interpret events and circumstances of the past. They sketch out ways of representing the complex activities and events of the past; they explain and interpret significant outcomes; and they base their findings on evidence in the present that bears upon facts about the past. Their accounts need to be grounded on the evidence of the available historical record, and their explanations and interpretations require that the historian arrive at hypotheses about social causes and cultural meanings. Historians can turn to the best available theories in the social and behavioral sciences to arrive at theories about causal mechanisms and human behavior; so historical statements depend ultimately upon factual inquiry and theoretical reasoning. Ultimately, the historian’s task is to shed light on the what, why, and how of the past, based on inferences from the evidence of the present.

Three preliminary issues are relevant to almost all discussions of history and the philosophy of history. The first is a set of issues having to do with the "ontology" of history, the kinds of entities, processes, and events that make up the historical past. This topic concerns the entities, forces, and structures that we postulate in describing the historical phenomena, whether the medieval manor or the Weimar Republic, and the theory we have of how these social entities depend upon the actions of the historical actors who embody them. The second issue has to do with the problems of selectivity unavoidable for the historian of any period or epoch. Here we take up the question of how the unavoidable selectivity of historical inquiry in terms of theme, location, scope, and scale influences the nature of historical knowledge. The third issue has to do with the complicated relationship that exists between history, narrative, and collective memory. This topic addresses the point that real human beings make history. And, as Marc Bloch insists (1953), we humans are historical beings, we tell stories about ourselves, and those stories sometimes themselves have major historical consequences. The collective memories and identities of Serb nationalism were a historical fact in the 1990s, and these elements of mythic collective identity led to massive bloodshed, ethnic cleansing, and murder during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia (Judt and Snyder, 2012; Judt, 2006).

An important problem for the philosophy of history is how to conceptualize “history” happenings. What are the "objects" of which history consists? Are there social structures or systems that play a role in history? Are there causes at work in the historical process? Or is history simply an concatenation of the actions and mental frameworks of myriad individuals, high and low? If both structures and actors are crucial to understanding history, what is the relationship between them?

Marc Bloch (1953) provided a very simple and penetrating definition of history. History is "man in time". By this he meant that history is the product of human action, creativity, invention, conflict, and interaction. Bloch was skeptical about many other categories commonly used to analyze history—periods, epochs, civilizations, reigns, and centuries. Instead, he advocated for what can be called an "actor-centered" conception of history. If there are structures and systems in history, they depend upon the beliefs, attitudes, and actions of individual actors. If there are causes in history, they likewise depend upon the actions and interactions of human actors within a setting of humanly created institutions and norms. The task of the historian is to reconstruct the meanings, beliefs, values, purposes, constraints, and actions that jointly explain the moments of history, from the meaning of an ancient stele to the causes of the rapid defeat of France in 1940.

This perspective does not diminish the ontological importance of structures, systems, and ideologies in history. It simply forces the historian, like the social scientist, to be attentive to the problem of articulating the relationship that exists between actors and structures. A system of norms, a property system, and a moral ideology of feudal loyalty can all be understood as being both objectively present at a time and place, and being ontologically dependent upon the mental frameworks, actions, and relationships of the individual actors who make up these systems. This problem has been thoroughly discussed in the philosophy of social science under the rubric of "ontological individualism" (Zahle and Collin, 2014). Higher-level social entities are indeed causally powerful in the social world; and they depend entirely for their causal powers on the characteristics of the individual actors who constitute them. This is the requirement of microfoundations: extended social structures and causes depend upon microfoundations at the level of the individuals who constitute them (Little 2017). In particular, we need to have some idea about how individuals have been brought to think and act in the ways required by the structures and ideologies in which they function as adults. On this approach, history is the result of the actions and thoughts of vast numbers of actors, and institutions, structures, and norms are likewise embodied in the actions and mental frameworks of historically situated individuals. Such an approach helps to inoculate us against the error of reification of historical structures, periods, or forces, in favor of a more disaggregated conception of multiple actors and shifting conditions of action. This is the conception to which we are drawn when we understand history along the lines proposed by Bloch.

This orientation brings along with it the importance of analyzing closely the social and natural environment in which actors frame their choices. A historian’s account of the flow of human action eventuating in historical change unavoidably needs to take into account the institutional and situational environment in which these actions take place. Part of the social environment of a period of historical change is the ensemble of institutions that exist more or less stably in the period: property relations, political institutions, family structures, educational practices, religious and moral values. So historical explanations need to be sophisticated in their treatment of institutions, cultures, and practices. It is an important fact that a given period in time possesses a fund of scientific and technical knowledge, a set of social relationships of power, and a level of material productivity. It is also an important fact that knowledge is limited; that coercion exists; and that resources for action are limited. Within these opportunities and limitations, individuals, from leaders to ordinary people, make out their lives and ambitions through action.

Similar microfoundational accounts must be given in support of the idea of "causes in history". Once established, it is reasonably straightforward to see how a social structure such as a property system or an ideology "causes" a historical outcome: by constraining the choices of actors and contributing to their motivations and values in the choices they make, a structure or an ideology influences historically important events like social movements, market crashes, or outbreaks of ethnic violence. Structures influence individual actors, and individual actors collectively constitute structures. This approach gives a basis for judging that such-and-so circumstance “caused” a given historical change; but it also provides an understanding of the way in which this kind of historical cause is embodied and conveyed—through the actions and thoughts of individuals in response to given natural and social circumstances.

Are there large scale causes at work in historical processes? Historians often pose questions like these: “What were some of the causes of the fall of Rome?”, “what were the causes of the rise of fascism?”, or “what were the causes of the Industrial Revolution?”. These kinds of questions presuppose that there were grand causes at work that had grand effects. However, it is more plausible to believe that the causes of some very large and significant historical events are themselves small, granular, gradual, and cumulative. If this is the case, then there is no satisfyingly simple and high-level answer to the question, why did Rome fall? Moreover, astute historians like Bloch and his contemporaries recognized that there is a very large amount of contingency and path dependency in historical change (Pierson, 2004). Historical outcomes are not determined by a few large scale causes; instead, multiple local, contingent, and conjunctural processes and happening jointly come together in the production of the outcome of interest. It is possible, for example, that the collapse of the Roman Empire resulted from a myriad of very different contingencies and organizational features in different parts of the empire. A contingent account of the fall of Rome might refer to logistical difficulties in supplying armies in the German winter, particularly stubborn local resistance in Palestine, administrative decay in Roman Britain, population pressure in Egypt, and a particularly inept series of commanders in Gaul. Without drama, administrative and military collapse ensues. The best we can do sometimes is to identify a swarm of independent, small-scale processes and contingencies that eventually produced the large outcome of interest.

This approach might be called "actor-centered history": we explain a historical moment or event when we have an account of what people thought and believed; what they wanted; and what social, institutional, and environmental conditions framed their choices. It is a view of history that gives close attention to states of knowledge, ideology, and agency, as well as institutions, organizations, and structures, and examines the actions and practices of individuals as they lived their lives within these constraining and enabling circumstances. Further, it emphasizes the contingency and path-dependency of history, and it acknowledges the fact of heterogeneity of institutions, beliefs, and actions across time and place.

Historical research unavoidably requires selectivity in deciding what particular phenomena to emphasize. As Max Weber (1949) notes, there is an infinite depth to historical reality, and therefore it is necessary to select a finite representation of the object of study if we want to approach a problem rigorously. Let us imagine, for example, that a historian is interested in cities and their development over time. This might be pursued as an economic question, a question of regional geography, a question about cultural change, a question about poverty and segregation, a question about municipal governance, or a question about civil disturbances, and so one, for indefinitely many aspects of urban life. One generation of historians may be especially interested in cultural topics, while another generation is preoccupied with the organization of the economy at various points in history. The two orientations lead to very different historical representations of the past. Both inquiries lead to true depictions of the cities in question, but their findings and interpretations are very different. Likewise, the historian needs to make choices about location; is he or she interested in the cities of Britain, the cities of Europe, or all cities in the world? Further, the historian must consider whether to conduct a comparative history of cities, examining similarities and differences in the development of Paris and London; or instead restrict attention to a single case. Simply collecting “historical facts” about cities in the past is not a valid mode of historical inquiry. The question of how historians select and identify their subjects for research is an important one for the philosophy of history, and it has great significance for how we think about “knowing the past”.

Weber’s essays on methodology (1949) provide insight about these questions. Weber emphasizes the role that the scholar’s values play in his or her selection of a subject matter and a conceptual framework. So it is always open to historians of later generations to reevaluate prior interpretations of various aspects and periods of history. There is no general or comprehensive approach to defining the historical; there is only the possibility of a series of selective and value-guided approaches to defining specific aspects of history. We are always at liberty to bring forward new perspectives and new aspects of the problem, and to arrive at new insights about how the phenomena hang together when characterized in these new ways. This inherent selectivity of historical knowledge does not undermine the objectivity or veridicality of our knowledge; it merely entails that – like mathematics – history is inherently incomplete.

Doing history also forces the historian to make choices about the scale of the history with which he or she is concerned. Suppose we are interested in Asian history. Are we concerned with Asia as a continent, including China, India, Cambodia, and Japan, or the whole of China during the Ming Dynasty, or Hubei Province? Or if we define our interest in terms of a single important historical event like the Chinese Revolution, are we concerned with the whole of the Chinese Revolution, the base area of Yenan, or the specific experience of a handful of villages in Shandong during the 1940s? Given the fundamental heterogeneity of social life, the choice of scale makes an important difference to the findings.

Historians differ greatly around the decisions they make about scale. It is possible to treat any historical subject at the micro-scale. William Hinton provides what is almost a month-to-month description of the Chinese Revolution in Fanshen village—a collection of a few hundred families (Hinton 1966). Likewise, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie offers a deep treatment of the villagers of Montaillou; once again, a single village and a limited time (Le Roy Ladurie 1979). William Cronon provides a focused and detailed account of the development of Chicago as a metropolis for the middle of the United States (Cronon 1991). These histories are limited in time and space, and they can appropriately be called “micro-history.”

Macro-level history is possible as well. William McNeill provides a history of the world’s diseases (McNeill 1976); Massimo Livi-Bacci offers a history of the world’s population (Livi-Bacci 2007); and De Vries and Goudsblom provide an environmental history of the world (De Vries and Goudsblom 2002). In each of these cases, the historian has chosen a scale that encompasses virtually the whole of the globe, over millennia of time. These histories can certainly be called “macro-history.”

Both micro- and macro-histories have important shortcomings. Micro-history leaves us with the question, “how does this particular village shed light on anything larger?”. Macro-history leaves us with the question, “how do these large assertions about the nature of revolution or the importance of class conflict in mobilization apply in the context of Canada or Warsaw?”. The first threatens to be so particular as to lose all interest, whereas the second threatens to be so general as to lose all empirical relevance to real historical processes.

There is a third choice available to the historian that addresses both points. This is to choose a scale that encompasses enough time and space to be genuinely interesting and important, but not so much as to defy valid analysis. This level of scale might be regional—for example, G. William Skinner’s analysis of the macro-regions of China (Skinner 1977). It might be national—for example, a social and political history of Indonesia. And it might be supra-national—for example, an economic history of Western Europe or comparative treatment of Eurasian history. The key point is that historians in this middle range are free to choose the scale of analysis that seems to permit the best level of conceptualization of history, given the evidence that is available and the social processes that appear to be at work. And this mid-level scale permits the historian to make substantive judgments about the “reach” of social processes that are likely to play a causal role in the story that needs telling. This level of analysis can be referred to as “meso-history,” and it appears to offer an ideal mix of specificity and generality.

What is the relation between history, memory, and narrative? We might put these concepts into a crude map by saying that "history" is an organized and evidence-based presentation of of the processes, actions, and events that have occurred for a people over an extended period of time; "memory" is the personal recollections and representations of individuals who lived through a series of events and processes; and "narratives" are the stories that ordinary people and historians weave together to make sense of the events and happenings through which a people and a person have lived. Collective memory, the idea that groups such as Welsh miners, Serbian villagers, or black Alabama farmers possess a collective representation of the past that binds them together, can be understood as a shared set of narratives and stories about the past events of the given group or community. We use narratives to make sense of things that have happened; to identify meanings and causes within this series of events; and to select the "important" events and processes out from the ordinary and inconsequential.

What is a narrative? Most generally, it is an account of how and why a situation or event came to be. A narrative is intended to provide an account of how a complex historical event unfolded and why. We want to understand the event in time. What were the contextual features that were relevant to the outcome—the conditions at one or more points in time that played a role? What were the actions and choices that agents performed, and why did they take these actions rather than other possible choices? What causal processes—either social or natural—may have played a role in influencing the outcome? So a narrative seeks to provide hermeneutic understanding of the outcome—why did actors behave as they did in bringing about the outcome?—and causal explanation —what social and natural processes were acting behind the backs of the actors in bringing about the outcome? And different narratives represent different mixes of hermeneutic and causal factors. A crucial and unavoidable feature of narrative history is the fact of selectivity. The narrative historian is forced to make choices and selections at every stage: between "significant" and "insignificant", between "sideshow" and "main event", and between levels of description.

It is evident that there are often multiple truthful, unbiased, and inconsistent narratives that can be told for a single complex event. Exactly because many things happened at once, actors’ motives were ambiguous, and the causal connections among events are debatable, it is possible to construct inconsistent narratives that are equally well supported by the evidence. Further, the intellectual interest that different historians bring to the happening can lead to differences in the narrative. One historian may be primarily interested in the role that different views of social justice played in the actions of the participants; another may be primarily interested in the role that social networks played; and a third may be especially interested in the role of charismatic personalities, with a consequent structuring to the narrative around the actions and speeches of the charismatic leader. Each of these may be truthful, objective, and unbiased—and inconsistent in important ways with the others. So narratives are underdetermined by the facts, and there is no such thing as an exhaustive and comprehensive telling of the story—only various tellings that emphasize one set of themes or another.

When we consider collective memory and social identity, we are also forced to recognize that powerful institutions attempt to shape the narrative of important events in ways that serve political interests. A group identity can be defined as a set of beliefs and stories about one’s home, one’s people, and one’s past. These ideas often involve answers to questions like these: Where did we come from? How did we get here? And perhaps, who are my enemies? So an identity involves a narrative, a creation story, or perhaps a remembrance of a long chain of disasters and crimes. Identity and collective memory are intertwined; monuments, songs, icons, and flags help to set the way points in the history of a people and the collective emotions that this group experiences. They have to do with the stories we tell each other about who we are; how our histories brought us to this place; and what large events shaped us as a "people". Governments, leaders, activists, and political parties all have an interest in shaping collective memory to their own ends. Collective memories and identities are interwoven with myths and folk histories. And, as Benedict Anderson (1983) demonstrated, these stories are more often than not fictions of various kinds, promulgated by individuals and groups who have an interest in shaping collective consciousness in one way or another.

The philosophy of history must pay attention to the nexus of experience, memory, and history. There is no single “Civil Rights era” experience or “Great Depression” experience; instead, historians must consider a wide range of sources and evidence, including oral histories, first-person accounts, photographs, and other traces of the human experience of the time to allow them to discern both variation and some degree of thematicization of memory and identity in the periods they study. Second, attention to history and memory highlights the amount of human and individual agency involved in memory. Memories must be created; agents must find frameworks within which to understand their moments of historical experience. Museums and monuments curate historical memories — often with biases of their own. A third and equally important point is the fact that memories become part of the political mobilization possibilities that exist for a group. Groups find their collective identities through shared understandings of the past; and these shared understandings provide a basis for future collective action. Paul Ricoeur’s  Time and Narrative (1984-1988) sheds profound light on the profound relations that extend among memory, identity, narrative, and history.

2. Continental philosophy of history

The topic of history has been treated frequently in modern European philosophy. A long, largely German, tradition of thought looks at history as a total and comprehensible process of events, structures, and processes, for which the philosophy of history can serve as an interpretive tool. This approach, speculative and meta-historical, aims to discern large, embracing patterns and directions in the unfolding of human history, persistent notwithstanding the erratic back-and-forth of particular historical developments. Modern philosophers raising this set of questions about the large direction and meaning of history include Vico, Herder, and Hegel. A somewhat different line of thought in the continental tradition that has been very relevant to the philosophy of history is the hermeneutic tradition of the human sciences. Through their emphasis on the “hermeneutic circle” through which humans undertake to understand the meanings created by other humans—in texts, symbols, and actions—hermeneutic philosophers such as Schleiermacher (1838), Dilthey (1860–1903), and Ricoeur (1984-1988, 2000) offer philosophical arguments for emphasizing the importance of narrative interpretation within our understanding of history. Understanding history means providing a narrative that makes sense of it from beginning to end.

Human beings make history; but what is the fundamental nature of the human being? Is there one fundamental “human nature,” or are the most basic features of humanity historically conditioned (Mandelbaum 1971)? Can the study of history shed light on this question? When we study different historical epochs, do we learn something about unchanging human beings—or do we learn about fundamental differences of motivation, reasoning, desire, and collectivity? Is humanity a historical product? Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725) offered an interpretation of history that turned on the idea of a universal human nature and a universal history (see Berlin 2000 for commentary). Vico’s interpretation of the history of civilization offers the view that there is an underlying uniformity in human nature across historical settings that permits explanation of historical actions and processes. The common features of human nature give rise to a fixed series of stages of development of civil society, law, commerce, and government: universal human beings, faced with recurring civilizational challenges, produce the same set of responses over time. Two things are worth noting about this perspective on history: first, that it simplifies the task of interpreting and explaining history (because we can take it as given that we can understand the actors of the past based on our own experiences and nature); and second, it has an intellectual heir in twentieth-century social science theory in the form of rational choice theory as a basis for comprehensive social explanation.

Johann Gottfried Herder offers a strikingly different view about human nature and human ideas and motivations. Herder argues for the historical contextuality of human nature in his work, Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity (1791). He offers a historicized understanding of human nature, advocating the idea that human nature is itself a historical product and that human beings act differently in different periods of historical development (1800–1877, 1791). Herder’s views set the stage for the historicist philosophy of human nature later found in such nineteenth-century figures as Hegel and Nietzsche. His perspective too prefigures an important current of thought about the social world in the late twentieth century, the idea of the “social construction” of human nature and social identities (Anderson 1983; Hacking 1999; Foucault 1971).

Philosophers have raised questions about the meaning and structure of the totality of human history. Some philosophers have sought to discover a large organizing theme, meaning, or direction in human history. This may take the form of an effort to demonstrate how history enacts a divine order, or reveals a large pattern (cyclical, teleological, progressive), or plays out an important theme (for example, Hegel’s conception of history as the unfolding of human freedom discussed below). The ambition in each case is to demonstrate that the apparent contingency and arbitrariness of historical events can be related to a more fundamental underlying purpose or order.

This approach to history may be described as hermeneutic; but it is focused on interpretation of large historical features rather than the interpretation of individual meanings and actions. In effect, it treats the sweep of history as a complicated, tangled text, in which the interpreter assigns meanings to some elements of the story in order to fit these elements into the larger themes and motifs of the story. (Ranke makes this point explicitly (1881).)

A recurring current in this approach to the philosophy of history falls in the area of theodicy or eschatology: religiously inspired attempts to find meaning and structure in history by relating the past and present to some specific, divinely ordained plan. Theologians and religious thinkers have attempted to find meaning in historical events as expressions of divine will. One reason for theological interest in this question is the problem of evil; thus Leibniz’s Theodicy attempts to provide a logical interpretation of history that makes the tragedies of history compatible with a benevolent God’s will (1709). In the twentieth century, theologians such as Maritain (1957), Rust (1947), and Dawson (1929) offered systematic efforts to provide Christian interpretations of history.

Enlightenment thinkers rejected the religious interpretation of history but brought in their own teleology, the idea of progress—the idea that humanity is moving in the direction of better and more perfect civilization, and that this progression can be witnessed through study of the history of civilization (Condorcet 1795; Montesquieu 1748). Vico’s philosophy of history seeks to identify a foundational series of stages of human civilization. Different civilizations go through the same stages, because human nature is constant across history (Pompa 1990). Rousseau (1762a; 1762b) and Kant (1784–5; 1784–6) brought some of these assumptions about rationality and progress into their political philosophies, and Adam Smith embodies some of this optimism about the progressive effects of rationality in his account of the unfolding of the modern European economic system (1776). This effort to derive a fixed series of stages as a tool of interpretation of the history of civilization is repeated throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it finds expression in Hegel’s philosophy (discussed below), as well as Marx’s materialist theory of the development of economic modes of production (Marx and Engels 1845–49; Marx and Engels 1848).

The effort to find directionality or stages in history found a new expression in the early twentieth century, in the hands of several “meta-historians” who sought to provide a macro-interpretation that brought order to world history: Spengler (1934), Toynbee (1934), Wittfogel (1935), and Lattimore (1932). These authors offered a reading of world history in terms of the rise and fall of civilizations, races, or cultures. Their writings were not primarily inspired by philosophical or theological theories, but they were also not works of primary historical scholarship. Spengler and Toynbee portrayed human history as a coherent process in which civilizations pass through specific stages of youth, maturity, and senescence. Wittfogel and Lattimore interpreted Asian civilizations in terms of large determining factors. Wittfogel contrasts China’s history with that of Europe by characterizing China’s civilization as one of “hydraulic despotism”, with the attendant consequence that China’s history was cyclical rather than directional. Lattimore applies the key of geographic and ecological determinism to the development of Asian civilization (Rowe 2007).

A legitimate criticism of many efforts to offer an interpretation of the sweep of history is the view that it looks for meaning where none can exist. Interpretation of individual actions and life histories is intelligible, because we can ground our attributions of meaning in a theory of the individual person as possessing and creating meanings. But there is no super-agent lying behind historical events—for example, the French Revolution—and so it is a metaphysical mistake to attempt to find the meaning of the features of the event (e.g., the Terror). The theological approach purports to evade this criticism by attributing agency to God as the author of history, but the assumption that there is a divine author of history takes the making of history out of the hands of humanity.

Efforts to discern large stages in history such as those of Vico, Spengler, or Toynbee are vulnerable to a different criticism based on their mono-causal interpretations of the full complexity of human history. These authors single out one factor that is thought to drive history: a universal human nature (Vico), or a common set of civilizational challenges (Spengler, Toynbee). But their hypotheses need to be evaluated on the basis of concrete historical evidence. And the evidence concerning the large features of historical change over the past three millennia offers little support for the idea of one fixed process of civilizational development. Instead, human history, at virtually every scale, appears to embody a large degree of contingency and multiple pathways of development. This is not to say that there are no credible “large historical” interpretations available for human history and society. For example, Michael Mann’s sociology of early agrarian civilizations (1986), De Vries and Goudsblom’s efforts at global environmental history (2002), and Jared Diamond’s treatment of disease and warfare (1997) offer examples of scholars who attempt to explain some large features of human history on the basis of a few common human circumstances: the efforts of states to collect revenues, the need of human communities to exploit resources, or the global transmission of disease. The challenge for macro-history is to preserve the discipline of empirical evaluation for the large hypotheses that are put forward.

Hegel’s philosophy of history is perhaps the most fully developed philosophical theory of history that attempts to discover meaning or direction in history (1824a, 1824b, 1857). Hegel regards history as an intelligible process moving towards a specific condition—the realization of human freedom. “The question at issue is therefore the ultimate end of mankind, the end which the spirit sets itself in the world” (1857: 63). Hegel incorporates a deeper historicism into his philosophical theories than his predecessors or successors. He regards the relationship between “objective” history and the subjective development of the individual consciousness (“spirit”) as an intimate one; this is a central thesis in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). And he views it to be a central task for philosophy to comprehend its place in the unfolding of history. “History is the process whereby the spirit discovers itself and its own concept” (1857: 62). Hegel constructs world history into a narrative of stages of human freedom, from the public freedom of the polis and the citizenship of the Roman Republic, to the individual freedom of the Protestant Reformation, to the civic freedom of the modern state. He attempts to incorporate the civilizations of India and China into his understanding of world history, though he regards those civilizations as static and therefore pre-historical (O’Brien 1975). He constructs specific moments as “world-historical” events that were in the process of bringing about the final, full stage of history and human freedom. For example, Napoleon’s conquest of much of Europe is portrayed as a world-historical event doing history’s work by establishing the terms of the rational bureaucratic state. Hegel finds reason in history; but it is a latent reason, and one that can only be comprehended when the fullness of history’s work is finished: “When philosophy paints its grey on grey, then has a shape of life grown old. … The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” ((Hegel 1821: 13). (See O’Brien (1975), Taylor (1975), and Kojève (1969) for treatments of Hegel’s philosophy of history.)

It is worth observing that Hegel’s philosophy of history is not the indefensible exercise of speculative philosophical reasoning that analytic philosophers sometimes paint it. His philosophical approach is not based solely on foundational apriori reasoning, and many of his interpretations of concrete historical developments are quite insightful. Instead he proposes an “immanent” encounter between philosophical reason and the historical given. Here is how W. H. Walsh (1960) describes Hegel’s intellectual project in his philosophy of history:

To accomplish this task the philosopher must take the results of empirical history as data, but it will not suffice for him merely to reproduce them. He must try to illuminate history by bringing his knowledge of the Idea, the formal articulation of reason, to bear upon it, striving, in a phrase Hegel uses elsewhere, to elevate empirical contents to the rank of necessary truth. (Walsh 1960: 143)

Hegel’s prescription is that the philosopher should seek to discover the rational within the real—not to impose the rational upon the real. “To comprehend what is, this is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason” (1821: 11). His approach is neither purely philosophical nor purely empirical; instead, he undertakes to discover within the best historical knowledge of his time, an underlying rational principle that can be philosophically articulated (Avineri 1972).

Another important strand of continental philosophy of history proposes to apply hermeneutics to problems of historical interpretation. This approach focuses on the meaning of the actions and intentions of historical individuals rather than historical wholes. This tradition derives from the tradition of scholarly Biblical interpretation. Hermeneutic scholars emphasized the linguistic and symbolic core of human interactions and maintained that the techniques that had been developed for the purpose of interpreting texts could also be employed to interpret symbolic human actions and products. Wilhelm Dilthey maintained that the human sciences were inherently distinct from the natural sciences in that the former depend on the understanding of meaningful human actions, while the latter depend on causal explanation of non-intensional events (1883, 1860-1903, 1910). Human life is structured and carried out through meaningful action and symbolic expressions. Dilthey maintains that the intellectual tools of hermeneutics—the interpretation of meaningful texts—are suited to the interpretation of human action and history. The method of verstehen (understanding) makes a methodology of this approach; it invites the thinker to engage in an active construction of the meanings and intentions of the actors from their point of view (Outhwaite 1975). This line of interpretation of human history found expression in the twentieth-century philosophical writings of Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Foucault. This tradition approaches the philosophy of history from the perspective of meaning and language. It argues that historical knowledge depends upon interpretation of meaningful human actions and practices. Historians should probe historical events and actions in order to discover the interconnections of meaning and symbolic interaction that human actions have created (Sherratt 2006).

The hermeneutic tradition took an important new turn in the mid-twentieth century, as philosophers attempted to make sense of modern historical developments including war, racism, and the Holocaust. Narratives of progress were no longer compelling, following the terrible events of the first half of the twentieth century. The focus of this approach might be labeled “history as remembrance.” Contributors to this strand of thought emerged from twentieth-century European philosophy, including existentialism and Marxism, and were influenced by the search for meaning in the Holocaust. Paul Ricoeur draws out the parallels between personal memory, cultural memory, and history (2000). Dominick LaCapra brings the tools of interpretation theory and critical theory to bear on his treatment of the representation of the trauma of the Holocaust (1994, 1998). Others emphasize the role that folk histories play in the construction and interpretation of “our” past. This is a theme that has been taken up by contemporary historians, for example, by Michael Kammen in his treatment of public remembrance of the American Civil War (1991). Memory and the representation of the past play a key role in the formation of racial and national identities; numerous twentieth-century philosophers have noted the degree of subjectivity and construction that are inherent in the national memories represented in a group’s telling of its history.

Although not himself falling within the continental lineage, R. G. Collingwood’s philosophy of history falls within the general framework of hermeneutic philosophy of history (1946). Collingwood focuses on the question of how to specify the content of history. He argues that history is constituted by human actions. Actions are the result of intentional deliberation and choice; so historians are able to explain historical processes “from within” as a reconstruction of the thought processes of the agents who bring them about. He presents the idea of re-enactment as a solution to the problem of knowledge of the past from the point of view of the present. The past is accessible to historians in the present, because it is open to them to re-enact important historical moments through imaginative reconstruction of the actors’ states of mind and intentions. He describes this activity of re-enactment in the context of the historical problem of understanding Plato’s meanings as a philosopher or Caesar’s intentions as a ruler:

This re-enactment is only accomplished, in the case of Plato and Caesar respectively, so far as the historian brings to bear on the problem all the powers of his own mind and all his knowledge of philosophy and politics. It is not a passive surrender to the spell of another’s mind; it is a labour of active and therefore critical thinking. (Collingwood 1946: 215)

2.5 Conceptual history

The post-war German historian Reinhart Koselleck made important contributions to the philosophy of history that are largely independent from the other sources of Continental philosophy of history mentioned here. (Koselleck’s contributions are ably discussed in Olsen 2012.) Koselleck contributed to a “conceptual and critical theory of history” (2002, 2004). His major compendium, with Brunner and Conze, of the history of concepts of history in the German-speaking world is one of the major expressions of this work (Brunner, Conze, and Koselleck 1972-97). Koselleck believes there are three key tasks for the metahistorian or philosopher: to identify the concepts that are either possible or necessary in characterizing history; to locate those concepts within the context of the social and political discourses and conflicts of the time period; and to critically evaluate various of these concepts for their usefulness in historical analysis.

Key examples that Koselleck develops include “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”. Examples of metahistorical categories in Koselleck’s account include “capacity to die and capacity to kill,” “friend and foe,” “inside and outside,” and “master and servant”. Koselleck represents these conceptual oppositions as representing conditions of possibility of any representation of history (Bouton 2016: 178).

A large part of Koselleck’s work thus involves identifying and describing various kinds of historical concepts. In order to represent history it is necessary to make use of a vocabulary that distinguishes the things we need to talk about; and historical concepts permit these identifications. This in turn requires both conceptual and historical treatment: how the concepts are understood, and how they have changed over time. Christophe Bouton encapsulates Koselleck’s approach in these terms: “[It is an] inquiry into the historical categories that are used in, or presupposed by, the experience of history at its different levels, as events, traces, and narratives” (Bouton 2016: 164). Further, Bouton argues that Koselleck also brings a critical perspective to the concepts that he discusses: he asks the question of validity (Bouton 2016). To what extent do these particular concepts work well to characterize history?

What this amounts to is the idea that history is the result of conceptualization of the past on the part of the people who tell it—professional historians, politicians, partisans, and ordinary citizens. (It is interesting to note that Koselleck’s research in the final years of his career focused on the meaning of public monuments, especially war memorials.) It is therefore an important, even crucial, task to investigate the historical concepts that have been used to characterize the past. A key concept that was of interest to Koselleck was the idea of “modernity”. This approach might seem to fall within the larger field of intellectual history; but Koselleck and other exponents believe that the historical concepts in use actually play a role as well in the concrete historical developments that occur within a period.

It is worth noticing that history comes into Koselleck’s notion of Begriffsgeschichte in two ways. Koselleck is concerned to uncover the logic and semantics of the concepts that have been used to describe historical events and processes; and he is interested in the historical evolution of some of those concepts over time. (In this latter interest his definition of the question parallels that of the so-called Cambridge School of Quentin Skinner, John Dunn, and J. G. A. Pocock.) Numerous observers emphasize the importance of political conflict in Koselleck’s account of historical concepts: concepts are used by partisans to define the field of battle over values and loyalties (Pankakoski 2010). More generally, Koselleck’s aim is to excavate the layers of meaning that have been associated with key historical concepts in different historical periods. (Whatmore and Young 2015 provide extensive and useful accounts of each of the positions mentioned here.)

Conceptual history may appear to have a Kantian background—an exploration of the “categories” of thought on the basis of which alone history is intelligible. But this appears not to be Koselleck’s intention, and his approach is not apriori. Rather, he looks at historical concepts on a spectrum of abstraction, from relatively close to events (the French Revolution) to more abstract (revolutionary change). Moreover, he makes rigorous attempts to discover the meanings and uses of these concepts in their historical contexts.

Koselleck’s work defines a separate space within the field of the philosophy of history. It has to do with meanings in history, but it is neither teleological nor hermeneutic. It takes seriously the obligation of the historian excavate the historical facts with scrupulous rigor, but it is not empiricist or reductionist. It emphasizes the dependence of “history” on the conceptual resources of those who live history and those who tell history, but it is not post-modernist or relativist. Koselleck provides an innovative and constructive way of formulating the problem of historical knowledge.

3. Anglo-American philosophy of history

The traditions of empiricism and Anglo-American philosophy have also devoted occasional attention to history. Philosophers in this tradition have avoided the questions of speculative philosophy of history and have instead raised questions about the logic and epistemology of historical knowledge. Here the guiding question is, “What are the logical and epistemological characteristics of historical knowledge and historical explanation?”.

David Hume’s empiricism cast a dominant key for almost all subsequent Anglo-American philosophy, and this influence extends to the interpretation of human behavior and the human sciences. Hume wrote a widely read history of England (1754–1762). His interpretation of history was based on the assumption of ordinary actions, motives, and causes, with no sympathy for theological interpretations of the past. His philosophical view of history was premised on the idea that explanations of the past can be based on the assumption of a fixed human nature.

Anglo-American interest in the philosophy of history was renewed at mid-twentieth century with the emergence of “analytical philosophy of history.” Representative contributors include Dray (1957, 1964, 1966), Danto (1965), and Gardiner (1952, 1974). This approach involves the application of the methods and tools of analytic philosophy to the special problems that arise in the pursuit of historical explanations and historical knowledge (Gardiner 1952). Here the interest is in the characteristics of historical knowledge: how we know facts about the past, what constitutes a good historical explanation, whether explanations in history require general laws, and whether historical knowledge is underdetermined by available historical evidence. Analytic philosophers emphasized the empirical and scientific status of historical knowledge, and attempted to understand this claim along the lines of the scientific standing of the natural sciences (Nagel 1961).

Philosophers in the analytic tradition are deeply skeptical about the power of non-empirical reason to arrive at substantive conclusions about the structure of the world—including human history. Philosophical reasoning by itself cannot be a source of substantive knowledge about the natural world, or about the sequence of events, actions, states, classes, empires, plagues, and conquests that we call “history.” Rather, substantive knowledge about the world can only derive from empirical investigation and logical analysis of the consequences of these findings. So analytic philosophers of history have had little interest in the large questions about the meaning and structure of history considered above. The practitioners of speculative philosophy of history, on the other hand, are convinced of the power of philosophical thought to reason through to a foundational understanding of history, and would be impatient with a call for a purely empirical and conceptual approach to the subject.

W. H. Walsh’s Philosophy of History (Walsh 1960 [1951]), first published in 1951 and revised in 1960, is an open-minded and well-grounded effort to provide an in-depth presentation of the field that crosses the separation between continental and analytical philosophy. The book attempts to treat both major questions driving much of the philosophy of history: the nature of historical knowledge and the possibility of gaining “metaphysical” knowledge about history. An Oxford philosopher trained in modern philosophy, Walsh was strongly influenced by Collingwood and was well aware of the European idealist tradition of philosophical thinking about history, including Rickert, Dilthey, and Croce, and he treats this tradition in a serious way. He draws the distinction between these traditions along the lines of “critical” and “speculative” philosophy of history. Walsh’s goal for the book is ambitious; he hopes to propose a framework within which the main questions about history can be addressed, including both major traditions. He advances the view that the historian is presented with a number of events, actions, and developments during a period. How do they hang together? The process of cognition through which the historian makes sense of a set of separate historical events Walsh refers to as “colligation” — “to locate a historical event in a larger historical process in terms of which it makes sense” (23).

Walsh fundamentally accepts Collingwood’s most basic premise: that history concerns conscious human action. Collingwood’s slogan was that “history is the science of the mind,” and Walsh appears to accept much of this perspective. So the key intellectual task for the historian, on this approach, is to reconstruct the reasons or motives that actors had at various points in history (and perhaps the conditions that led them to have these reasons and motives). This means that the tools of interpretation of meanings and reasons are crucial for the historian—much as the hermeneutic philosophers in the German tradition had argued.

Walsh suggests that the philosophical content of the philosophy of history falls naturally into two different sorts of inquiry, parallel to the distinction between philosophy of nature and philosophy of science. The first has to do with metaphysical questions about the reality of history as a whole; the latter has to do with the epistemic issues that arise in the pursuit and formulation of knowledge of history. He refers to these approaches as “speculative” and “critical” aspects of the philosophy of history. And he attempts to formulate a view of what the key questions are for each approach. Speculative philosophy of history asks about the meaning and purpose of the historical process. Critical philosophy of history is what we now refer to as “analytic” philosophy; it is the equivalent for history of what the philosophy of science is for nature.

The philosopher of science Carl Hempel stimulated analytic philosophers’ interest in historical knowledge in his essay, “The Function of General Laws in History” (1942). Hempel’s general theory of scientific explanation held that all scientific explanations require subsumption under general laws. Hempel considered historical explanation as an apparent exception to the covering-law model and attempted to show the suitability of the covering-law model even to this special case. He argued that valid historical explanations too must invoke general laws. The covering-law approach to historical explanation was supported by other analytical philosophers of science, including Ernest Nagel (1961). Hempel’s essay provoked a prolonged controversy between supporters who cited generalizations about human behavior as the relevant general laws, and critics who argued that historical explanations are more akin to explanations of individual behavior, based on interpretation that makes the outcome comprehensible. Especially important discussions were offered by William Dray (1957), Michael Scriven (1962), and Alan Donagan (1966). Donagan and others pointed out the difficulty that many social explanations depend on probabilistic regularities rather than universal laws. Others, including Scriven, pointed out the pragmatic features of explanation, suggesting that arguments that fall far short of deductive validity are nonetheless sufficient to “explain” a given historical event in a given context of belief. The most fundamental objections, however, are these: first, that there are virtually no good examples of universal laws in history, whether of human behavior or of historical event succession (Donagan 1966: 143–45); and second, that there are other compelling schemata through which we can understand historical actions and outcomes that do not involve subsumption under general laws (Elster 1989). These include the processes of reasoning through which we understand individual actions—analogous to the methods of verstehen and the interpretation of rational behavior mentioned above (Dray 1966: 131–37); and the processes through which we can trace out chains of causation and specific causal mechanisms without invoking universal laws.

A careful re-reading of these debates over the covering-law model in history suggests that the debate took place largely because of the erroneous assumption of the unity of science and the postulation of the regulative logical similarity of all areas of scientific reasoning to a few clear examples of explanation in a few natural sciences. This approach was a deeply impoverished one, and handicapped from the start in its ability to pose genuinely important questions about the nature of history and historical knowledge. Explanation of human actions and outcomes should not be understood along the lines of an explanation of why radiators burst when the temperature falls below zero degrees centigrade. As Donagan concludes, “It is harmful to overlook the fundamental identity of the social sciences with history, and to mutilate research into human affairs by remodeling the social sciences into deformed likenesses of physics” (1966: 157). The insistence on naturalistic models for social and historical research leads easily to a presumption in favor of the covering-law model of explanation, but this presumption is misleading.

Another issue that provoked significant attention among analytic philosophers of history is the issue of “objectivity.” Is it possible for historical knowledge to objectively represent the past? Or are forms of bias, omission, selection, and interpretation such as to make all historical representations dependent on the perspective of the individual historian? Does the fact that human actions are value-laden make it impossible for the historian to provide a non-value-laden account of those actions?

This topic divides into several different problems, as noted by John Passmore (1966: 76). The most studied of these within the analytic tradition is that of the value-ladenness of social action. Second is the possibility that the historian’s interpretations are themselves value-laden—raising the question of the capacity for objectivity or neutrality of the historian herself. Does the intellectual have the ability to investigate the world without regard to the biases that are built into her political or ethical beliefs, her ideology, or her commitments to a class or a social group? And third is the question of the objectivity of the historical circumstances themselves. Is there a fixed historical reality, independent from later representations of the facts? Or is history intrinsically “constructed,” with no objective reality independent from the ways in which it is constructed? Is there a reality corresponding to the phrase, “the French Revolution,” or is there simply an accumulation of written versions of the French Revolution?

There are solutions to each of these problems that are highly consonant with the philosophical assumptions of the analytic tradition. First, concerning values: There is no fundamental difficulty in reconciling the idea of a researcher with one set of religious values, who nonetheless carefully traces out the religious values of a historical actor possessing radically different values. This research can be done badly, of course; but there is no inherent epistemic barrier that makes it impossible for the researcher to examine the body of statements, behaviors, and contemporary cultural institutions corresponding to the other, and to come to a justified representation of the other. One need not share the values or worldview of a sans-culotte , in order to arrive at a justified appraisal of those values and worldview. This leads us to a resolution of the second issue as well—the possibility of neutrality on the part of the researcher. The set of epistemic values that we impart to scientists and historians include the value of intellectual discipline and a willingness to subject their hypotheses to the test of uncomfortable facts. Once again, review of the history of science and historical writing makes it apparent that this intellectual value has effect. There are plentiful examples of scientists and historians whose conclusions are guided by their interrogation of the evidence rather than their ideological presuppositions. Objectivity in pursuit of truth is itself a value, and one that can be followed.

Finally, on the question of the objectivity of the past: Is there a basis for saying that events or circumstances in the past have objective, fixed characteristics that are independent from our representation of those events? Is there a representation-independent reality underlying the large historical structures to which historians commonly refer (the Roman Empire, the Great Wall of China, the imperial administration of the Qianlong Emperor)? We can work our way carefully through this issue, by recognizing a distinction between the objectivity of past events, actions and circumstances, the objectivity of the contemporary facts that resulted from these past events, and the objectivity and fixity of large historical entities. The past occurred in precisely the way that it did—agents acted, droughts occurred, armies were defeated, new technologies were invented. These occurrences left traces of varying degrees of information richness; and these traces give us a rational basis for arriving at beliefs about the occurrences of the past. So we can offer a non-controversial interpretation of the “objectivity of the past.” However, this objectivity of events and occurrences does not extend very far upward as we consider more abstract historical events: the creation of the Greek city-state, the invention of Enlightenment rationality, the Taiping Rebellion. In each of these instances the noun’s referent is an interpretive construction by historical actors and historians, and one that may be undone by future historians. To refer to the “Taiping Rebellion” requires an act of synthesis of a large number of historical facts, along with an interpretive story that draws these facts together in this way rather than that way. The underlying facts of behavior, and their historical traces, remain; but the knitting-together of these facts into a large historical event does not constitute an objective historical entity. Consider research in the past twenty years that questions the existence of the “Industrial Revolution.” In this debate, the same set of historical facts were first constructed into an abrupt episode of qualitative change in technology and output in Western Europe; under the more recent interpretation, these changes were more gradual and less correctly characterized as a “revolution” (O’Brien and Keyder 1978). Or consider Arthur Waldron’s sustained and detailed argument to the effect that there was no “Great Wall of China,” as that structure is usually conceptualized (1990).

A third important set of issues that received attention from analytic philosophers concerned the role of causal ascriptions in historical explanations. What is involved in saying that “The American Civil War was caused by economic conflict between the North and the South”? Does causal ascription require identifying an underlying causal regularity—for example, “periods of rapid inflation cause political instability”? Is causation established by discovering a set of necessary and sufficient conditions? Can we identify causal connections among historical events by tracing a series of causal mechanisms linking one to the next? This topic raises the related problem of determinism in history: are certain events inevitable in the circumstances? Was the fall of the Roman Empire inevitable, given the configuration of military and material circumstances prior to the crucial events?

Analytic philosophers of history most commonly approached these issues on the basis of a theory of causation drawn from positivist philosophy of science. This theory is ultimately grounded in Humean assumptions about causation: that causation is nothing but constant conjunction. So analytic philosophers were drawn to the covering-law model of explanation, because it appeared to provide a basis for asserting historical causation. As noted above, this approach to causal explanation is fatally flawed in the social sciences, because universal causal regularities among social phenomena are unavailable. So it is necessary either to arrive at other interpretations of causality or to abandon the language of causality. A second approach was to define causes in terms of a set of causally relevant conditions for the occurrence of the event—for example, necessary and/or sufficient conditions, or a set of conditions that enhance or reduce the likelihood of the event. This approach found support in “ordinary language” philosophy and in analysis of the use of causal language in such contexts as the courtroom (Hart and Honoré 1959). Counterfactual reasoning is an important element of discovery of a set of necessary and/or sufficient conditions; to say that \(C\) was necessary for the occurrence of \(E\) requires that we provide evidence that \(E\) would not have occurred if \(C\) were not present (Mackie 1965, 1974). And it is evident that there are causal circumstances in which no single factor is necessary for the occurrence of the effect; the outcome may be overdetermined by multiple independent factors.

The convergence of reasons and causes in historical processes is helpful in this context, because historical causes are frequently the effect of deliberate human action (Davidson 1963). So specifying the reason for the action is simultaneously identifying a part of the cause of the consequences of the action. It is often justifiable to identify a concrete action as the cause of a particular event (a circumstance that was sufficient in the existing circumstances to bring about the outcome), and it is feasible to provide a convincing interpretation of the reasons that led the actor to carry out the action.

What analytic philosophers of the 1960s did not come to, but what is crucial for current understanding of historical causality, is the feasibility of tracing causal mechanisms through a complex series of events (causal realism). Historical narratives often take the form of an account of a series of events, each of which was a causal condition or trigger for later events. Subsequent research in the philosophy of the social sciences has provided substantial support for historical explanations that depend on tracing a series of causal mechanisms (Little 2018; Hedström and Swedberg 1998).

English-speaking philosophy of history shifted significantly in the 1970s, beginning with the publication of Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973) and Louis Mink’s writings of the same period (1966; Mink et al. 1987). The so-called “linguistic turn” that marked many areas of philosophy and literature also influenced the philosophy of history. Whereas analytic philosophy of history had emphasized scientific analogies for historical knowledge and advanced the goals of verifiability and generalizability in historical knowledge, English-speaking philosophers in the 1970s and 1980s were increasingly influenced by hermeneutic philosophy, post-modernism, and French literary theory (Rorty 1979). These philosophers emphasized the rhetoric of historical writing, the non-reducibility of historical narrative to a sequence of “facts”, and the degree of construction that is involved in historical representation. Affinities with literature and anthropology came to eclipse examples from the natural sciences as guides for representing historical knowledge and historical understanding. The richness and texture of the historical narrative came in for greater attention than the attempt to provide causal explanations of historical outcomes. Frank Ankersmit captured many of these themes in his treatment of historical narrative (1995; Ankersmit and Kellner 1995); see also Berkhofer (1995).

This “new” philosophy of history is distinguished from analytic philosophy of history in several important respects. It emphasizes historical narrative rather than historical causation. It is intellectually closer to the hermeneutic tradition than to the positivism that underlay the analytic philosophy of history of the 1960s. It highlights features of subjectivity and multiple interpretation over those of objectivity, truth, and correspondence to the facts. Another important strand in this approach to the philosophy of history is a clear theoretical preference for the historicist rather than the universalist position on the status of human nature—Herder rather than Vico. The prevalent perspective holds that human consciousness is itself a historical product, and that it is an important part of the historian’s work to piece together the mentality and assumptions of actors in the past (Pompa 1990). Significantly, contemporary historians such as Robert Darnton have turned to the tools of ethnography to permit this sort of discovery (1984).

Another important strand of thinking within analytic philosophy has focused attention on historical ontology (Hacking 2002, Little 2010). The topic of historical ontology is important, both for philosophers and for practicing historians. Ontology has to do with the question, what kinds of things do we need to postulate in a given realm? Historical ontology poses this question with regard to the realities of the past. Should large constructs like ‘revolution’, ‘market society’, ‘fascism’, or ‘Protestant religious identity’ be included in our ontology as real things? Or should we treat these ideas in a purely nominalistic way, treating them as convenient ways of aggregating complex patterns of social action and knowledge by large numbers of social actors in a time and place? Further, how should we think about the relationship between instances and categories in the realm of history, for example, the relation between the French, Chinese, or Russian Revolutions and the general category of ‘revolution’? Are there social kinds that recur in history, or is each historical formation unique in important ways? These are all questions of ontology, and the answers we give to them will have important consequences for how we conceptualize and explain the past.

When historians discuss methodological issues in their research they more commonly refer to “historiography” than to “philosophy of history.” What is the relation between these bodies of thought about the writing of history? We should begin by asking the basic question: what is historiography? In its most general sense, the term refers to the study of historians’ methods and practices. Any intellectual or creative practice is guided by a set of standards and heuristics about how to proceed, and “experts” evaluate the performances of practitioners based on their judgments of how well the practitioner meets the standards. So one task we always have in considering an expert activity is to attempt to identify these standards and criteria of good performance. This is true for theatre and literature, and it is true for writing history. Historiography is at least in part the effort to do this work for a particular body of historical writing. (Several handbooks contain a wealth of recent writings on various aspects of historiography; Tucker 2009, Bentley 1997, Breisach 2007. Important and innovative contributions to understanding the intellectual tasks of the historian include Bloch 1953 and Paul 2015.)

Historians normally make truth claims, and they ask us to accept those claims based on the reasoning they present. So a major aspect of the study of historiography has to do with defining the ideas of evidence, rigor, and standards of reasoning for historical inquiry. We presume that historians want to discover empirically supported truths about the past, and we presume that they want to offer inferences and interpretations that are somehow regulated by standards of scientific rationality. (Simon Schama challenges some of these ideas in Dead Certainties (Schama 1991).) So the apprentice practitioner seeks to gain knowledge of the practices of his/her elders in the profession: what counts as a compelling argument, how to assess a body of archival evidence, how to offer or criticize an interpretation of complex events that necessarily exceeds the available evidence. The historiographer has a related task: he/she would like to be able to codify the main methods and standards of one historical school or another.

There are other desiderata governing a good historical work, and these criteria may change from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. Discerning the historian’s goals is crucial to deciding how well he or she succeeds. So discovering these stylistic and aesthetic standards that guide the historian’s work is itself an important task for historiography. This means that the student of historiography will naturally be interested in the conventions of historical writing and rhetoric that are characteristic of a given period or school.

A full historiographic assessment of a given historian might include questions like these: What methods of discovery does he/she use? What rhetorical and persuasive goals does he/she pursue? What models of explanation? What paradigm of presentation? What standards of style and rhetoric? What interpretive assumptions?

A historical school might be defined as a group of interrelated historians who share a significant number of specific assumptions about evidence, explanation, and narrative. The Annales school, established by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre in the 1920s, represented a distinctive and fertile approach to social history (Burguière 2009), united by shared assumptions about both topics and intellectual approaches to the past. Historiography becomes itself historical when we recognize that frameworks of assumptions about historical knowledge and reasoning change over time. On this assumption, the history of historical thinking and writing is itself an important subject. How did historians of various periods in human history conduct their study and presentation of history? Under this rubric we find books on the historiography of the ancient Greeks; Renaissance historiography; or the historiography of German romanticism. Arnaldo Momigliano’s writings on the ancient historians fall in this category (Momigliano 1990). In a nutshell, Momigliano is looking at the several traditions of ancient history-writing as a set of normative practices that can be dissected and understood in their specificity and their cultural contexts.

A second primary use of the concept of historiography is more present-oriented and methodological. It involves the study and analysis of historical methods of research, inquiry, inference, and presentation used by more-or-less contemporary historians. How do contemporary historians go about their tasks of understanding the past? Here we can reflect upon the historiographical challenges that confronted Philip Huang as he investigated the Chinese peasant economy in the 1920s and 1930s (Huang 1990), or the historiographical issues raised in Robert Darnton’s telling of a peculiar and trivial event, the Great Cat Massacre by printers’ apprentices in Paris in the 1730s (Darnton 1984). Sometimes these issues have to do with the scarcity or bias in the available bodies of historical records (for example, the fact that much of what Huang refers to about the village economy of North China was gathered by the research teams of the occupying Japanese army). Sometimes they have to do with the difficulty of interpreting historical sources (for example, the unavoidable necessity Darnton faced of providing meaningful interpretation of a range of documented actions that appear fundamentally irrational).

An important question that arises in recent historiography is that of the status of the notion of “global history.” One important reason for thinking globally as an historian is the fact that the history discipline—since the Greeks—has tended to be Eurocentric in its choice of topics, framing assumptions, and methods. Economic and political history, for example, often privileges the industrial revolution in England and the creation of the modern bureaucratic state in France, Britain, and Germany, as being exemplars of “modern” development in economics and politics. This has led to a tendency to look at other countries’ development as non-standard or stunted. So global history is, in part, a framework within which the historian avoids privileging one regional center as primary and others as secondary or peripheral. Bin Wong makes this point in China Transformed (Wong 1997).

Second is the related fact that when Western historical thinkers—for example, Hegel, Malthus, Montesquieu—have turned their attention to Asia, they have often engaged in a high degree of stereotyping without much factual historical knowledge. The ideas of Oriental despotism, Asian overpopulation, and Chinese stagnation have encouraged a cartoonish replacement of the intricate and diverse processes of development of different parts of Asia by a single-dimensional and reductive set of simplifying frameworks of thought. This is one of the points of Edward Said’s critique of orientalism (Said 1978). So doing “global” history means paying rigorous attention to the specificities of social, political, and cultural arrangements in other parts of the world besides Europe.

So a historiography that takes global diversity seriously should be expected to be more agnostic about patterns of development, and more open to discovery of surprising patterns, twists, and variations in the experiences of India, China, Indochina, the Arab world, the Ottoman Empire, and Sub-Saharan Africa. Variation and complexity are what we should expect, not stereotyped simplicity. Clifford Geertz’s historical reconstruction of the “theatre state” of Bali is a case in point—he uncovers a complex system of governance, symbol, value, and hierarchy that represents a substantially different structure of politics than the models derived from the emergence of bureaucratic states in early modern Europe (Geertz 1980). A global history needs to free itself from Eurocentrism.

This step away from Eurocentrism in outlook should also be accompanied by a broadening of the geographical range of what is historically interesting. So a global history ought to be global and trans-national in its selection of topics—even while recognizing the fact that all historical research is selective. A globally oriented historian will recognize that the political systems of classical India are as interesting and complex as the organization of the Roman Republic.

An important current underlying much work in global history is the reality of colonialism through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the equally important reality of anti-colonial struggles and nation building in the 1960s and 1970s. “The world” was important in the early-modern capitals of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium because those nations exerted colonial rule in various parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. So there was a specific interest in gaining certain kinds of knowledge about those societies—in order to better govern them and exploit them. And post-colonial states had a symmetrical interest in supporting global historiography in their own universities and knowledge systems, in order to better understand and better critique the forming relations of the past.

A final way in which history needs to become global is to incorporate the perspectives and historical traditions of historians in non-western countries into the mainstream of discussion of major world developments. Indian and Chinese historians have their own intellectual traditions in conducting historical research and explanation; a global history is one that pays attention to the insights and arguments of these traditions. So global historiography has to do with a broadened definition of the arena of historical change to include Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas; a recognition of the complexity and sophistication of institutions and systems in many parts of the world; a recognition of the trans-national interrelatedness that has existed among continents for at least four centuries; and a recognition of the complexity and distinctiveness of different national traditions of historiography

Dominic Sachsenmaier provides a significant recent discussion of some of these issues (Sachsenmaier 2011). Sachsenmaier devotes much of his attention to the last point mentioned here, the “multiple global perspectives” point. He wants to take this idea seriously and try to discover some of the implications of different national traditions of academic historiography. He writes, “It will become quite clear that in European societies the question of historiographical traditions tended to be answered in ways that were profoundly different from most academic communities in other parts of the world” (17).

As should be clear from these remarks, there is a degree of overlap between historiography and the philosophy of history in the fact that both are concerned with identifying and evaluating the standards of reasoning that are used in various historical traditions. That said, historiography is generally more descriptive and less evaluative than the philosophy of history. And it is more concerned with the specifics of research and writing than is the philosophy of history.

Every period presents challenges for the historian, and every period raises problems for historiography and the philosophy of history. The twentieth century is exceptional, however, even by this standard. Events of truly global significance occurred from beginning to end. War, totalitarianism, genocide, mass starvation, ideologies of murder and extermination, and states that dominated their populations with unprecedented violence all transpired during the century. The Holocaust (Snyder 2010, 2015), the Holodomor (Applebaum 2017), the Gulag (Applebaum 2003), and the cultural and ideological premises of the Nazi regime (Rabinbach et al 2020) have all presented historians with major new challenges of research, framing, and understanding. How should historians seek to come to grips with these complex and horrifying circumstances? These occurrences were highly complex and extended and often hidden: many thousands of active participants, many groups and populations, millions of victims, conflicting purposes and goals, new organizations and institutions, numerous ideologies. Moreover, through too many of these novelties is woven the theme of evil – deliberate destruction, degradation, and murder of masses of innocent human beings. The historian of virtually any aspect of the twentieth century is confronted with great problems of frame-setting, explanatory purpose, and moral reflection.

These facts about the twentieth century raise problems for the philosophy of history for several reasons. They challenge historians to consider the depth, detail, and human experience that the historian must convey of the events and experiences that war, genocide, and totalitarianism imposed on millions of people. The discovery and truthful documentation of the extent and lived experience of these crimes is a painful but crucial necessity. Second, historians are forced to reflect on the assumptions they bring to their research and interpretations – assumptions about geography, political causation, individual motivation, and behavior resulting in these crimes. Third, historians must reconsider and sharpen their hypotheses about causation of these vast and extended crimes against humanity. Fourth, it appears inescapable that historians have a human responsibility to contribute to worldwide changes in culture, memory, and politics in ways that make genocide and totalitarian oppression less likely in the future.

The ways in which historians have sought to understand the Holocaust have undergone important historical realignment in the past twenty years. Raul Hilberg (1961) and Lucy Dawidowicz (1975) captured much of the postwar historical consensus about the Holocaust. However, recent historians have offered new ways of thinking about the Nazi plan of extermination. Timothy Snyder (2010, 2015) argues that the Nazi war of extermination against the Jews has been importantly misunderstood—too centered on Germany, when the majority of genocide and murder occurred further east, in the lands that he calls the “bloodlands” of central Europe (Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, the Soviet Union); largely focused on extermination camps, whereas most killing of Jews occurred near the cities and villages where they lived, and most commonly by gunfire; insufficiently attentive to the relationship between extermination of people and destruction of the institutions of state in subject countries; and without sufficient attention to Hitler’s own worldview, within which the Nazi war of extermination against Europe’s Jews was framed. Alexander Prusin (2010) conceptualizes the topic of mass murder in the period 1933–1945 in much the same geographical terms. Like Snyder, Prusin defines his subject matter as a region rather than a nation or collection of nations. The national borders that exist within the region are of less importance in his account than the facts of ethnic, religious, and community disparities that are evident across the region. Thus both historians argue that we need to understand the geography of the Holocaust differently. Snyder believes that these attempts at refocusing the way we understand the Holocaust lead to a new assessment: bad as we thought the Holocaust was, it was much, much worse.

Another strand of re-thinking that has occurred in the study of the Holocaust concerns a renewed focus on the motivations of the ordinary people who participated in the machinery of mass murder. A major field of research into ordinary behavior during the Holocaust was made possible by the availability of investigative files concerning the actions of a Hamburg police unit that was assigned special duties as “Order Police” in Poland in 1940. These duties amounted to collecting and massacring large numbers of Jewish men, women, and children. Christopher Browning (1992) and Daniel Goldhagen (1996) made extensive use of investigatory files and testimonies of the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101. Both books came to shocking conclusions: very ordinary, middle-aged, apolitical men of the police unit picked up the work of murder and extermination with zeal and efficiency. They were not coerced, they were not indoctrinated, and they were not deranged; and yet they turned to the work of mass murder with enthusiasm. A small percentage of the men of the unit declined the shooting assignments, but the great majority did not. Another important example of research on ordinary people committing mass murder is Jan Gross’s (2001) case study of a single massacre of Jews in Jedwabne, a small Polish town during the Nazi occupation, but not ordered or directed by the German occupation. Instead, this was a local, indigenous action by non-Jewish residents in the town who gathered up their Jewish neighbors and then murdered large numbers of them. Gross’s account has stimulated much debate, but Anna Bikont (2015) validates almost every detail of Gross’s original narrative.

As a different example, consider now the history of the Gulag in the Soviet Union. Anne Applebaum (2003) provides a detailed and honest history of the Gulag and its role in maintaining Soviet dictatorship. Stalin’s dictatorship depended on a leader, a party, and a set of institutions that worked to terrorize and repress the population of the USSR. The NKVD (the system of internal security police that enforced Stalin’s repression), a justice system that was embodied in the Moscow Show Trials of 1936–38, and especially the system of forced labor and prison camps that came to be known as the Gulag constituted the machinery of repression through which a population of several hundred million people were controlled, imprisoned, and repressed. Further, like the Nazi regime, Stalin used the slave labor of the camps to contribute to the economic output of the Soviet economy. Applebaum estimates that roughly two million prisoners inhabited several thousand camps of the Gulag at a time in the 1940s, and that as many as 18 million people had passed through the camps by 1953 (Applebaum 2003: 13). The economic role of the Gulag was considerable; significant portions of Soviet-era mining, logging, and manufacturing took place within the forced labor camps of the Gulag (13). Applebaum makes a crucial and important point about historical knowledge in her history of the Gulag: the inherent incompleteness of historical understanding and the mechanisms of overlooking and forgetting that get in the way of historical honesty. The public outside the USSR did not want to know about these realities. Applebaum notes that public knowledge of the camps in the West was available, but was de-dramatized and treated as a fairly minor part of the reality of the USSR. The reality—that the USSR embodied and depended upon a massive set of concentrations camps where millions of people were enslaved and sometimes killed—was never a major part of the Western conception of the USSR. She comments, "far more common, however, is a reaction of boredom or indifference to Stalinist terror" (18). Wide knowledge in the West of the scope and specific human catastrophe of the Gulag was first made available by Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (1974).

Similar references could be offered concerning Stalin’s war on the kulaks in the Ukraine (1930s), mass starvation in China (1958–61), the widespread violence of the Cultural Revolution in China (1966–1976), and the use of violence in the American South to enforce Jim Crow-era race relations (1930s–1960s). In each case terrible things took place on a wide scale, and barriers exist that make it difficult for historians and the public to come to know the details of these periods.

The twentieth century poses one additional challenge for the historian because it falls within the human memories of the living generation of historians grappling with its intricacies. When Tony Judt writes (2006) about the fall of Ceaușescu in Romania in 1989, or Timothy Snyder (2010) writes about the murderous actions of German order police in Ukraine in 1940, or Marc Bloch (1949) writes about the “strange defeat” of France in 1940, they are writing about events for which they themselves, or their parents, or Poles and Ukrainian Jews with whom they can interact, have direct lived experiences and memories. Timothy Snyder’s style of historical writing suggests that the nearness in time of the killings in the bloodlands both supports and warrants an especially personal and individual approach; thus Snyder’s use of many individual stories of victims of the killings of peasants, Jews, and other human victims of the killing machines of Hitler and Stalin suggests that he believes it is important for the historian to make an effort to convey the individual meanings of these events affecting millions of people. How does this accessibility of the recent past affect the problems facing the historian? Does it influence the ways in which historians select events, causes, and actions as “crucial”? Does this experiential access through living memory provide a more secure form of historical evidence than other sources available to the historian? Does it give rise to an experiential content and detail to historical writing that solve an interpretive problem for the reader – for example, how to put oneself in the position of a Ukrainian peasant slowly starving to death? Did the stories told in the Judt household in London in 1942 about beloved cousins then facing deadly threats in Brussels shape the historical consciousness of the adult historian (Judt and Snyder 2012)? Did Marc Bloch’s own experience as a French army officer in defeat at Dunkirk influence the way that he understood war and violence? Access to individuals who lived through the Holodomor or the Spanish Civil War is of course valuable historical evidence. Here too, however, Marc Bloch has important insights, for Bloch specifically challenges the idea that participants have an inherently more reliable or complete form of knowledge than more temporally distant historians (1953: chapter II). Memories and personal accounts are valuable for the historian, but equally, historians have access to other forms of historical evidence (archaeological, archival, government records, …) which may be comparably important and epistemically secure in attempting to piece together the complex history of Stalin’s war on the Ukrainian peasantry.

These topics in twentieth-century history create an important reminder for historians and for philosophers: a truthful understanding of inhuman atrocity is deeply important for humanity, and it is difficult to attain. We learn from Judt, Snyder, and Applebaum that there are powerful mechanisms of deception and forgetting that stand in the way of an honest accounting of these periods of the recent human past. Discovering and telling the truth about our past is the highest and most important moral imperative that history conveys.

As the previous section suggests, there is an ethical dimension involved in the quest for historical knowledge. Historians have obligations of truthfulness and objectivity; peoples have obligations of honest recognition; and nations have obligations of memory and reconciliation.

Historians themselves have obligations of truthfulness and objectivity in the accounts they provide of the past. This topic has occupied much of the discussion of history and ethics in the past few years (Fay 2004). Much of this discussion has centered on the intellectual virtues to which historians need to aspire, such as truthfulness, objectivity, and persistence (Creyghton et al 2016, Paul 2015). Perhaps more generally, we might argue that historians have an obligation to deliberately and actively include those aspects of the past for further research that are the most morally troublesome—for example, the origins and experience of slavery during the eighteenth century in the American South, or the role of the Gulag in the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. We may reasonably fault the historian of the American South in the nineteenth century who confines her investigation to the economics of the cotton industry without examining the role of slavery in that industry, or the historian of the USSR who studies the institutions of engineering research in the 1950s while ignoring the fact of forced labor camps. Historians have an obligation to squarely confront the hard truths of their subject matter.

There is a broader ethical question to ask about history that goes beyond the professional ethics of the historian to the responsibilities of the public in relation to its own history. The facts of genocide and other crimes against humanity make it clear that there are moral reasons for believing that all of humanity has a moral responsibility to attempt to discover our past with honesty and exactness. In particular, the facts of past horrific actions (genocide, mass repression, slavery, suppression of ethnic minorities, dictatorship) create a moral responsibility for historians and the public alike to uncover the details, causes, and consequences of those actions.

The thread of honesty and truthfulness runs through all of these ethical issues. Tony Judt (1992) argues that a people or nation at a point in time have a collective responsibility to face the facts of its own history honestly and without mythology. Judt’s points can be distilled into a few key ideas. Knowledge of the past matters in the present; being truthful about the past is a key responsibility for all of us. Standing in the way of honest recognition is the fact that oppressors and tyrants are invariably interested in concealing their culpability, while “innocent citizens” are likewise inclined to minimize their own involvement in the crimes of their governments. The result is "myth-making", according to Judt. Anna Wylegala (2017) illustrates the moral importance and complexity of this kind of investigation with regard to collective memory in post-1991 Ukraine. The history of the twentieth century has shown itself to be especially prone to myth-making, whether about resistance to Nazi occupation or refusal to collaborate with Soviet-installed regimes in Poland or Czechoslovakia. Judt (1992) argues that a very pervasive process of myth-making and forgetting has been a deep part of the narrative-making in post-war Europe. But, Judt argues, bad myths give rise eventually to bad collective behavior—more conflict, more tyranny, more violence. So the work of honest history is crucial to humanity’s ability to achieve a better future. Judt expresses throughout his work a credo of truth-telling about the past: we have a weighty obligation to discover, represent, and understand the circumstances of our past, even when those facts are deeply unpalatable. Myth-making about the past is not only bad history and bad politics, it is morally deficient.

This observation brings us to a final way in which moral questions arise in the context of honest history. The crimes of the past have consequences in the present. The facts of trans-Atlantic slavery continue to have consequences for millions of descendants of the men and women who were transported from Africa to the Americas; the facts of the Rwandan genocide have consequences for the living victims of these mass killings and their kin; and the fact of colonial exploitation of the Congo or southern Africa has consequences for the current poverty of much of Africa. Does knowledge of the crimes of the past create for the current generation an obligation of engagement in contributing actively to healing those wounds in the present and preventing their recurrence in the future? Does “truth and reconciliation” require more than simply recognizing ugly truths about the past? Does it require that we act differently, individually and collectively? It is of course a tragic and immutable reality of the human condition that the past cannot be changed; the murdered cannot be unmurdered, and the primary perpetrators of horrific crimes within a few generations are certainly beyond the reach of justice. The future is deeply contingent, while the past is fixed and unchangeable. But does this immutability imply that the present generation has no obligations created by past crimes? Or rather, does knowing the truth about our past create for us the obligation to learn from those tragic human actions how to avoid such crimes in the future? Does honest knowledge of the human crimes of the past bring with it an obligation to strive in good faith to address the consequences of those crimes in the present? Finally, can knowledge of history help us to become more empathetic, more just, and more farsighted in our dealings with each other in the grand affairs that make up future history? One would hope so; and perhaps this is the most pressing moral obligation of all that is created by our recognition of our own historicity.

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How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

• History and Theory , at historyandtheory.org.
• UnderstandingSociety , maintained by Daniel Little (University of Michigan-Dearborn).

Berlin, Isaiah | Dilthey, Wilhelm | Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich | Hempel, Carl | Herder, Johann Gottfried von | hermeneutics | -->historiography --> | Ricoeur, Paul | Vico, Giambattista

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgement is offered to Christopher Bouton for valuable feedback on section 2.5.

Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Little < delittle @ umd . umich . edu >

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History Matters: The Critical Contribution of Historical Analysis to Contemporary Health Policy and Health Care

Sally sheard.

University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

History is popular with health policymakers, if the regularity with which they invoke historical anecdotes to support policy change is used as an indicator. Yet the ways in which they ‘use’ history vary enormously, as does its impact. This paper explores, from the perspective of a UK academic historian, the development of ‘applied’ history in health policy. It draws on personal experience of different types and levels of engagement with policymakers, and highlights mechanisms through which this dialogue and partnership can be made more efficient, effective, and intellectually rewarding for all involved.

History is popular with health policymakers, if the regularity with which they invoke historical anecdotes to support policy change is used as an indicator. Yet the ways in which they ‘use’ history vary enormously, as does its impact. This paper explores, from the perspective of an academic historian, the development of ‘applied’ history in health policy. It demonstrates, through UK case studies, that historical analysis can improve policymaking and service delivery. By focusing on the actual process of policymaking and implementation, especially what happens when earlier policies have been forgotten or deliberately side-lined, historical analysis helps to open up wider opportunities. The paper highlights the similarities between history and improvement science: both disciplines are concerned with change over time, and have developed methodologies to cope with complexity. There is a case to be made for a greater use of historians in health policy and health care, but this requires policymakers and service providers to be aware of what they offer and where to find them, and to routinely engage with them at the start of new policy or service planning. It requires the development of shared objectives, language and planning schedules.

The paper first outlines how history has become a key component of popular culture, especially in the UK, and suggests that this has enabled UK some health policymakers to feel they can ‘do it themselves’ to the exclusion of professional historians. Second, it sets out some of the methodological issues and challenges around historical analysis, especially in the setting of periods of study, in comparison with improvement science. Third, it discusses how historians of healthcare in the UK have chosen their research topics, and crucially, the style of output, and how this has facilitated or hindered their engagement with policymakers and service providers. Fourth, it provides two case studies which demonstrate how history can be used at different scales: at the local level using an anniversary (of the first UK public health team in 1847) to provoke a city (Liverpool) to reflect on what has enabled population health to improve; at the national level (UK Department of Health) to demonstrate the impact of cuts in medical expertise in the civil service (1980s–1990s) on the ability of the government to respond to emerging infectious diseases (HIV/AIDS; BSE; MRSA).

Fifth, it outlines how UK historians are using new methodologies (witness seminars) and new modes of engagement and dissemination (the History and Policy organisation) to become more proactive in working with policymakers. Although history students are now often taught that their discipline is ‘useful’, or has practical significance, because ‘intelligent action’ invariably draws on past experience, some academic historians are unwilling to see historical ‘lessons’ applied to current ‘real-world’ situations. 1 They would suggest that the uniqueness of a historical event cannot translate perfectly to the present, and so has limited relevance. And, as the US historian Richard Hirsh puts it: ‘More practically, many historians realise that universities rarely provide rewards for work that has direct application outside the ivory tower’. 2 Yet in the UK historians have been developing external work for many years across policy, creative and other arenas, and indeed ‘impact’ is now a key indicator of success for research councils and for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that helps determine state funding allocations for universities.

Challenges of Using History

There are multiple challenges for historians attempting to engage with non-academic audiences, perhaps the first (in terms of importance and sequence) is the issue of superfluity or irrelevance. I have already noted how historians themselves have been reluctant to let their work be used as crude analogy to contemporary circumstances, but equally, some policymakers do not naturally see history as ‘relevant’ to their work, unless provoked to do so. This is due to a number of factors. They will have an understanding of history based on their personal ‘history’—recollections of their school curricula (which in the UK invariably included the stock favourites of Tudors and Stuarts, and the Second World War)—and they will also draw on how they encounter history as entertainment. It has come to dominate TV scheduling in the UK, from mammoth series such as Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation to the new generation of international ‘telly dons’ such as Mary Beard and Simon Schama. History as a genre regularly features in publication bestseller lists (often tied to TV series). This history as entertainment is passive: delivered to the audience, and requiring/allowing little interaction with the historians producing it. Even when historians are invited to deliver serious academic content, their raison d’etre can be misinterpreted. The well-known historian David Starkey gave a keynote speech at the 2006 NHS Confederation conference, but one of the organisers later commented that ‘to some extent, he was there as entertainment’. 3

The enthusiasm for mainstream history, as evidenced through its presence in the media and bestseller lists also occasionally surfaces within the policymaking community, where policymakers feel confident, perhaps because they have a history degree, that they can identify and apply historical analogies to current policy issues. Sometimes this is well-intentioned, but can also be seen as ‘history as pancea’. Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Minister of Health who oversaw the introduction of the NHS in 1948, has been regularly name-checked by his successors, usually to support politically contentious policy changes, such as hospital closures and service reorganisations. 4 The repetition of popular historical vignettes, such as the Black Death or the 1918 global influenza pandemic serves to retain and gain them cultural purchase. They also demonstrate preoccupations of their users that are ‘more gothic than historical’. 5

A second challenge—that of ‘time’—causes concerns for both historians and policymakers. Much of the history that is presented as ‘useful’ or ‘relevant’ by historians when consulted by policymakers (or history self-selected by policymakers themselves) can be labelled ‘contemporary history’. Every period has its own contemporary history, and historians differ on how to set our contemporary history’s parameters: whether it covers things within living memory, or as Francis Fukuyama suggests, can be dated from the nineteenth century advent of liberal democracy, in which technology and military competition acted as the twin engines of historical change, as opposed to Marxist theoretical mechanisms of class conflict, politics, and tensions between the individual and the state. 6 Geoffrey Barraclough provides yet another definition: ‘ Contemporary history begins when the problems which are actually in the world today first take visible shape’ (original italics). 7 Historians such as John Gaddis and Peter Catterall have championed contemporary history as a way to deepen the historian’s active engagement in the production of history—someone on the ‘inside’—in contrast to E H Carr’s view of the role of the historian as a general watching from the edge of the battlefield as ‘events’ march past him. 8

Irrespective of how historians conduct their intra-professional debates, for policymakers—especially those politically appointed—the main benefit of using contemporary history context is that it will be familiar to their intended audience: colleagues and/or the public. The supremacy of the recent recognises that ‘every age thinks itself to be the most important age that ever occurred’. 9

This is more than academic turf wars. It determines how history is ‘done’, both by historians and policymakers, as it delimits what is acceptable evidence, how the analytical frameworks handle it, and its potential for further application. Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), editor of Annales and one of the great French historians of the twentieth century, opened a significant debate with his 1958 essay History and the Social Sciences: the Longue Durée . 10 He highlighted the limitations of the historian’s conventional strategy of working with ‘unilinear’ time: in which historical development is presented as continuous on a single (and invariably short) time-scale. This approach, for Braudel, neglected the structures within which change occurred, and prioritised the very recent past. He proposed using an alternative ‘plurality of social time’ in which history operates on three simultaneous levels: the long term (la longue durée: fundamental conditions of life, including the environment); medium term (for social, economic and political systems); the short term (for analysing the individual and the l’histoire événementielle—the ‘event’).

In 1970 an academic symposium on ‘Time’ was convened by the Society for Values in Higher Education that brought together biologists, physicists, psychologists, philosophers and historians. As Dale Porter provocatively stated in his summary of the event, it was the historians who appeared to be least confident in working with the concept of time: ‘In short, historians are working without a viable theory of explanation. Their individual investigations cannot be related to each other in any systematic way, and they are largely irrelevant to studies in other disciplines’. However, their focus on narrative explanations, Dale suggested, were actually similar to the more analytical ‘explanatory models’ used by these other disciplines, and with a bit of effort could be re-purposed to effectively meet the challenges of complex temporal developments, working in a similar way to the ‘process’ philosophy that Alfred North Whitehead had developed earlier in the twentieth century in response to the breakdown in scientific positivism. 11

A third challenge for using history in policymaking centres on how historical explanation requires relative degrees of abstraction, generalisation and complexity. The main difficulty with narrative accounts is that they involve two kinds of understanding of events. The first is gained by following a sequence of incidents of a given duration, and any pattern abstracted from that narrative is therefore only meaningful by reference to what actually happened. The second kind of understanding—analytical—emerges from a natural tendency to use the pattern abstracted from the story as a heuristic device that prompts questions about the similarity or difference between one sequence of events and another. 12 These two modes of understanding—by following and by analysing—appeared to be antithetical, and Porter suggested that this duality within traditional historical narrative accounts was at the root of ‘a great deal of anxiety among historians and their critics in recent years’, whereas in other disciplines, especially in the social sciences, these two modes of understanding had been pursued separately. He proposed a conscious re-balancing in which the reciprocity between hypothesis and empirical evidence would validate the historians’ traditional prioritisation of the narrative form of understanding. 13

Thinking about history as change—of historical events as dynamic relationships between causes and effects that happen ‘over time’—raises a fourth challenge which relates more directly to the concept of ‘improvement’, which also has an inherent dynamism. Some weak history—generally that which is uncritical—is branded ‘Whiggish’: it assumes that the present is always better than the past; that there has been progressive, cumulative, ‘improvement’. 14 In health history/history of medicine, this is often an accurate (if superficial) observation, depending on what measurements are used: life expectancies have improved since the mid-nineteenth century (the upward trajectory only just flattening in the first decade of the twenty-first century). In the fifteenth century more than half the British population were aged under 20; in the early twenty-first century we are already seeing some countries where half the population are over 60. It is tempting to attribute these historical patterns to specific historical events: the introduction of anaesthesia, antisepsis, antibiotics, etc. But when crude national patterns are unpicked it is possible to see that improvement has been relative or unequal: lower mortality rates from the classic infectious diseases such as cholera and smallpox have been paralleled by rising mortality rates for chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease. Cancer is in essence a disease of modernity, becoming more visible to society as more human bodies now survive long enough into the new ‘middle ages of 50+’ to allow cell mutations. Underneath Whiggish national improvements in health is an enduring inequality that has been clearly linked to socio-economic factors for nearly two hundred years: Edwin Chadwick, Friedrich Engels and other early nineteenth century reformers were able to demonstrate a significant positive correlation between poverty and ill-health.

Yet ‘long’ health histories—those that begin with the early nineteenth century epidemic disease—are easier, perhaps lazier, and in some ways more politically acceptable, than more recent health history. Politicians are comfortable drawing on the triumph of scientific advances such as anaesthesia and the discovery of germ theory in their rhetoric as evidence of long-term ‘improvement’ in health. To shift to short term history, for the politician, and possibly their policymakers, is more risky. Even using the creation of the NHS in 1948 as a historical era marker raises the potential for political debate on its performance and sustainability. ‘Short’ historical analysis might also be more problematical for historians because it exposes their academic fiefdom to other academic disciplines, especially political scientists and sociologists. It returns us to the first challenge of relevance, and opens up the debate on how to make history useful to policymakers, which requires discussion of historians’ motive, language and agency.

The Emergence of History of Health and Medicine

The history of health and medicine did not emerge as a distinct sub-discipline before the twentieth century. Rankean historians consolidated their professional identity and status through studies of nation states, in which biographical information on the life (health) and death of key players was a by-product of the bigger narrative. 15 Studies of the health of populations by professional historians required source material. The introduction of the decadal census in the UK in 1801, and of vital civil registration (births, marriages and deaths) in England and Wales in 1837, enabled a more comprehensive analysis than was possible using the earlier religious archives. Histories of patients, as well as of the great men of medicine, were now possible. There is an irony to this: doctors have always ‘taken histories’ from their patients.

In the US there was an active community of health historians from the 1920s (united through the American Association for the History of Medicine which was formed in 1925, primarily by physicians with an amateur interest in the discipline). US pioneers in the early years, up to the 1960s, included Henry Sigerist, Erwin Ackerknecht and Owsei Temkin. A second generation responded to the concept of a ‘social construction’ of medical authority and the development of medicine as an industrial and commercial activity. Key scholars included Susan Reverby, Charles Rosenberg, Judith Levitt, David Rosner and Rosemary Stevens, to name some of the most prominent proponents. In European countries there were smaller communities of medical/health historians. In Germany it was primarily the province of medical professionals.

Yet a community of historians of health and medicine was not visible in the UK until the 1950s. 16 The watershed moment of creation of the full British welfare state in 1948 played a critical role in permitting more robust ‘before and after’ historical analysis. Indeed, many of the leading historians working in this area have focused on the achievements of 1948 within their work to support their personal political values. This is not the place in which to digress into a detailed history of the history of health and medicine, but it is useful to outline the leading UK scholars, and a broad split into sub-genres, as this impacts on the UK case studies provided in this paper.

Some, such as Roy Porter and W.F. [Bill] Bynum, focused on science and medicine in the period before the NHS. Others, such as Asa Briggs and Anthony Wohl would be more properly classified as social historians, but their classic books Victorian People and Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain are defining works in the history of public health and early state medicine. 17 Some historians moved into this area having previously worked on related themes. Charles Webster’s early interests were in early modern science. He then widened his scope to consider medicine in the same period, but it was not until the 1980s that he shifted his focus to the twentieth century, and in particular the health of the working classes. 18 He was then invited to write the official history of the National Health Service, which appeared in two volumes in 1988 and 1996. 19

Webster is a ‘proper’ historian, in that he was trained and employed as an academic historian throughout his career. But it is interesting that some of the most influential UK health history books have been written by scholars for whom history was not their ‘day job’. Brian Abel-Smith, a health economist and professor of social administration, produced histories of the British nursing profession and hospitals which remain definitive texts. 20 These were important political and policy histories of aspects of health care: they were written in support of his socialist principles that a universal free health care system was an intrinsic component of social justice in a civilised society, and a basic human right. Abel-Smith actively used historical context and historical analysis in his work as one of the first special advisers to the British government. He worked closely with Richard Crossman, Barbara Castle and David Ennals, when they served as Secretaries of State for Health during the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–79. 21 He routinely incorporated history into his briefing papers, and produced anniversary accounts of the NHS to help secure its position at times of increasing financial attacks from the Treasury. 22

Geoffrey Rivett also used his considerable insider knowledge of the NHS and the DHSS/DH as a former general practitioner and civil servant to write comprehensive histories of the British NHS. 23 Other health care (service) historians with different backgrounds who were writing in the first phase include Rudolf Klein who initially approached health care from a contemporary public policy perspective, and Nicholas Timmins, who was social policy editor for the Financial Times. 24 It has also attracted comparative historical analysis through the work of Dan Fox, a US health policy adviser. 25

‘Applied’ History and Historians in the UK

All of the British health care histories noted above, most of them produced in the 1980s and early 1990s, share common features: they are substantial books (most of them more than 300 pages) and their target audiences were primarily the academic community, although some sought wider policymaking and public audiences. Some, such as Abel-Smith, wished to use their work to consolidate and secure the history and future of the NHS; some of the anniversary histories have also been appropriated by politicians and used to legitimise their revisions to Health Minister Aneurin Bevan’s founding principles, while at the same time canonising him within political history (see for example Prime Minister Tony Blair’s foreword to Geoffrey Rivett’s history of the NHS on its 50th anniversary).

Yet it is labour-intensive to take these ‘gold standard’ comprehensive histories of British health care and to use them to support contemporary health policy making. Policymakers prefer short briefing papers and find synthesis of key analysis into bullet points helpful. It is difficult to take even standard academic papers, focusing on specific health care issues, to generate useful ‘policy-applicable’ history. Health care historians, responding to and building on the pioneers listed above, have increasingly chosen to focus on smaller, more manageable themes: hospitals, diseases, clinical innovations, staffing. There has been a trend since the 1990s to push back the period of study to before the creation of the NHS in 1948—to properly examine the ‘mixed economy’ of health care in the inter-war period, which had traditionally been written up as universally bleak. 26 Another trend has been to look specifically at the history of health care policy development, rather than its delivery and impact. 27

Alongside this trend for thematic health care histories, has been the emergence of overt ‘policy applied’ health historians. The case studies presented below draw on my personal experiences. Other historians who have increasingly adopted this mantle include Virginia Berridge, whose success is evidenced by her creation and leadership of the first Centre for History in Public Health, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2003. Berridge’s career has included significant advisory roles to policymakers working on AIDS, drugs and alcohol policy. 28 What policy-applied health historians have collectively experienced can be grouped as three key issues: the role of networking to gain access to policymakers; synchronicity with policymaking schedules; style of engagement. These are common issues in the expert/policymaking arena, as evidenced by policy theory literature. 29

Case Study 1: Public Health in 1847 and 1997

Liverpool experienced some of the worst epidemics of infectious diseases (cholera, typhus, typhoid) of the early nineteenth century. Its image as a dangerously unhealthy place finally persuaded the urban authority to take action. In 1846, a local Act of Parliament was passed which created the first British public health team, and three men were appointed to start work on 1 January 1847 to deliver a radical programme of sanitary reform (Dr William Henry Duncan as Medical Officer of Health, James Newlands as Borough Engineer, and Thomas Fresh as Inspector of Nuisances). Liverpool continued to develop and implement radical policy solutions through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the first public housing schemes, clean air legislation and attempts at introducing a local ban on smoking in public places. In 1995, John Ashton, then Regional Director of Public Health for North West England, who had previously been a professor of public health at the University of Liverpool, and who had a keen amateur interest in history, commissioned a ‘year of public health’ for 1997 to mark the 150th anniversary of the start of professional public health in the UK.

Ashton supported the creation of a research post in the history of public health at the University of Liverpool, to which I was appointed (later converted into a lectureship). Together we discussed how Liverpool’s health history could be used to generate public debate on the changing determinants of health, especially income levels, unemployment, access to healthcare, and lifestyle factors such as smoking, exercise and diet. This deliberate public engagement policy was intended to be used as leverage with national policymakers on the negative impact of cutting benefits and health services, which had had a disproportionate effect in Liverpool since the election of a Conservative government (under Margaret Thatcher) in 1979. I used the history of local health and healthcare to develop an exhibition with the Museum of Liverpool Life and a programme of ‘celebratory events’, including artistic commissions and activities with local schools. The evaluation at the end of 1997 demonstrated that local awareness of the relative role of health determinants had improved. The city council and local NHS authorities were stimulated by understanding how major policy developments had been achieved by three pioneers in 1847, despite a lack of local funding, staffing or national support. They were encouraged to draw contemporary comparisons and to think more broadly and creatively about solutions to Liverpool’s chronic poor health.

The collaboration between myself and local health policymakers in Liverpool was reported to the UK Department of Public Health. As Liverpool’s pioneering 1846 Sanatory Act was also the foundation for the first national legislation: the 1848 Public Health Act, I was invited to brief the Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Sir Kenneth Calman, and to write a section for his annual report. Working with the US health historian Chris Hamlin, I also presented this history to a wider medical professional audience in an article in the British Medical Journal which drew comparisons between the 1848 Act and the plans to re-structure public health in 1998. 30

Case study 2: The Decline of the UK Medical Civil Service

Policymakers’ knowledge of where to go for health history is also highlighted through this second case study, which directly leads from the first. When I presented my analysis of the 1848 Public Health Act and its relevance to the 1998 Act at Calman’s final report launch I met the in-coming CMO, Sir Liam Donaldson. He wrote to me afterwards, expressing an interest in the history of the role of the CMO, and inviting me to write a joint research application, which was subsequently funded by the Nuffield Trust.

Between autumn 1998 and the publication of The Nation’s Doctor: the Role of the Chief Medical Officer 1855 – 1998 in 2006, Donaldson and I met regularly in his Department of Health office in Whitehall, London. We agreed a work plan in which I conducted the historical analysis and wrote the draft chapters, which he then commented on. As the research progressed we discussed emerging issues such as completeness of sources, strengths and weaknesses of oral history, balancing chronological progression with thematic analysis, and historiography: how previous historians had written about CMOs and their work. It emerged that most of the CMOs had faced similar recurrent problems, especially control of adequate staff; relations with the wider civil service and the medical profession; Whitehall culture; the right to speak independently of the government on health issues. These were also issues that Donaldson was then experiencing as the current CMO.

Over the course of 6 years I learnt a lot about how Whitehall works, from reading archive materials deposited by former CMOs, civil servants and politicians, and from discussions with Donaldson about how to achieve policy change, especially on contentious issues such as banning smoking in public places. This was one of his key objectives as CMO, but one which the UK government found tricky as it risked accusations of ‘nanny state-ism’. I researched how previous CMOs had handled the initial discovery of the association between smoking and lung cancer in the 1950s, and then worked towards effective policies to reduce smoking. I demonstrated, through analysis of the archives of the Ministry of Health and the Treasury, that the Conservative governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan were reluctant to run effective health education campaigns partly because the relatively new NHS was heavily reliant on revenue from tobacco tax. Sir John Charles, the CMO in post when the association was established, was persuaded not to be too pro-active on this issue. He was allowed to stay in post beyond the usual civil service retirement age because he was ‘amenable’ to pressure from the Treasury, who anticipated that his nominated successor, Sir George Godber, would not be so malleable. Godber did indeed take a much tougher line, and got around the issue of Whitehall policy intransigence by taking it outside government to his medical colleagues in the Royal College of Physicians. He persuaded them to run a hard-hitting, plain English campaign in 1962, which had significant impact in reducing the high levels of smoking in the UK. 31

The policy lessons from the 1950s history of smoking and lung cancer were indirect but helpful. They illuminated the importance of involving external expertise, and of ensuring senior medical civil servants were not intentionally side-lined by other government departments when financial concerns competed with scientific evidence. These were common ‘history lessons’ that emerged from other research for The Nation’s Doctor . One of the case studies that had significant ‘impact’ was on the history of the CMO’s access to medical expertise. From Sir John Simon in 1855 onwards, the CMO had direct line management of medical civil servants, and was able to direct them to conduct rapid investigations into emerging health crises, such as the outbreak of epidemics. This regularly caused friction with the rest of the civil service, especially the Permanent Secretaries in the Ministry/Department of Health, some of whom resented the CMO being able to directly access the Minister without their approval. Sir Arthur Newsholme (CMO between 1908 and 1919) later recorded his frustration that there was:

…an honest belief, common to many government departments, that technical advice is advice not to be given until called for by the secretariat [lay civil service] who, it is assumed, are entirely competent to decide whether such advice is needed. Second, when such advice is on record, it is assumed that it can be safely reapplied in what are regarded by the secretariat as analogous circumstances. 32

Many of the fourteen men who held the CMO role between 1855 and 1998 found ways to manage this issue, but the last two, Sir Donald Acheson (1984–91) and Sir Kenneth Calman (1991–98) came up against a more substantial obstacle: the successive Whitehall efficiency reviews that from 1979 onwards aimed at shrinking the civil service. These culminated in 1994 in the merger of the previously parallel medical and ‘lay’ civil service reporting hierarchies in the Department of Health, effectively reducing the CMO’s capacity to call upon the support of medical civil servants, at a time of several significant new health threats, including HIV/AIDS, BSE and MRSA. At the peak of the medical civil service in the early 1970s, the CMO had direct line management of over 170 medically qualified civil servants, who provided expertise on the development and implementation of new medical treatments as well as on broader health protection and promotion issues. By the time Calman gave evidence to the BSE enquiry in 1998, he was left with, in his own words, ‘a secretary and a mobile phone’. 33 I demonstrated, through analysis of archive papers (made available to the Phillips Enquiry on BSE, which would have been otherwise closed under the government’s 30 years rule), and through a series of oral history interviews with senior civil servants, medical professionals and politicians, that there had been a longer decline in medical manpower in Whitehall, and that this had restricted the effectiveness of responses to emerging health crises.

I used the historical evidence I collected on the issue of the shrinking of medical civil service in several ways. First, it formed sections of The Nation’s Doctor , co-written with Sir Liam Donaldson. Second, I was approached in 2008 by a medically qualified member of the House of Lords, who had read The Nation’s Doctor and wished to use the recent history of the decline of the medical civil service to push the government to invest in staffing and return some of the traditional mechanisms for soliciting external expertise, which had been damaged in the successive Whitehall culls. I re-drafted the analysis for a policy paper published on the website History and Policy . 34 This generated coverage in the Guardian newspaper, and a letter from Lord Ara Darzi, then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health (2007–09). I later learnt from senior civil servants in the Department of Health that the issues I had raised had generated internal debate and an investigation into how to improve institutional memory. Third, I published a longer version of the paper in the academic journal Social Policy and Administration , in a more conventional academic format. 35

Synchronicity and Styles of Engagement

These personal case studies illuminate the core issues of engagement: the role of networking to gain access to policymakers; synchronicity with policymaking schedules; style of engagement. I have discussed the need to be flexible (accommodating to policymakers’ schedules for meetings, deadlines and focus of outputs). It is worth saying more about the issues of synchronicity and styles of engagement. From my other experiences of working with policymakers I have come to appreciate the need to respond quickly: policymakers work on much shorter timescales, often looking for analysis results within weeks or months. Historians, especially those engaged on large projects, will be more comfortable with planning their research over years rather than months. The conventional format of outputs as monographs (prioritised by the periodic Research Excellence Framework [REF]), and academic journal articles take months or years to write and then work their way through rigorous peer review systems, which then need to be fitted into publishing schedules.

History and Policy, a UK web-based academic organisation, was founded in 2002 partly in response to this ‘constipated’ academic output culture. 36 It now has a membership of over 500 historians, who are encouraged to work up their research into short Policy Papers and Opinion Pieces. These go through quick peer review for rapid web-based publication. The papers are carefully targeted at policymakers and journalists by the organisation’s press officers. Where possible, publications are scheduled to coincide with anticipated government policy statements. The policy papers begin with executive summaries, in the style of policy briefing papers. They contain essential historical context, and provide suggested further sources. History and Policy has developed from its early focus on presenting academic history in a new format, to deliver bespoke services to government departments (seminar series and workshops). It engages directly with policymakers; responds quickly to invitations to collaborate, for example, providing historical content for the No. 10 Downing Street [Office of the Prime Minister] website; and supports historians in preparing written submissions to parliamentary enquiries. 37

Other new styles of engagement between historians and policymakers have been developed within the last couple of decades. Witness seminars provide opportunities for people who were involved in significant policy decisions to come together and reflect on the process and outcomes. The Wellcome Trust has been one of the most active pioneers of this format, convening more than 50 witness seminars on a wide range of health policy issues, from development of hip replacements to epigenetics. 38 Early career historians are offered training in public and policy engagement (History and Policy regularly run workshops, funded by the main research councils), and some are able to take up placements in government departments.

The issue of location of historians is also critical. While most historians are based within traditional university history departments, there is a strong case to be made for ‘embedding’ historians within other academic departments and in external policymaking environments. This provides more opportunities for serendipitous encounters, and encourages policymakers to seek advice. For historians, the benefit of having other homes is that they are there at the moments when policy shifts become apparent, and can respond efficiently. They can develop the necessary language of the policymaking organisation and knowledge of how policy ‘gets done’: the complexities of local and national government committees and reviews, the importance of knowing key staff. These issues are of course not specific to historians, but relevant to all expert policy advisers, and are analysed in Richard Freeman and Steve Sturdy’s excellent edited book, Knowledge in Policy: Embodied, inscribed, enacted . 39

Despite the considerable progress made by historians in engaging with health policymakers in the UK, it is important to be realistic on the authority of historical knowledge in the policy arena. It competes with analyses of the current situation, and predictions of possible future scenarios. The mode of engagement—usually crisis-driven if initiated from the policy community—de-limits a ‘context-only’ or ‘passive–reactive’ response from the historian. Yet history used to be the default policy science. 40 Although historians are still often asked for ‘facts’ rather than analysis, they are getting better at initiating a more useful mode of engagement. 41 Good examples come from the recent health and social care scandals of Mid-Staffordshire Hospital and those triggered by the exposure of Jimmy Savile’s abuse of vulnerable children and adults. Historians from the History and Policy organisation were invited to give evidence to the Savile public inquiry, and several opinion pieces were written that addressed the ‘never again’ issue behind these scandals. 42 However, we rarely reach a critical tipping point that permits policy change on the primary basis of historical evidence. 43 Historical analysis has not yet become an integral and initial part of policy planning process.

Robust and routine historical analysis of new policy issues can add real value. 44 It permits discussion of some of the bigger, or neglected questions in health and health care, such as choice of funding mechanisms, expectations and responsibilities (by both the public and the state). It can illuminate more fundamental issues, such as health as a human right, and demonstrate the implications of politicising access to health care, that may have evolved over centuries, rather than the years which usually delimit the frame of reference for policymakers. Historical analysis can explain the persistence of institutional structures (the NHS) and cultural attitudes (the British public’s love for the NHS) and expose how policymakers use history to reinforce or disrupt the status quo. Its preference for subjective, intuitive analysis (of texts, oral history) can cope with the finer nuances involved in policymaking: the ‘what if’ and ‘so what’ quandaries. It enables a better understanding of the policy development process, and through specific case studies show what happens when potential policies get forgotten or deliberately side-lined. 45 Historians are skilled at handling complexity: there are significant similarities between what historians, improvement scientists and policymakers do. What needs to be further developed are the shared objectives and language to enable a more rewarding collaboration.

1 J. Tosh and S. Lang, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History (New York 4th edition, Longman Pearson, 2006), p. 1–2.

2 R. Hirsh, ‘Historians of Technology in the Real World: Reflections on the Pursuit of Policy-Oriented History’, Technology and Culture 52; 1 (2011); 6–20.

3 V. Berridge, ‘History Matters? History’s role in health policymaking’, Medical History 52 (2008); 311–326.

4 See for example how the historian Charles Webster took the Labour government to task in 2002 for rewriting NHS history to suit its current reform plans: C. Webster, ‘The Parable of the Incompetent Steward’, British Journal of Health Care Management 8; 3 (2002); 113–14.

5 A. Bashford and C. Strange, ‘Thinking historically about public health’, Medical Humanities 33 (2007): 87–92. ‘Gothic’ is used here to mean a preoccupation with events that are portentously gloomy or horrifying.

6 F. Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992); P. Catterall, ‘What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History 32; 4 (1997); 451.

7 G. Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), p. 20.

8 J.L. Gaddis , On contemporary history. An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford 18 May 1993 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995); P. Catterall, ‘What (if anything) is Distinctive about Contemporary History?’, Journal of Contemporary History 32; 4 (1997); 444–52.

9 J.L. Gaddis , On contemporary history. An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Oxford 18 May 1993 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 21.

10 F. Braudel, ‘History and the Social Sciences: la longue durée’ , 1958, reprinted in F. Braudel, On History (trans. Sarah Matthews) (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also J. Tosh (with S Lang), The Pursuit of History (Harlow, Pearson Education Ltd, 1984).

11 D. Porter, The Emergence of the Past. A Theory of Historical Explanation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. ix.

12 Porter, Emergence of the Past , pp. 29–31.

13 Porter, Emergence of the Past , p. 2.

14 The term comes from the Whigs—a British political party active from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

15 The German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) was influential in setting standards for historical methodologies, especially the use of primary sources and an emphasis on narrative history and international politics.

16 As one reviewer pointed out, this was also the period when medical ethics, bioethics and medical law emerged as distinct disciplines. See D. Wilson, ‘What can History Do for Bioethics?’, Bioethics 27;4 (2013); 215–223; J. Harrington, Towards a Rhetoric of Medical Law (London, Routledge, 2016).

17 A. Briggs, Victorian People (1983); A.S. Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain (London, Dent, 1983).

18 C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (New York, Holmes & Meier, 1975); C. Webster, Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979); C. Webster, Biology. Medicine and Society 1840-1940 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981); C. Webster, ‘, ‘Healthy or Hungry Thirties?’, History Workshop Journal , 13, 1 (1982); 110–29.

19 C. Webster, Problems of Health Care: the National Health Service Before 1957 (London, HMSO, 1988); C. Webster, Government and Health Care: the National Health Service 1958–1979 (London, The Stationery Office, 1996).

20 B. Abel-Smith, A History of the Nursing Profession (London, Heinemann, 1960); B. Abel-Smith, The Hospitals 1800-1948 (London, Heinemann, 1964).

21 S. Sheard, The Passionate Economist. How Brian Abel-Smith shaped global health and social welfare (Bristol, Policy Press, 2013).

22 A. Abel-Smith, The National Health Service: the First Thirty Years (London, HMSO, 1978).

23 G. Rivett, The Development of London’s Hospital Systems (1986); G. Rivett, From Cradle to Grave: 50   Years of the NHS (London, King’s Fund, 1998).

24 R. Klein, The Politics of the National Health Service (London, Longmans, 1983); N. Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (London, Fontana, 1996).

25 D. Fox, Health Policies, Health Politics: the British and American Experience, 1911–1965 (Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press, 1986).

26 S. Szreter, ‘Health, Class, Place and Politics; social capital and collective provision in Britain’, Contemporary British History 3(2002); 27–57; J. Stewart, ‘Ideology and Process in the Creation of the British National Health Service’, Journal of Policy History 14 No. 2 (2002); 114–134; M. Gorsky and S. Sheard (eds), Financing Medicine: The British Experience since 1750 (Routledge, 2006); A. Levene, M. Powell, J. Stewart and B. Taylor, Cradle to Grave: Municipal medicine in Inter-war England and Wales (Peter Lang, 2011); M. Gorsky, ‘Local Government Health Services in Interwar England: Problems of Quantification and Interpretation’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2011 (85), 384–412; M Gorsky, ‘The British NHS 1948–2008: A review of the historiography’, Social History of Medicine 21 (2008), 437–60.

27 V. Berridge (ed.), Making Health Policy: Networks in Research and Policy after 1945 (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 2005).

28 Berridge, ‘History Matters?’ (2008); V. Berridge and J. Stewart, History: a social science neglected by other social sciences (and why it should not be), Contemporary Social Science 7; 1 (2012); 39–54.

29 E. Perdiguero, J Bernabeu, R. Hertas and E. Rodriguez-Ocana, ‘History of health, a valuable tool in public health’, J. Epidemiology and Community Health 55 (2001); 667–673; S. Sheard, ‘History in health and health services: exploring the possibilities’, J. Epidemiology and Community Health 62 (2008); 740–744; R. Freeman and S. Sturdy (eds), Knowledge in Policy: Embodied, inscribed, enacted (Bristol, Policy Press, 2015).

30 C. Hamlin and S. Sheard, ‘Revolutions in public health: 1848, and 1998?’, British Medical Journal 317 (1998); 587–91.

31 Royal College of Physicians of London, Smoking and Health: report of the Royal College of Physicians of London on smoking in relation to cancer of the lung and other diseases (London, Pitman, 1962).

32 A. Newsholme, The Last 30   Years in Public Health (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1936), p. 62.

33 British Medical Journal editorial, ‘Staff cuts would leave the CMO stranded’ , British Medical Journal 317 (1998); 232.

34 S. Sheard, ‘Doctors in Whitehall: how the government manages medical advice at the 60 th anniversary of the NHS, www.historyandpolicy.org.uk (last accessed 27.12.16).

35 S. Sheard, ‘Quacks and Clerks: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Structure and Function of the British Medical Civil Service’ , Social Policy and Administration 44;2 (2010), 193–207.

36 http://www.historyandpolicy.org/ . Last accessed 2.2.17.

37 M. Gorsky, Memorandum submitted to the Health Select Committee Inquiry into Public and Patient Involvement in the NHS. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/hp/docs/gorsky_memo.pdf/ . Last accessed 2.2.17.

38 https://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/09/24/21-years-wellcome-witness/ . Last accessed 2.2.17.

39 Freeman and Sturdy, Knowledge in Policy .

40 V. Berridge and J. Stewart, ‘History: a social science neglected by other social sciences (and why it should not be)’, Contemporary Social Science 7; 1 (2012); 39–54; E. Fee and D. Fox, ‘Introduction: AIDS, public policy and historical enquiry’, in E. Fee and D. Fox (eds ), AIDS and the burdens of history (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1988), 1–11.

41 V. Berridge, Public or Policy Understanding of History? Social History of Medicine 16; 3 (2003); 511–523.

42 See also the US historian Allan Brandt’s contributions as an expert witness in a landmark 2006 court case involving tobacco companies, in which he explained how they manipulated the scientific debate over the risks of smoking in the 1950s. A.M. Brandt, ‘From analysis to advocacy: crossing boundaries as a historian of health policy’, in F. Huisman and J.H. Warner (eds), Locating Medical History (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). A. Brandt, The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America (New York, Basic Books, 2009).

43 C. Hilton, ‘Whistle-blowing in the National Health Service since the 1960s’, History and Policy paper published 26.8.16. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/whistle-blowing-in-the-national-health-service-since-the-1960s . Last accessed 2.2.17; S. Sheard, Can we never learn? Abuse, complaints and inquiries in the NHS’, History and Policy paper published 26.2.15. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/why-we-never-learn-abuse-complaints-and-inquiries-in-the-nhs . Last accessed 2.2.17; A. Bingham, L.Delap, L. Jackson and L. Settle, ‘” These outrages are going on more than people know”’, History and Policy paper published 26.2.15. http://www.historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/these-outrages-are-going-on-more-than-people-know . Last accessed 2.2.17.

44 For a US perspective see J. Zelizer, Clio’s Lost Tribe: Public Policy History since 1978’, Journal of Policy History 12 (2000); 369–94.

45 R.E. Neustadt and E.R. May, Thinking in Time: the Uses of History for Decision Makers (New York, Free Press, 1986).

From the President

Why Study You-Know-What?

Our Reasons for Doing What We Do

Jacqueline Jones | Jan 13, 2021

W hy study history? The answers depend on who asks the question and who ventures a reply. 

We all have our own reasons for doing what we do. I came to a study of history via a curiosity about my hometown, a village in New Castle County, Delaware. I also appreciated the aesthetics of doing archival research and the sheer enjoyment of assembling a coherent story from disparate, scattered pieces of evidence. Everybody loves a good story, one with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And we crave encounters with characters, in the past as in the present, men and women who are fascinating in their own way, whether admirable or repellant. The readers of Perspectives well know that on a personal level, the act of crafting these stories, to enlighten and entertain, can be immensely satisfying.

Yet even if we historians have our reasons for studying the past, we often find ourselves needing to make the case to people not in the discipline—our students, museum visitors, grant officers at funding agencies, readers of newspaper op-eds, corporate executives, heads of government agencies, budget-conscious deans and provosts. We might be good at “doing” history, but are we good at convincing other people that learning about history is worthwhile? 

Standing before a class of 400 undergraduates in a US history introductory course on the first day of the semester, I have always felt compelled to give my students some good reasons to be there. In Texas, the state legislature requires that all public university undergraduates take two courses in US history. Anyone who has ever taught a required course knows it’s a challenge. The instructor must (try to) get students engaged in a topic that some have little interest in and others actively despise. I always thought I owed it to the skeptics to make a pitch and try to convince them that learning about the United States since 1865 was worth their time.

I often began by reciting the reasons why an understanding of history is good for you. Over 20 years ago, Peter Stearns offered an elegant rumination on the value of a history education: history helps us understand people and societies; history helps us understand change and how the society we live in came to be; history contributes to moral understanding; history provides identity; studying history is essential for good citizenship; a study of history helps to develop essential skills; and history is useful in the world of work. 

We might be good at “doing” history, but are we good at convincing other people that learning about history is worthwhile?

Last fall, Stearns updated his essay to account for changes in the economy, higher education, and the discipline over the last quarter century or so. Today, he notes, any discussion of the value of the discipline needs to highlight the kinds of jobs available to history majors; we cannot simply ignore our students’ well-founded concern for their future. We must give them license to study and enjoy history without the worry that they will never be able to make a living if they do so in a serious way. To that end, my department at the University of Texas at Austin has developed a web page called “ What History Majors Do ,” and the AHA also has a section on its website called “ Careers for History Majors .”

In his updated essay, Stearns also suggests that we must stress how historical data can help us to understand the diverse, dynamic world we are living in now—a history that informs the present. In recent decades, the study of history has expanded in terms of content, methodologies, and digital tools to provide context for complex contemporary issues, from racial ideologies and the global economy to pandemics and politics. I recall my daughter coming home from high school one afternoon, throwing her schoolbooks on the kitchen table, and announcing her history homework assignment for the evening with considerable dread and disgust. This 16-year-old, so focused on the here and now, had a hard time wrapping her head around the idea that people and events in the past could or should matter to her. “It’s history—get over it, Mom!” she exclaimed. By linking historical knowledge to the ideas and things people care about today, we might have a better chance of convincing a larger audience that what we do is socially useful work. 

What other arguments might resonate with the resistant or the indifferent? The late civil rights activist and US representative John Lewis (1940–2020) wrote an essay that he asked be published the day of his funeral (July 17, 2020). In it, he wrote about the history of reformers and radicals and their strategies for change:

You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, through decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time.

Lewis was making the case that an understanding of historic fights for justice is a precondition for meaningful social change.

Still, not everyone is interested in social movements. And most students are focused on another area of study in any case, with their sights set firmly on careers such as nursing, forest management, pharmacy, law, or journalism. Here we might make the case to them—and to college and university administrators—that all occupations have a history. One’s vocation can be enhanced and enriched by an appreciation for the way it has developed over time, and for the people in the past who helped to shape it into what it is today.

We can make the case that the study of history is an outlet for creative expression.

Finally, we can make the case that the study of history is an outlet for creative expression—literary, visual, and aural. It is a privilege and a challenge to be able to write or teach or craft exhibits with a particular audience in mind. Some students find their way to history via assignments that draw on their particular talents—as budding writers or filmmakers, as visual learners or musicians. As historians, we have an opportunity to seek innovative means to report on what we have found in the archives or other kinds of repositories of information about the past. 

Returning to that big undergraduate history survey course: No instructor can convince a resistant, even resentful student on the first day of class that an understanding of history opens up exciting new realms of knowledge and experience. Students have to arrive at the conclusion on their own over the course of the semester. As the weeks go by, they might begin to focus on a particular piece of the historical enterprise that intrigues them—an appreciation for the history of their own communities and cultures, for the words of people who lived in the past, for historical evidence and different interpretations of it, for the different ways we bring history to life, for the pieces of a mystery that is the great human drama. And certainly if we can convey to other people the excitement that drew us historians to the discipline to begin with, we need not offer a laundry list of the reasons why the study of history is good for all of us.

In the end, we make our best case when we describe our own journey as historians, for there are as many compelling responses to the question “Why study history?” as there are people who ask and historians who answer.

Jacqueline Jones is president of AHA.

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Home » Historical Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Historical Research – Types, Methods and Examples

Table of Contents

Historical Research

Definition:

Historical research is the process of investigating and studying past events, people, and societies using a variety of sources and methods. This type of research aims to reconstruct and interpret the past based on the available evidence.

Types of Historical Research

There are several types of historical research, including:

Descriptive Research

This type of historical research focuses on describing events, people, or cultures in detail. It can involve examining artifacts, documents, or other sources of information to create a detailed account of what happened or existed.

Analytical Research

This type of historical research aims to explain why events, people, or cultures occurred in a certain way. It involves analyzing data to identify patterns, causes, and effects, and making interpretations based on this analysis.

Comparative Research

This type of historical research involves comparing two or more events, people, or cultures to identify similarities and differences. This can help researchers understand the unique characteristics of each and how they interacted with each other.

Interpretive Research

This type of historical research focuses on interpreting the meaning of past events, people, or cultures. It can involve analyzing cultural symbols, beliefs, and practices to understand their significance in a particular historical context.

Quantitative Research

This type of historical research involves using statistical methods to analyze historical data. It can involve examining demographic information, economic indicators, or other quantitative data to identify patterns and trends.

Qualitative Research

This type of historical research involves examining non-numerical data such as personal accounts, letters, or diaries. It can provide insights into the experiences and perspectives of individuals during a particular historical period.

Data Collection Methods

Data Collection Methods are as follows:

• Archival research : This involves analyzing documents and records that have been preserved over time, such as government records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and photographs. Archival research is often conducted in libraries, archives, and museums.
• Oral history : This involves conducting interviews with individuals who have lived through a particular historical period or event. Oral history can provide a unique perspective on past events and can help to fill gaps in the historical record.
• Artifact analysis: This involves examining physical objects from the past, such as tools, clothing, and artwork, to gain insights into past cultures and practices.
• Secondary sources: This involves analyzing published works, such as books, articles, and academic papers, that discuss past events and cultures. Secondary sources can provide context and insights into the historical period being studied.
• Statistical analysis : This involves analyzing numerical data from the past, such as census records or economic data, to identify patterns and trends.
• Fieldwork : This involves conducting on-site research in a particular location, such as visiting a historical site or conducting ethnographic research in a particular community. Fieldwork can provide a firsthand understanding of the culture and environment being studied.
• Content analysis: This involves analyzing the content of media from the past, such as films, television programs, and advertisements, to gain insights into cultural attitudes and beliefs.

Data Analysis Methods

• Content analysis : This involves analyzing the content of written or visual material, such as books, newspapers, or photographs, to identify patterns and themes. Content analysis can be used to identify changes in cultural values and beliefs over time.
• Textual analysis : This involves analyzing written texts, such as letters or diaries, to understand the experiences and perspectives of individuals during a particular historical period. Textual analysis can provide insights into how people lived and thought in the past.
• Discourse analysis : This involves analyzing how language is used to construct meaning and power relations in a particular historical period. Discourse analysis can help to identify how social and political ideologies were constructed and maintained over time.
• Statistical analysis: This involves using statistical methods to analyze numerical data, such as census records or economic data, to identify patterns and trends. Statistical analysis can help to identify changes in population demographics, economic conditions, and other factors over time.
• Comparative analysis : This involves comparing data from two or more historical periods or events to identify similarities and differences. Comparative analysis can help to identify patterns and trends that may not be apparent from analyzing data from a single historical period.
• Qualitative analysis: This involves analyzing non-numerical data, such as oral history interviews or ethnographic field notes, to identify themes and patterns. Qualitative analysis can provide a rich understanding of the experiences and perspectives of individuals in the past.

Historical Research Methodology

Here are the general steps involved in historical research methodology:

• Define the research question: Start by identifying a research question that you want to answer through your historical research. This question should be focused, specific, and relevant to your research goals.
• Review the literature: Conduct a review of the existing literature on the topic of your research question. This can involve reading books, articles, and academic papers to gain a thorough understanding of the existing research.
• Develop a research design : Develop a research design that outlines the methods you will use to collect and analyze data. This design should be based on the research question and should be feasible given the resources and time available.
• Collect data: Use the methods outlined in your research design to collect data on past events, people, and cultures. This can involve archival research, oral history interviews, artifact analysis, and other data collection methods.
• Analyze data : Analyze the data you have collected using the methods outlined in your research design. This can involve content analysis, textual analysis, statistical analysis, and other data analysis methods.
• Interpret findings : Use the results of your data analysis to draw meaningful insights and conclusions related to your research question. These insights should be grounded in the data and should be relevant to the research goals.
• Communicate results: Communicate your findings through a research report, academic paper, or other means. This should be done in a clear, concise, and well-organized manner, with appropriate citations and references to the literature.

Applications of Historical Research

Historical research has a wide range of applications in various fields, including:

• Education : Historical research can be used to develop curriculum materials that reflect a more accurate and inclusive representation of history. It can also be used to provide students with a deeper understanding of past events and cultures.
• Museums : Historical research is used to develop exhibits, programs, and other materials for museums. It can provide a more accurate and engaging presentation of historical events and artifacts.
• Public policy : Historical research is used to inform public policy decisions by providing insights into the historical context of current issues. It can also be used to evaluate the effectiveness of past policies and programs.
• Business : Historical research can be used by businesses to understand the evolution of their industry and to identify trends that may affect their future success. It can also be used to develop marketing strategies that resonate with customers’ historical interests and values.
• Law : Historical research is used in legal proceedings to provide evidence and context for cases involving historical events or practices. It can also be used to inform the development of new laws and policies.
• Genealogy : Historical research can be used by individuals to trace their family history and to understand their ancestral roots.
• Cultural preservation : Historical research is used to preserve cultural heritage by documenting and interpreting past events, practices, and traditions. It can also be used to identify and preserve historical landmarks and artifacts.

Examples of Historical Research

Examples of Historical Research are as follows:

• Examining the history of race relations in the United States: Historical research could be used to explore the historical roots of racial inequality and injustice in the United States. This could help inform current efforts to address systemic racism and promote social justice.
• Tracing the evolution of political ideologies: Historical research could be used to study the development of political ideologies over time. This could help to contextualize current political debates and provide insights into the origins and evolution of political beliefs and values.
• Analyzing the impact of technology on society : Historical research could be used to explore the impact of technology on society over time. This could include examining the impact of previous technological revolutions (such as the industrial revolution) on society, as well as studying the current impact of emerging technologies on society and the environment.
• Documenting the history of marginalized communities : Historical research could be used to document the history of marginalized communities (such as LGBTQ+ communities or indigenous communities). This could help to preserve cultural heritage, promote social justice, and promote a more inclusive understanding of history.

Purpose of Historical Research

The purpose of historical research is to study the past in order to gain a better understanding of the present and to inform future decision-making. Some specific purposes of historical research include:

• To understand the origins of current events, practices, and institutions : Historical research can be used to explore the historical roots of current events, practices, and institutions. By understanding how things developed over time, we can gain a better understanding of the present.
• To develop a more accurate and inclusive understanding of history : Historical research can be used to correct inaccuracies and biases in historical narratives. By exploring different perspectives and sources of information, we can develop a more complete and nuanced understanding of history.
• To inform decision-making: Historical research can be used to inform decision-making in various fields, including education, public policy, business, and law. By understanding the historical context of current issues, we can make more informed decisions about how to address them.
• To preserve cultural heritage : Historical research can be used to document and preserve cultural heritage, including traditions, practices, and artifacts. By understanding the historical significance of these cultural elements, we can work to preserve them for future generations.
• To stimulate curiosity and critical thinking: Historical research can be used to stimulate curiosity and critical thinking about the past. By exploring different historical perspectives and interpretations, we can develop a more critical and reflective approach to understanding history and its relevance to the present.

When to use Historical Research

Historical research can be useful in a variety of contexts. Here are some examples of when historical research might be particularly appropriate:

• When examining the historical roots of current events: Historical research can be used to explore the historical roots of current events, practices, and institutions. By understanding how things developed over time, we can gain a better understanding of the present.
• When examining the historical context of a particular topic : Historical research can be used to explore the historical context of a particular topic, such as a social issue, political debate, or scientific development. By understanding the historical context, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the topic and its significance.
• When exploring the evolution of a particular field or discipline : Historical research can be used to explore the evolution of a particular field or discipline, such as medicine, law, or art. By understanding the historical development of the field, we can gain a better understanding of its current state and future directions.
• When examining the impact of past events on current society : Historical research can be used to examine the impact of past events (such as wars, revolutions, or social movements) on current society. By understanding the historical context and impact of these events, we can gain insights into current social and political issues.
• When studying the cultural heritage of a particular community or group : Historical research can be used to document and preserve the cultural heritage of a particular community or group. By understanding the historical significance of cultural practices, traditions, and artifacts, we can work to preserve them for future generations.

Characteristics of Historical Research

The following are some characteristics of historical research:

• Focus on the past : Historical research focuses on events, people, and phenomena of the past. It seeks to understand how things developed over time and how they relate to current events.
• Reliance on primary sources: Historical research relies on primary sources such as letters, diaries, newspapers, government documents, and other artifacts from the period being studied. These sources provide firsthand accounts of events and can help researchers gain a more accurate understanding of the past.
• Interpretation of data : Historical research involves interpretation of data from primary sources. Researchers analyze and interpret data to draw conclusions about the past.
• Use of multiple sources: Historical research often involves using multiple sources of data to gain a more complete understanding of the past. By examining a range of sources, researchers can cross-reference information and validate their findings.
• Importance of context: Historical research emphasizes the importance of context. Researchers analyze the historical context in which events occurred and consider how that context influenced people’s actions and decisions.
• Subjectivity : Historical research is inherently subjective, as researchers interpret data and draw conclusions based on their own perspectives and biases. Researchers must be aware of their own biases and strive for objectivity in their analysis.
• Importance of historical significance: Historical research emphasizes the importance of historical significance. Researchers consider the historical significance of events, people, and phenomena and their impact on the present and future.
• Use of qualitative methods : Historical research often uses qualitative methods such as content analysis, discourse analysis, and narrative analysis to analyze data and draw conclusions about the past.

Advantages of Historical Research

There are several advantages to historical research:

• Provides a deeper understanding of the past : Historical research can provide a more comprehensive understanding of past events and how they have shaped current social, political, and economic conditions. This can help individuals and organizations make informed decisions about the future.
• Helps preserve cultural heritage: Historical research can be used to document and preserve cultural heritage. By studying the history of a particular culture, researchers can gain insights into the cultural practices and beliefs that have shaped that culture over time.
• Provides insights into long-term trends : Historical research can provide insights into long-term trends and patterns. By studying historical data over time, researchers can identify patterns and trends that may be difficult to discern from short-term data.
• Facilitates the development of hypotheses: Historical research can facilitate the development of hypotheses about how past events have influenced current conditions. These hypotheses can be tested using other research methods, such as experiments or surveys.
• Helps identify root causes of social problems : Historical research can help identify the root causes of social problems. By studying the historical context in which these problems developed, researchers can gain a better understanding of how they emerged and what factors may have contributed to their development.
• Provides a source of inspiration: Historical research can provide a source of inspiration for individuals and organizations seeking to address current social, political, and economic challenges. By studying the accomplishments and struggles of past generations, researchers can gain insights into how to address current challenges.

Limitations of Historical Research

Some Limitations of Historical Research are as follows:

• Reliance on incomplete or biased data: Historical research is often limited by the availability and quality of data. Many primary sources have been lost, destroyed, or are inaccessible, making it difficult to get a complete picture of historical events. Additionally, some primary sources may be biased or represent only one perspective on an event.
• Difficulty in generalizing findings: Historical research is often specific to a particular time and place and may not be easily generalized to other contexts. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions about human behavior or social phenomena.
• Lack of control over variables : Historical research often lacks control over variables. Researchers cannot manipulate or control historical events, making it difficult to establish cause-and-effect relationships.
• Subjectivity of interpretation : Historical research is often subjective because researchers must interpret data and draw conclusions based on their own biases and perspectives. Different researchers may interpret the same data differently, leading to different conclusions.
• Limited ability to test hypotheses: Historical research is often limited in its ability to test hypotheses. Because the events being studied have already occurred, researchers cannot manipulate variables or conduct experiments to test their hypotheses.
• Lack of objectivity: Historical research is often subjective, and researchers must be aware of their own biases and strive for objectivity in their analysis. However, it can be difficult to maintain objectivity when studying events that are emotionally charged or controversial.
• Limited generalizability: Historical research is often limited in its generalizability, as the events and conditions being studied may be specific to a particular time and place. This makes it difficult to draw broad conclusions that apply to other contexts or time periods.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing Historical Research [without getting hysterical!] In addition to being a scholarly investigation, research is a social activity intended to create new knowledge. Historical research is your informed response to the questions that you ask while examining the record of human experience. These questions may concern such elements as looking at an event or topic, examining events that lead to the event in question, social influences, key players, and other contextual information. This step-by-step guide progresses from an introduction to historical resources to information about how to identify a topic, craft a thesis and develop a research paper. Table of contents: The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Secondary Sources Primary Sources Historical Analysis What is it? Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Choose a Topic Craft a Thesis Evaluate Thesis and Sources A Variety of Information Sources Take Efficient Notes Note Cards Thinking, Organizing, Researching Parenthetical Documentation Prepare a Works Cited Page Drafting, Revising, Rewriting, Rethinking For Further Reading: Works Cited Additional Links So you want to study history?! Tons of help and links Slatta Home Page Use the Writing and other links on the lefhand menu I. The Range and Richness of Historical Sources Back to Top Every period leaves traces, what historians call "sources" or evidence. Some are more credible or carry more weight than others; judging the differences is a vital skill developed by good historians. Sources vary in perspective, so knowing who created the information you are examining is vital. Anonymous doesn't make for a very compelling source. For example, an FBI report on the antiwar movement, prepared for U.S. President Richard Nixon, probably contained secrets that at the time were thought to have affected national security. It would not be usual, however, for a journalist's article about a campus riot, featured in a local newspaper, to leak top secret information. Which source would you read? It depends on your research topic. If you're studying how government officials portrayed student activists, you'll want to read the FBI report and many more documents from other government agencies such as the CIA and the National Security Council. If you're investigating contemporary opinion of pro-war and anti-war activists, local newspaper accounts provide a rich resource. You'd want to read a variety of newspapers to ensure you're covering a wide range of opinions (rural/urban, left/right, North/South, Soldier/Draft-dodger, etc). Historians classify sources into two major categories: primary and secondary sources. Secondary Sources Back to Top Definition: Secondary sources are created by someone who was either not present when the event occurred or removed from it in time. We use secondary sources for overview information, to familiarize ourselves with a topic, and compare that topic with other events in history. In refining a research topic, we often begin with secondary sources. This helps us identify gaps or conflicts in the existing scholarly literature that might prove promsing topics. Types: History books, encyclopedias, historical dictionaries, and academic (scholarly) articles are secondary sources. To help you determine the status of a given secondary source, see How to identify and nagivate scholarly literature . Examples: Historian Marilyn Young's (NYU) book about the Vietnam War is a secondary source. She did not participate in the war. Her study is not based on her personal experience but on the evidence she culled from a variety of sources she found in the United States and Vietnam. Primary Sources Back to Top Definition: Primary sources emanate from individuals or groups who participated in or witnessed an event and recorded that event during or immediately after the event. They include speeches, memoirs, diaries, letters, telegrams, emails, proclamations, government documents, and much more. Examples: A student activist during the war writing about protest activities has created a memoir. This would be a primary source because the information is based on her own involvement in the events she describes. Similarly, an antiwar speech is a primary source. So is the arrest record of student protesters. A newspaper editorial or article, reporting on a student demonstration is also a primary source. II. Historical Analysis What is it? Back to Top No matter what you read, whether it's a primary source or a secondary source, you want to know who authored the source (a trusted scholar? A controversial historian? A propagandist? A famous person? An ordinary individual?). "Author" refers to anyone who created information in any medium (film, sound, or text). You also need to know when it was written and the kind of audience the author intend to reach. You should also consider what you bring to the evidence that you examine. Are you inductively following a path of evidence, developing your interpretation based on the sources? Do you have an ax to grind? Did you begin your research deductively, with your mind made up before even seeing the evidence. Historians need to avoid the latter and emulate the former. To read more about the distinction, examine the difference between Intellectual Inquirers and Partisan Ideologues . In the study of history, perspective is everything. A letter written by a twenty- year old Vietnam War protestor will differ greatly from a letter written by a scholar of protest movements. Although the sentiment might be the same, the perspective and influences of these two authors will be worlds apart. Practicing the " 5 Ws " will avoid the confusion of the authority trap. Who, When, Where, What and Why: The Five "W"s Back to Top Historians accumulate evidence (information, including facts, stories, interpretations, opinions, statements, reports, etc.) from a variety of sources (primary and secondary). They must also verify that certain key pieces of information are corroborated by a number of people and sources ("the predonderance of evidence"). The historian poses the " 5 Ws " to every piece of information he examines: Who is the historical actor? When did the event take place? Where did it occur? What did it entail and why did it happen the way it did? The " 5 Ws " can also be used to evaluate a primary source. Who authored the work? When was it created? Where was it created, published, and disseminated? Why was it written (the intended audience), and what is the document about (what points is the author making)? If you know the answers to these five questions, you can analyze any document, and any primary source. The historian doesn't look for the truth, since this presumes there is only one true story. The historian tries to understand a number of competing viewpoints to form his or her own interpretation-- what constitutes the best explanation of what happened and why. By using as wide a range of primary source documents and secondary sources as possible, you will add depth and richness to your historical analysis. The more exposure you, the researcher, have to a number of different sources and differing view points, the more you have a balanced and complete view about a topic in history. This view will spark more questions and ultimately lead you into the quest to unravel more clues about your topic. You are ready to start assembling information for your research paper. III. Topic, Thesis, Sources Definition of Terms Back to Top Because your purpose is to create new knowledge while recognizing those scholars whose existing work has helped you in this pursuit, you are honor bound never to commit the following academic sins: Plagiarism: Literally "kidnapping," involving the use of someone else's words as if they were your own (Gibaldi 6). To avoid plagiarism you must document direct quotations, paraphrases, and original ideas not your own. Recycling: Rehashing material you already know thoroughly or, without your professor's permission, submitting a paper that you have completed for another course. Premature cognitive commitment: Academic jargon for deciding on a thesis too soon and then seeking information to serve that thesis rather than embarking on a genuine search for new knowledge. Choose a Topic Back to Top "Do not hunt for subjects, let them choose you, not you them." --Samuel Butler Choosing a topic is the first step in the pursuit of a thesis. Below is a logical progression from topic to thesis: Close reading of the primary text, aided by secondary sources Growing awareness of interesting qualities within the primary text Choosing a topic for research Asking productive questions that help explore and evaluate a topic Creating a research hypothesis Revising and refining a hypothesis to form a working thesis First, and most important, identify what qualities in the primary or secondary source pique your imagination and curiosity and send you on a search for answers. Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive levels provides a description of productive questions asked by critical thinkers. While the lower levels (knowledge, comprehension) are necessary to a good history essay, aspire to the upper three levels (analysis, synthesis, evaluation). Skimming reference works such as encyclopedias, books, critical essays and periodical articles can help you choose a topic that evolves into a hypothesis, which in turn may lead to a thesis. One approach to skimming involves reading the first paragraph of a secondary source to locate and evaluate the author's thesis. Then for a general idea of the work's organization and major ideas read the first and last sentence of each paragraph. Read the conclusion carefully, as it usually presents a summary (Barnet and Bedau 19). Craft a Thesis Back to Top Very often a chosen topic is too broad for focused research. You must revise it until you have a working hypothesis, that is, a statement of an idea or an approach with respect to the source that could form the basis for your thesis. Remember to not commit too soon to any one hypothesis. Use it as a divining rod or a first step that will take you to new information that may inspire you to revise your hypothesis. Be flexible. Give yourself time to explore possibilities. The hypothesis you create will mature and shift as you write and rewrite your paper. New questions will send you back to old and on to new material. Remember, this is the nature of research--it is more a spiraling or iterative activity than a linear one. Test your working hypothesis to be sure it is: broad enough to promise a variety of resources. narrow enough for you to research in depth. original enough to interest you and your readers. worthwhile enough to offer information and insights of substance "do-able"--sources are available to complete the research. Now it is time to craft your thesis, your revised and refined hypothesis. A thesis is a declarative sentence that: focuses on one well-defined idea makes an arguable assertion; it is capable of being supported prepares your readers for the body of your paper and foreshadows the conclusion. Evaluate Thesis and Sources Back to Top Like your hypothesis, your thesis is not carved in stone. You are in charge. If necessary, revise it during the research process. As you research, continue to evaluate both your thesis for practicality, originality, and promise as a search tool, and secondary sources for relevance and scholarliness. The following are questions to ask during the research process: Are there many journal articles and entire books devoted to the thesis, suggesting that the subject has been covered so thoroughly that there may be nothing new to say? Does the thesis lead to stimulating, new insights? Are appropriate sources available? Is there a variety of sources available so that the bibliography or works cited page will reflect different kinds of sources? Which sources are too broad for my thesis? Which resources are too narrow? Who is the author of the secondary source? Does the critic's background suggest that he/she is qualified? After crafting a thesis, consider one of the following two approaches to writing a research paper: Excited about your thesis and eager to begin? Return to the primary or secondary source to find support for your thesis. Organize ideas and begin writing your first draft. After writing the first draft, have it reviewed by your peers and your instructor. Ponder their suggestions and return to the sources to answer still-open questions. Document facts and opinions from secondary sources. Remember, secondary sources can never substitute for primary sources. Confused about where to start? Use your thesis to guide you to primary and secondary sources. Secondary sources can help you clarify your position and find a direction for your paper. Keep a working bibliography. You may not use all the sources you record, but you cannot be sure which ones you will eventually discard. Create a working outline as you research. This outline will, of course, change as you delve more deeply into your subject. A Variety of Information Sources Back to Top "A mind that is stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimension." --Oliver Wendell Holmes Your thesis and your working outline are the primary compasses that will help you navigate the variety of sources available. In "Introduction to the Library" (5-6) the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers suggests you become familiar with the library you will be using by: taking a tour or enrolling for a brief introductory lecture referring to the library's publications describing its resources introducing yourself and your project to the reference librarian The MLA Handbook also lists guides for the use of libraries (5), including: Jean Key Gates, Guide to the Use of Libraries and Information Sources (7th ed., New York: McGraw, 1994). Thomas Mann, A Guide to Library Research Methods (New York: Oxford UP, 1987). Online Central Catalog Most libraries have their holdings listed on a computer. The online catalog may offer Internet sites, Web pages and databases that relate to the university's curriculum. It may also include academic journals and online reference books. Below are three search techniques commonly used online: Index Search: Although online catalogs may differ slightly from library to library, the most common listings are by: Subject Search: Enter the author's name for books and article written about the author. Author Search: Enter an author's name for works written by the author, including collections of essays the author may have written about his/her own works. Title Search: Enter a title for the screen to list all the books the library carries with that title. Key Word Search/Full-text Search: A one-word search, e.g., 'Kennedy,' will produce an overwhelming number of sources, as it will call up any entry that includes the name 'Kennedy.' To focus more narrowly on your subject, add one or more key words, e.g., "John Kennedy, Peace Corps." Use precise key words. Boolean Search: Boolean Search techniques use words such as "and," "or," and "not," which clarify the relationship between key words, thus narrowing the search. Take Efficient Notes Back to Top Keeping complete and accurate bibliography and note cards during the research process is a time (and sanity) saving practice. If you have ever needed a book or pages within a book, only to discover that an earlier researcher has failed to return it or torn pages from your source, you understand the need to take good notes. Every researcher has a favorite method for taking notes. Here are some suggestions-- customize one of them for your own use. Bibliography cards There may be far more books and articles listed than you have time to read, so be selective when choosing a reference. Take information from works that clearly relate to your thesis, remembering that you may not use them all. Use a smaller or a different color card from the one used for taking notes. Write a bibliography card for every source. Number the bibliography cards. On the note cards, use the number rather than the author's name and the title. It's faster. Another method for recording a working bibliography, of course, is to create your own database. Adding, removing, and alphabetizing titles is a simple process. Be sure to save often and to create a back-up file. A bibliography card should include all the information a reader needs to locate that particular source for further study. Most of the information required for a book entry (Gibaldi 112): Author's name Title of a part of the book [preface, chapter titles, etc.] Title of the book Name of the editor, translator, or compiler Edition used Number(s) of the volume(s) used Name of the series Place of publication, name of the publisher, and date of publication Page numbers Supplementary bibliographic information and annotations Most of the information required for an article in a periodical (Gibaldi 141): Author's name Title of the article Name of the periodical Series number or name (if relevant) Volume number (for a scholarly journal) Issue number (if needed) Date of publication Page numbers Supplementary information For information on how to cite other sources refer to your So you want to study history page . Note Cards Back to Top Take notes in ink on either uniform note cards (3x5, 4x6, etc.) or uniform slips of paper. Devote each note card to a single topic identified at the top. Write only on one side. Later, you may want to use the back to add notes or personal observations. Include a topical heading for each card. Include the number of the page(s) where you found the information. You will want the page number(s) later for documentation, and you may also want page number(s)to verify your notes. Most novice researchers write down too much. Condense. Abbreviate. You are striving for substance, not quantity. Quote directly from primary sources--but the "meat," not everything. Suggestions for condensing information: Summary: A summary is intended to provide the gist of an essay. Do not weave in the author's choice phrases. Read the information first and then condense the main points in your own words. This practice will help you avoid the copying that leads to plagiarism. Summarizing also helps you both analyze the text you are reading and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (Barnet and Bedau 13). Outline: Use to identify a series of points. Paraphrase, except for key primary source quotations. Never quote directly from a secondary source, unless the precise wording is essential to your argument. Simplify the language and list the ideas in the same order. A paraphrase is as long as the original. Paraphrasing is helpful when you are struggling with a particularly difficult passage. Be sure to jot down your own insights or flashes of brilliance. Ralph Waldo Emerson warns you to "Look sharply after your thoughts. They come unlooked for, like a new bird seen on your trees, and, if you turn to your usual task, disappear...." To differentiate these insights from those of the source you are reading, initial them as your own. (When the following examples of note cards include the researcher's insights, they will be followed by the initials N. R.) When you have finished researching your thesis and you are ready to write your paper, organize your cards according to topic. Notecards make it easy to shuffle and organize your source information on a table-- or across the floor. Maintain your working outline that includes the note card headings and explores a logical order for presenting them in your paper. IV. Begin Thinking, Researching, Organizing Back to Top Don't be too sequential. Researching, writing, revising is a complex interactive process. Start writing as soon as possible! "The best antidote to writer's block is--to write." (Klauser 15). However, you still feel overwhelmed and are staring at a blank page, you are not alone. Many students find writing the first sentence to be the most daunting part of the entire research process. Be creative. Cluster (Rico 28-49). Clustering is a form of brainstorming. Sometimes called a web, the cluster forms a design that may suggest a natural organization for a paper. Here's a graphical depiction of brainstorming . Like a sun, the generating idea or topic lies at the center of the web. From it radiate words, phrases, sentences and images that in turn attract other words, phrases, sentences and images. Put another way--stay focused. Start with your outline. If clustering is not a technique that works for you, turn to the working outline you created during the research process. Use the outline view of your word processor. If you have not already done so, group your note cards according to topic headings. Compare them to your outline's major points. If necessary, change the outline to correspond with the headings on the note cards. If any area seems weak because of a scarcity of facts or opinions, return to your primary and/or secondary sources for more information or consider deleting that heading. Use your outline to provide balance in your essay. Each major topic should have approximately the same amount of information. Once you have written a working outline, consider two different methods for organizing it. Deduction: A process of development that moves from the general to the specific. You may use this approach to present your findings. However, as noted above, your research and interpretive process should be inductive. Deduction is the most commonly used form of organization for a research paper. The thesis statement is the generalization that leads to the specific support provided by primary and secondary sources. The thesis is stated early in the paper. The body of the paper then proceeds to provide the facts, examples, and analogies that flow logically from that thesis. The thesis contains key words that are reflected in the outline. These key words become a unifying element throughout the paper, as they reappear in the detailed paragraphs that support and develop the thesis. The conclusion of the paper circles back to the thesis, which is now far more meaningful because of the deductive development that supports it. Chronological order A process that follows a traditional time line or sequence of events. A chronological organization is useful for a paper that explores cause and effect. Parenthetical Documentation Back to Top The Works Cited page, a list of primary and secondary sources, is not sufficient documentation to acknowledge the ideas, facts, and opinions you have included within your text. The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers describes an efficient parenthetical style of documentation to be used within the body of your paper. Guidelines for parenthetical documentation: "References to the text must clearly point to specific sources in the list of works cited" (Gibaldi 184). Try to use parenthetical documentation as little as possible. For example, when you cite an entire work, it is preferable to include the author's name in the text. The author's last name followed by the page number is usually enough for an accurate identification of the source in the works cited list. These examples illustrate the most common kinds of documentation. Documenting a quotation: Ex. "The separation from the personal mother is a particularly intense process for a daughter because she has to separate from the one who is the same as herself" (Murdock 17). She may feel abandoned and angry. Note: The author of The Heroine's Journey is listed under Works Cited by the author's name, reversed--Murdock, Maureen. Quoted material is found on page 17 of that book. Parenthetical documentation is after the quotation mark and before the period. Documenting a paraphrase: Ex. In fairy tales a woman who holds the princess captive or who abandons her often needs to be killed (18). Note: The second paraphrase is also from Murdock's book The Heroine's Journey. It is not, however, necessary to repeat the author's name if no other documentation interrupts the two. If the works cited page lists more than one work by the same author, include within the parentheses an abbreviated form of the appropriate title. You may, of course, include the title in your sentence, making it unnecessary to add an abbreviated title in the citation. > Prepare a Works Cited Page Back to Top There are a variety of titles for the page that lists primary and secondary sources (Gibaldi 106-107). A Works Cited page lists those works you have cited within the body of your paper. The reader need only refer to it for the necessary information required for further independent research. Bibliography means literally a description of books. Because your research may involve the use of periodicals, films, art works, photographs, etc. "Works Cited" is a more precise descriptive term than bibliography. An Annotated Bibliography or Annotated Works Cited page offers brief critiques and descriptions of the works listed. A Works Consulted page lists those works you have used but not cited. Avoid using this format. As with other elements of a research paper there are specific guidelines for the placement and the appearance of the Works Cited page. The following guidelines comply with MLA style: The Work Cited page is placed at the end of your paper and numbered consecutively with the body of your paper. Center the title and place it one inch from the top of your page. Do not quote or underline the title. Double space the entire page, both within and between entries. The entries are arranged alphabetically by the author's last name or by the title of the article or book being cited. If the title begins with an article (a, an, the) alphabetize by the next word. If you cite two or more works by the same author, list the titles in alphabetical order. Begin every entry after the first with three hyphens followed by a period. All entries begin at the left margin but subsequent lines are indented five spaces. Be sure that each entry cited on the Works Cited page corresponds to a specific citation within your paper. Refer to the the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (104- 182) for detailed descriptions of Work Cited entries. Citing sources from online databases is a relatively new phenomenon. Make sure to ask your professor about citing these sources and which style to use. V. Draft, Revise, Rewrite, Rethink Back to Top "There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed." --John Kenneth Galbraith Try freewriting your first draft. Freewriting is a discovery process during which the writer freely explores a topic. Let your creative juices flow. In Writing without Teachers , Peter Elbow asserts that "[a]lmost everybody interposes a massive and complicated series of editings between the time words start to be born into consciousness and when they finally come off the end of the pencil or typewriter [or word processor] onto the page" (5). Do not let your internal judge interfere with this first draft. Creating and revising are two very different functions. Don't confuse them! If you stop to check spelling, punctuation, or grammar, you disrupt the flow of creative energy. Create; then fix it later. When material you have researched comes easily to mind, include it. Add a quick citation, one you can come back to later to check for form, and get on with your discovery. In subsequent drafts, focus on creating an essay that flows smoothly, supports fully, and speaks clearly and interestingly. Add style to substance. Create a smooth flow of words, ideas and paragraphs. Rearrange paragraphs for a logical progression of information. Transition is essential if you want your reader to follow you smoothly from introduction to conclusion. Transitional words and phrases stitch your ideas together; they provide coherence within the essay. External transition: Words and phrases that are added to a sentence as overt signs of transition are obvious and effective, but should not be overused, as they may draw attention to themselves and away from ideas. Examples of external transition are "however," "then," "next," "therefore." "first," "moreover," and "on the other hand." Internal transition is more subtle. Key words in the introduction become golden threads when they appear in the paper's body and conclusion. When the writer hears a key word repeated too often, however, she/he replaces it with a synonym or a pronoun. Below are examples of internal transition. Transitional sentences create a logical flow from paragraph to paragraph. Iclude individual words, phrases, or clauses that refer to previous ideas and that point ahead to new ones. They are usually placed at the end or at the beginning of a paragraph. A transitional paragraph conducts your reader from one part of the paper to another. It may be only a few sentences long. Each paragraph of the body of the paper should contain adequate support for its one governing idea. Speak/write clearly, in your own voice. Tone: The paper's tone, whether formal, ironic, or humorous, should be appropriate for the audience and the subject. Voice: Keep you language honest. Your paper should sound like you. Understand, paraphrase, absorb, and express in your own words the information you have researched. Avoid phony language. Sentence formation: When you polish your sentences, read them aloud for word choice and word placement. Be concise. Strunk and White in The Elements of Style advise the writer to "omit needless words" (23). First, however, you must recognize them. Keep yourself and your reader interested. In fact, Strunk's 1918 writing advice is still well worth pondering. First, deliver on your promises. Be sure the body of your paper fulfills the promise of the introduction. Avoid the obvious. Offer new insights. Reveal the unexpected. Have you crafted your conclusion as carefully as you have your introduction? Conclusions are not merely the repetition of your thesis. The conclusion of a research paper is a synthesis of the information presented in the body. Your research has led you to conclusions and opinions that have helped you understand your thesis more deeply and more clearly. Lift your reader to the full level of understanding that you have achieved. Revision means "to look again." Find a peer reader to read your paper with you present. Or, visit your college or university's writing lab. Guide your reader's responses by asking specific questions. Are you unsure of the logical order of your paragraphs? Do you want to know whether you have supported all opinions adequately? Are you concerned about punctuation or grammar? Ask that these issues be addressed. You are in charge. Here are some techniques that may prove helpful when you are revising alone or with a reader. When you edit for spelling errors read the sentences backwards. This procedure will help you look closely at individual words. Always read your paper aloud. Hearing your own words puts them in a new light. Listen to the flow of ideas and of language. Decide whether or not the voice sounds honest and the tone is appropriate to the purpose of the paper and to your audience. Listen for awkward or lumpy wording. Find the one right word, Eliminate needless words. Combine sentences. Kill the passive voice. Eliminate was/were/is/are constructions. They're lame and anti-historical. Be ruthless. If an idea doesn't serve your thesis, banish it, even if it's one of your favorite bits of prose. In the margins, write the major topic of each paragraph. By outlining after you have written the paper, you are once again evaluating your paper's organization. OK, you've got the process down. Now execute! And enjoy! It's not everyday that you get to make history. VI. For Further Reading: Works Cited Back to Top Barnet, Sylvan, and Hugo Bedau. Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: A Brief Guide to Argument. Boston: Bedford, 1993. Brent, Doug. Reading as Rhetorical Invention: Knowledge,Persuasion and the Teaching of Research-Based Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1992. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Gibladi, Joseph. MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 4th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction , Vol. 17, No. 2, Autum, 1989, pp. 157-167. Republished in the Literature Research Center. Gale Group. (1 January 1999). Klauser, Henriette Anne. Writing on Both Sides of the Brain: Breakthrough Techniques for People Who Write. Philadelphia: Harper, 1986. Rico, Gabriele Lusser. Writing the Natural Way: Using Right Brain Techniques to Release Your Expressive Powers. Los Angeles: Houghton, 1983. Sorenson, Sharon. The Research Paper: A Contemporary Approach. New York: AMSCO, 1994. Strunk, William, Jr., and E. B. White. The Elements of Style. 3rd ed. New York: MacMillan, 1979. Back to Top This guide adapted from materials published by Thomson Gale, publishers. For free resources, including a generic guide to writing term papers, see the Gale.com website , which also includes product information for schools.

Best History Research Paper Topics

Dive into the world of historical scholarship with our comprehensive guide to the best history research paper topics . Primarily designed for students tasked with writing history research papers, this guide presents a curated list of 100 exceptional topics, divided into 10 distinct categories, each with a unique historical focus. The guide offers clear and practical advice on how to choose the most compelling history research paper topics, and provides 10 handy tips on crafting an outstanding research paper. In addition to academic guidance, the guide introduces the superior writing services of iResearchNet, a reliable option for students needing customized history research papers.

Comprehensive List of Best History Research Paper Topics

The following comprehensive list of the best history research paper topics is crafted to stimulate your curiosity and ignite your passion for historical study. These topics cover a range of historical periods and geographical locations to cater to the diverse interests of history students.

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Ancient History Topics

• The Causes and Effects of the Fall of the Roman Empire
• Daily Life in Ancient Egypt
• The Influence of Alexander the Great’s Conquests on the Hellenistic World
• The Role of Women in Spartan Society
• The Construction and Significance of the Great Wall of China
• The Impact of Confucianism on Ancient Chinese Society
• Trade Routes and their Role in the Expansion of Ancient Civilizations
• The Cultural and Political Influence of the Phoenician Civilization
• Comparing Democracy in Ancient Greece to Modern Democracy
• The Religious Practices and Beliefs of the Mayans

Medieval History Topics

• The Role of the Catholic Church in Medieval Europe
• The Impact of the Black Death on Medieval Society
• The Cultural Significance of the Knights Templar
• Gender Roles and Family Structure in Medieval Japan
• The Causes and Consequences of the Hundred Years War
• The Political Structure of the Byzantine Empire
• The Influence of the Carolingian Renaissance on Europe
• The Role of Vikings in European Trade and Exploration
• The Crusades: Causes, Events, and Consequences
• The Architecture and Symbolism of Gothic Cathedrals

Early Modern History Topics

• The Causes and Effects of the Protestant Reformation
• The Role of the Enlightenment in the French Revolution
• The Impact of the Scientific Revolution on European Society
• The Socioeconomic Consequences of the Industrial Revolution
• The Influence of the Ottoman Empire on Southeast Europe
• The Role of Slavery in the Colonial Economies
• The Politics and Culture of the Renaissance in Italy
• European Imperialism in Africa and Asia
• The Cultural and Political Impacts of the Mughal Empire
• The American Revolution: Causes, Events, and Legacy

Modern History Topics

• The Causes and Global Consequences of World War I
• The Great Depression: Causes and Effects
• The Role of Propaganda in World War II
• The Impact of the Cold War on International Relations
• The Civil Rights Movement in the United States
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the End of the Cold War
• The Effects of Decolonization in the 20th Century
• The Role of Women in the World Wars
• The Formation and Impact of the European Union
• The Causes and Consequences of the Arab Spring

Asian History Topics

• The Cultural Impact of the Silk Road in Asia
• The Effects of Colonial Rule in India
• The Legacy of the Mongol Empire in Asia
• The Cultural and Political Changes in China’s Cultural Revolution
• The Korean War: Causes, Events, and Consequences
• The Role of Samurai in Feudal Japan
• The Impact of the Opium Wars on China
• The Influence of Buddhism on Asian Cultures
• The Cambodian Genocide under the Khmer Rouge
• The Role of Gandhi in India’s Independence

American History Topics

• The Impact of the New Deal on the American Economy
• The Vietnam War: Causes, Events, and Legacy
• The Influence of the Beat Generation on American Culture
• The Role of Manifest Destiny in Westward Expansion
• The Cuban Missile Crisis and Its Effects on the Cold War
• The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the United States
• The Native American Civil Rights Movement
• The Role of the Transcontinental Railroad in American Expansion
• The Civil War: Causes, Events, and Aftermath
• The Immigration Wave at Ellis Island: Causes and Effects

European History Topics

• The Impacts of the Russian Revolution
• The Influence of Martin Luther’s Theses on Europe
• The British Empire: Rise, Dominance, and Fall
• The Role of Art in the French Revolution
• The Impact of the Spanish Inquisition on Spain and its Colonies
• The Rise and Influence of Fascism in Europe
• The Role of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages
• The Consequences of the Treaty of Versailles
• The Formation and Impact of NATO
• The Role of the Media in the Fall of the Berlin Wall

African History Topics

• The Effects of Apartheid in South Africa
• The Influence of the Trans-Saharan Trade on West African Societies
• The Role of Nelson Mandela in Ending Apartheid
• The Scramble for Africa and its Effects on the Continent
• The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on West Africa
• The Rwandan Genocide: Causes and Consequences
• The Role of the African Union in Continental Politics
• The Impact of Islam on North Africa
• The Decolonization of Africa in the 20th Century
• The Role of Women in Pre-Colonial African Societies

Military History Topics

• The Influence of Technological Innovations on Warfare
• The Role of the French Foreign Legion in Global Conflicts
• The Impact of the Manhattan Project on World War II and Beyond
• The Role of the Spartans in Ancient Greek Warfare
• The Impact of Drones on Modern Warfare
• The Influence of the English Longbow on Medieval Warfare
• The Role of the Maginot Line in World War II
• The Impact of Naval Power on the British Empire
• The Influence of Nuclear Weapons on International Politics
• The Role of Propaganda in World War I

This expansive list of best history research paper topics offers a comprehensive exploration of the past, crossing different eras, regions, and themes. They form a rich tapestry of human experience and a foundation for understanding our present and future. Choose a topic that piques your interest, ignites your curiosity, and promises a journey of intellectual discovery. Remember that the exploration of history is a journey into the roots of our shared humanity and an exploration of the forces that shape our world.

History and What Range of Best Research Paper Topics it Offers

As a subject of study, history is more than a chronological list of events, dates, and prominent figures. History is the exploration of human experiences, societal changes, political upheavals, cultural transformations, economic shifts, and technological advancements across different periods and regions. This exploration allows us to understand how the past has shaped our present and how it can potentially shape our future. It teaches us to appreciate the complexities and nuances of human nature and society, making history a rich field for research paper topics.

History is an interdisciplinary field, interweaving elements from various areas of study, including politics, sociology, economics, anthropology, geography, and literature. This interdisciplinary nature provides a wide array of best history research paper topics. Moreover, the global scope of history further broadens the pool of topics, as it encompasses every region of the world and every period from the dawn of human civilization to the present day.

Exploring Different Periods

Historical research often focuses on specific periods, each offering unique topics for exploration. For instance, Ancient History provides topics related to ancient civilizations like Rome, Greece, Egypt, China, and India, and key events such as Alexander the Great’s conquests or the fall of the Roman Empire.

The Medieval Period offers topics related to the socio-political structure of societies, the influence of religion, the impact of plagues, and the role of significant historical figures. Researching the Renaissance can focus on cultural, artistic, and scientific revolutions that have shaped the modern world.

The Modern History category contains topics related to significant events and transformations, such as world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, decolonization, and various national and international movements.

Geographical Perspectives

Geographical focus is another common approach in historical research. Asian history encompasses topics ranging from the influence of Confucianism in China to the impact of colonial rule in India. European history explores events such as the Enlightenment, the French and Russian revolutions, and the formation of the European Union. American history topics can cover everything from Manifest Destiny to the Civil Rights Movement. African history can delve into the effects of the Atlantic Slave Trade, the apartheid era, and decolonization.

Thematic Approaches

In addition to period- and region-based topics, history offers an extensive range of thematic topics. These themes often intersect with other disciplines, leading to exciting interdisciplinary research opportunities.

Social and cultural history, for instance, covers diverse topics such as the influence of the Harlem Renaissance on African American culture, the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the role of film and television in shaping societies, or the impacts of the Internet on global culture.

Military history provides a wide range of topics related to warfare, strategy, technological developments, and the influence of military conflicts on societies and politics. From the use of the English longbow in medieval warfare to the impact of drones on modern warfare, this field offers a variety of fascinating topics.

Making the Right Choice

The choice of a research paper topic in history should ideally be guided by your interest, the available resources, and the requirements of your assignment. With such a wide range of topics, it can be challenging to make a choice. But remember, a good history research paper topic is not just about the past; it should also engage with the present and potentially shed light on the future. The best research paper topics are those that not only delve deep into the annals of history but also resonate with current issues and debates.

The study of history is a gateway into the vast narrative of human civilization. With an extensive range of periods, regions, and themes to choose from, history offers a rich reservoir of research paper topics. As we delve into the past, we discover the forces that have shaped our world, gain insights into the human experience, and glean lessons for our future. This journey of exploration makes history an incredibly exciting field for research papers.

How to Choose Best History Research Paper Topics

Choosing the best history research paper topic can be the first step towards a rewarding intellectual journey. It’s not just about meeting academic requirements; it’s about uncovering facets of the past that intrigue you and may potentially contribute to the broader understanding of history. Here are twenty in-depth tips that will guide you through the process and help you select the best topic for your history research paper.

• Understand the Assignment: Understanding your assignment’s requirements is the primary and most critical step in selecting a topic. Take time to carefully read the guidelines given by your instructor. Are there any specific historical periods, geographical regions, or themes you are required to focus on? Do the instructions indicate the scope or complexity level of the topic? Comprehending the parameters set by your instructor will significantly narrow down your options.
• Choose a Time Period: One way to approach the topic selection is by focusing on a particular time period that sparks your interest. It could be anything from the Bronze Age, to the Renaissance, to World War II. The more interested you are in the chosen time period, the more engaged you will be in the research process.
• Pick a Region: Similar to choosing a time period, selecting a particular region or country can also help narrow down potential topics. Are you fascinated by the history of East Asia, intrigued by ancient Egypt, or drawn to the socio-political history of Europe? Starting with a geographic focus can provide a strong foundation for your research.
• Identify a Theme: In addition to or instead of a time period or region, you might want to choose a theme that you wish to explore. Themes can range from political history, cultural history, history of science and technology, to gender history, among others. A thematic approach can offer a unique perspective and can even allow you to cross over different time periods or regions.
• Conduct Preliminary Research: Even before you have a firm topic in hand, engage in some preliminary research. This could involve reviewing textbooks, scholarly articles, or reputable online resources related to your chosen period, region, or theme. Preliminary research can give you a general sense of the historical context and inspire potential topics.
• Seek Inspiration from Existing Works: As part of your preliminary research, look at other research papers, theses, or dissertations in your area of interest. This can give you a good idea of what has been done, what gaps exist in the research, and where your research could potentially fit in.
• Scope Your Topic: The scope of your topic should be proportionate to the length and depth of your paper. If your paper is relatively short, a narrow, focused topic would be more suitable. For a longer and more complex paper, a broader topic that explores multiple facets or perspectives would be more appropriate.
• Consider the Relevance: Another aspect to consider when selecting a topic is its relevance. Does the topic have any relation to the course you are undertaking? Does it reflect on current historical or social debates? A topic that connects your historical research to broader academic or social issues can make your paper more impactful and engaging.
• Look for Unique Angles: While not every research paper can revolutionize the field, striving for some degree of originality in your work is always a good practice. Look for unique angles, underexplored areas, or new perspectives on a well-trodden topic. Presenting a fresh approach can make your paper more interesting for both you and your readers.
• Assess the Availability of Sources: Your research paper is only as good as your sources. Before finalizing your topic, make sure there are enough primary and secondary sources available to you. This could be in the form of books, academic articles, documentary films, archives, databases, or digital resources.
• Evaluate the Feasibility: Beyond the availability of sources, consider other practical aspects of your chosen topic. Is it feasible to conduct the research within the given time frame? Is the topic too complex or too simplistic for your current academic level? A realistic evaluation of these factors at an early stage can save you a lot of time and effort down the line.
• Reflect on Your Interests: Above all, select a topic that genuinely piques your curiosity. A research paper is a significant undertaking, and your interest in the topic will sustain you through potential challenges. If you are passionate about the topic, it will reflect in your writing and make your paper more compelling.
• Solicit Feedback: Seek advice from your instructor, classmates, or any other knowledgeable individuals. They may be able to provide valuable feedback, point out potential pitfalls, or suggest different perspectives that can enrich your research.
• Be Flexible: Be prepared to tweak, adjust, or even overhaul your topic as you delve deeper into the research process. New information or insights may emerge that shift your focus or challenge your initial assumptions.
• Bridge the Past and Present: Try to find topics that allow you to connect historical events or phenomena with contemporary issues. This can provide additional depth to your paper and may also appeal to a broader audience.
• Consult Specialized Encyclopedias and Guides: These can provide overviews of various topics and can often suggest areas for research. They also offer bibliographies which can serve as a starting point for your research.
• Draft a Preliminary Thesis Statement: Once you have a potential topic, try drafting a preliminary thesis statement. This can help you focus your ideas and give you a clear direction for your research.
• Ensure Your Topic Meets the Assignment Goals: Check back with your assignment guidelines to make sure your chosen topic meets all the requirements. It’s a good idea to do this before you start your in-depth research.
• Be Ready to Invest Time and Effort: Choose a topic that you are ready to spend time on. Remember, you will be working on this topic for an extended period, so choose something that you find interesting and engaging.
• Enjoy the Process: Finally, remember that the process of researching and writing a history paper can be a source of enjoyment and intellectual satisfaction. Choose a topic that not only meets academic requirements but also gives you a sense of accomplishment and discovery.

Choosing the best history research paper topic is not merely about fulfilling an academic requirement. It’s about setting the stage for a journey into the past, an exploration of humanity’s collective memory. The right topic will not only make this journey enjoyable but also deeply enlightening. By considering these tips, you can select a topic that resonates with you and holds the potential for a meaningful scholarly contribution.

How to Write a Best History Research Paper

Writing a history research paper can be a rewarding experience, providing an opportunity to delve into the past and explore the events, ideas, and personalities that have shaped our world. However, crafting a high-quality paper requires more than just an interest in the subject matter. It involves thorough research, analytical thinking, and clear, persuasive writing. Here are twenty comprehensive tips on how to write a best history research paper.

• Understand the Assignment: Begin by thoroughly understanding the assignment. Ensure you grasp the requirements, the scope of the paper, the format, and the deadline. Clear any doubts with your professor or peers before you start.
• Select a Suitable Topic: As discussed earlier, choosing an appropriate topic is crucial. It should be engaging, manageable, and meet the assignment’s requirements. Consider your interests, the available resources, and the paper’s scope when choosing the topic.
• Conduct In-Depth Research: Once the topic is decided, embark on thorough research. Use a variety of sources, such as books, academic journals, credible online sources, primary sources, and documentaries. Remember to take notes and record the sources for citation purposes.
• Formulate a Thesis Statement: The thesis statement is the central argument or point of your paper. It should be clear, concise, and debatable, providing a roadmap for your entire paper. The thesis statement should guide your research and each main point you make in your paper should support this central idea.
• Create an Outline: An outline helps organize your thoughts and arguments. Typically, it should include an introduction (with the thesis statement), body paragraphs (with topic sentences), and a conclusion. Each point in your outline should be a reflection of your thesis statement.
• Start with a Strong Introduction: The introduction should be engaging, provide some background on the topic, and include the thesis statement. It sets the tone for the rest of your paper, so make it compelling and informative.
• Develop Body Paragraphs: Each body paragraph should focus on one main idea that supports your thesis. Begin with a topic sentence, provide evidence or arguments, and then conclude the paragraph by linking it back to your thesis. Be clear and concise in your arguments.
• Use Evidence Effectively: Support your arguments with evidence from your research. This could include quotations, statistics, or primary source materials. Remember to interpret the evidence and explain its relevance to your argument.
• Maintain a Logical Flow: The ideas in your paper should flow logically from one point to the next. Use transitional words and phrases to maintain continuity and help guide your reader through your paper.
• Write a Compelling Conclusion: Your conclusion should sum up your main points, restate the thesis in light of the evidence provided, and possibly offer areas for further research or a concluding insight. It should leave the reader with something to think about.
• Cite Your Sources: Always cite your sources properly. This not only gives credit where it’s due but also strengthens your argument by indicating the breadth of your research. Ensure you follow the required citation style (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.).
• Revise for Clarity and Coherence: After finishing your initial draft, revise your work. Check for clarity, coherence, and consistency of argument. Ensure each paragraph has a clear focus, and that the paragraphs flow smoothly from one idea to the next.
• Proofread: Proofread your paper for grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Such errors can distract from the content and undermine your credibility as a writer. Reading your paper aloud or having someone else read it can help catch errors you might have missed.
• Seek Feedback: Before finalizing your paper, consider seeking feedback from your professor, peers, or a writing center tutor. They can provide valuable perspectives and suggestions for improvement that you might not have considered.
• Write in a Formal Academic Style: Your paper should be written in a formal academic style. Avoid slang, colloquialisms, and overly complex language. Be clear, concise, and precise in your expression.
• Avoid Plagiarism: Plagiarism is a serious academic offense. Ensure that all ideas and words that are not your own are properly cited. When in doubt, it’s better to over-cite than to under-cite.
• Stay Objective: A good history paper is objective and does not include personal opinions or biases. It relies on facts and evidence, and presents balanced arguments. Stick to the evidence and avoid emotional language.
• Be Original: Strive for originality in your argument and interpretation. While your topic might not be entirely new, your perspective on it can be. Don’t be afraid to challenge established interpretations if you have evidence to support your argument.
• Use Primary Sources Wisely: Primary sources are invaluable in historical research. However, remember that they should be used to support your argument, not to construct it. Your analysis and interpretation of the sources are what matters.
• Enjoy the Process: Finally, remember to enjoy the process. Writing a research paper is not just an academic exercise, but a journey into the past. It’s a chance to learn, explore, and contribute to our understanding of history.

In conclusion, writing a best history research paper requires careful planning, thorough research, clear writing, and detailed revision. However, the process can be highly rewarding, leading to new insights and a deeper understanding of history. These tips provide a comprehensive guide to help you craft a top-notch history research paper. Remember, history is a continually evolving dialogue, and your paper is your chance to join the conversation.

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In conclusion, iResearchNet offers a comprehensive suite of academic writing services designed to support students in their academic journey. From expert writers and custom written works to in-depth research and timely delivery, iResearchNet is equipped to handle any history research paper with excellence and dedication. We believe in delivering high-quality, original, and impactful research papers that can elevate your academic experience and success. So why wait? Avail of iResearchNet’s services today and experience the relief and satisfaction of handing in a top-quality history research paper.

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Tips for Online Students , Tips for Students

Why Is History Important And How Can It Benefit Your Future?

Updated: February 28, 2024

Published: July 1, 2020

History is a topic that many find boring to study or a waste of time. But there is more to studying history than meets the eye. Let’s answer the age-old question: “Why is history important?”

What Is History?

History is the knowledge of and study of the past. It is the story of the past and a form of collective memory. History is the story of who we are, where we come from, and can potentially reveal where we are headed.

Why Study History: The Importance

History is important to study because it is essential for all of us in understanding ourselves and the world around us. There is a history of every field and topic, from medicine, to music, to art. To know and understand history is absolutely necessary, even though the results of historical study are not as visible, and less immediate.

Allows You To Comprehend More

1. our world.

History gives us a very clear picture of how the various aspects of society — such as technology, governmental systems, and even society as a whole — worked in the past so we understand how it came to work the way it is now.

2. Society And Other People

Studying history allows us to observe and understand how people and societies behaved. For example, we are able to evaluate war, even when a nation is at peace, by looking back at previous events. History provides us with the data that is used to create laws, or theories about various aspects of society.

3. Identity

History can help provide us with a sense of identity. This is actually one of the main reasons that history is still taught in schools around the world. Historians have been able to learn about how countries, families, and groups were formed, and how they evolved and developed over time. When an individual takes it upon themselves to dive deep into their own family’s history, they can understand how their family interacted with larger historical change. Did family serve in major wars? Were they present for significant events?

4. Present-Day Issues

History helps us to understand present-day issues by asking deeper questions as to why things are the way they are. Why did wars in Europe in the 20th century matter to countries around the world? How did Hitler gain and maintain power for as long as he had? How has this had an effect on shaping our world and our global political system today?

5. The Process Of Change Over Time

If we want to truly understand why something happened — in any area or field, such as one political party winning the last election vs the other, or a major change in the number of smokers — you need to look for factors that took place earlier. Only through the study of history can people really see and grasp the reasons behind these changes, and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society continue regardless of continual change.

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You learn a clear lesson, 1. political intelligence.

History can help us become better informed citizens. It shows us who we are as a collective group, and being informed of this is a key element in maintaining a democratic society. This knowledge helps people take an active role in the political forum through educated debates and by refining people’s core beliefs. Through knowledge of history, citizens can even change their old belief systems.

2. History Teaches Morals And Values

By looking at specific stories of individuals and situations, you can test your own morals and values. You can compare it to some real and difficult situations individuals have had to face in trying times. Looking to people who have faced and overcome adversity can be inspiring. You can study the great people of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, and also ordinary people who teach us lessons in courage, persistence and protest.

3. Builds Better Citizenship

The study of history is a non-negotiable aspect of better citizenship. This is one of the main reasons why it is taught as a part of school curricular. People that push for citizenship history (relationship between a citizen and the state) just want to promote a strong national identity and even national loyalty through the teaching of lessons of individual and collective success.

4. Learn From The Past And Notice Clear Warning Signs

We learn from past atrocities against groups of people; genocides, wars, and attacks. Through this collective suffering, we have learned to pay attention to the warning signs leading up to such atrocities. Society has been able to take these warning signs and fight against them when they see them in the present day. Knowing what events led up to these various wars helps us better influence our future.

5. Gaining A Career Through History

The skills that are acquired through learning about history, such as critical thinking, research, assessing information, etc, are all useful skills that are sought by employers. Many employers see these skills as being an asset in their employees and will hire those with history degrees in various roles and industries.

6. Personal Growth And Appreciation

Understanding past events and how they impact the world today can bring about empathy and understanding for groups of people whose history may be different from the mainstream. You will also understand the suffering, joy, and chaos that were necessary for the present day to happen and appreciate all that you are able to benefit from past efforts today.

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Develop and refine your skills through studying history, 1. reading and writing.

You can refine your reading skills by reading texts from a wide array of time periods. Language has changed and evolved over time and so has the way people write and express themselves. You can also refine your writing skills through learning to not just repeat what someone else said, but to analyze information from multiple sources and come up with your own conclusions. It’s two birds with one stone — better writing and critical thinking!

2. Craft Your Own Opinions

There are so many sources of information out in the world. Finding a decisive truth for many topics just doesn’t exist. What was a victory for one group was a great loss for another — you get to create your own opinions of these events.

3. Decision-Making

History gives us the opportunity to learn from others’ past mistakes. It helps us understand the many reasons why people may behave the way they do. As a result, it helps us become more impartial as decision-makers.

4. How To Do Research

In the study of history you will need to conduct research . This gives you the opportunity to look at two kinds of sources — primary (written at the time) and secondary sources (written about a time period, after the fact). This practice can teach you how to decipher between reliable and unreliable sources.

5. Quantitative Analysis

There are numbers and data to be learned from history. In terms of patterns: patterns in population, desertions during times of war, and even in environmental factors. These patterns that are found help clarify why things happened as they did.

6. Qualitative Analysis

It’s incredibly important to learn to question the quality of the information and “history” you are learning. Keep these two questions in mind as you read through information: How do I know what I’m reading are facts and accurate information? Could they be the writer’s opinions?

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We are all living histories.

All people and cultures are living histories. The languages we speak are inherited from the past. Our cultures, traditions, and religions are all inherited from the past. We even inherit our genetic makeup from those that lived before us. Knowing these connections give you a basic understanding of the condition of being human.

History Is Fun

Learning about history can be a great deal of fun. We have the throngs of movies about our past to prove it. History is full of some of the most interesting and fascinating stories ever told, including pirates, treasure, mysteries, and adventures. On a regular basis new stories from the past keep emerging to the mainstream. Better yet, there is a history of every topic and field. Whatever you find fascinating there is a history to go along with it. Dive a bit deeper into any topic’s history and you will be surprised by what you might find in the process.

The subject of history can help you develop your skills and transform you to be a better version of yourself as a citizen, a student, and person overall.

If you are looking to develop more of yourself and skills for your future career, check out the degree programs that are offered by University of the People — a tuition-free, 100% online, U.S. accredited university.

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8 Archives and Historical Research

While a larger and larger proportion of primary sources have been digitized, there will always be physical archives.  In this section, you’ll learn what archives are, why they exist, and how to take advantage of them. Sifting through actual documents and artifacts from the past can be great fun, and if you have the opportunity to visit an archive as a part of writing a historical research paper for a class, you should do so. Read up here and consider visiting an archival collection near you to locate unique sources.

Archives are the documents and records from individuals, organizations, and governments that have been preserved and made available to researchers because of their enduring value.  Archives aren’t just for historians, of course, they are saved for everyone. They are important because they provide evidence of activities and tell us more about individuals and institutions. They also tell stories and increase our sense of identity and understanding of cultures, societies, and human actions. They can even be used to protect hard-won civil, political, legal, and economic rights and to ensure justice. The bottom-line is archives are important to understanding the past and to documenting and protecting our rights as citizens.

Libraries and Archives

Chances are you have used libraries in the past for leisure reading, special programs, school projects, or a host of other activities. Libraries and their look, feel, and organization are familiar to most of us. Not so much archives. On the most basic level, libraries and archives are information providers, though they deliver information in different ways, and the type of information they contain is often different.

For example, libraries contain published works (books, journals, magazines, newspapers, electronic databases, etc.) created to educate, inform, and entertain, while archives contain mostly unpublished materials produced by individuals, organizations, and governments through normal day-to-day activities and only later are saved because they tell us something important about the past. A library’s collection is not unique, since most of the works it acquires are produced in multiple copies and sold to other libraries across the country. Archival holdings, however, are unique. You won’t find archival records in one repository duplicated anywhere else. There is an old cliché that says “libraries are for readers, while archives are for writers.” All sorts of people use libraries, but those planning to create knowledge for others use archives. While there are exceptions to this cliché, of course, we hope you get the point.

Because of their unique holdings, archival institutions oftentimes have well developed preservation, conservation, and security plans in place designed to protect and preserve their collections. After all, if an archival document is destroyed or stolen, it can’t be replaced. The limiting factor for libraries to replace missing items is money—does the library have the funds to purchase replacements? As a result, most libraries allow their materials to circulate outside the library and then replace lost and stolen items as needed. Archival materials are almost never allowed to leave the archives because they can’t be replaced.

Libraries and archives also process materials differently. Generally speaking, libraries catalog resources at the item level. You can search a library’s online catalog by subject, author, title, keyword, etc., and find discrete items focusing on your subject. Archives collections are maintained and processed at the collection level, and many collections have literally thousands of items in them (some considerably more). Rather than cataloging individual items in archival collections, archivists produce finding aids for collections as a whole. These finding aids, rather than library catalog records, are the access tools for researchers.  You can read more about how finding aids work below , but archives are also staffed by archivists, who help researchers as part of their jobs.  Don’t hesitate to ask them for help!

For a full discussion of the principles behind collecting for archives and the pathway to becoming an archivist, see the chapter on archiving as a profession – “Becoming an Archivist.”

Archives in the Dallas-Fort Worth Region

If you’re ready to work with an archive as part of your research project, there are plenty of options in the Dallas-Fort Worth region. These archives could be important for any number of different research topics from those pertaining to local history or to federal history, from cultural or religious history, to the history of technology or politics and many different topics in between.What follows is a list of some of the archives in the DFW metroplex, along with links to their homepages. Accessing their websites will give you information about the types of historical sources they have and what their use policies are.

City Archives

Dallas Municipal Archives

Dallas Public Library Special Collections (has a number of collections focusing on Dallas)

Fort Worth Public Library Genealogy, History, and Archives Department (houses numerous Fort Worth collections)

Most of the public libraries in the suburbs have local history collections too. Many of these collections also contain archival materials.

County Archives

Tarrant County Archives

Museum Collections

Amon Carter Museum of American Art

Dallas Historical Society

Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, Library and Archives

Dallas Jewish Historical Society

Dallas Museum of Art Archives

Documentary Arts, Dallas, Texas African American Photography Archive

Fort Museum of Science and History, Library and Archives

Frontiers of Flight Museum Research Library

Perot Museum of Nature and Science

University Collections

SMU Bridwell Library Archives

SMU DeGolyer Library

SMU Hamon Arts Library Bywaters Special Collections

Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary J. T. and Zelma Luther Archives

TCU Library Special Collections

Texas Woman’s University Library Woman’s Collection

University of Dallas Library Archives and Special Collections 

University of North Texas Library Special Collections

University of Texas at Arlington Libraries Special Collections

University of Texas at Dallas Library Special Collections

Researching in Archives

As mentioned earlier, archives are different animals than libraries, and their policies and procedures reflect this. When visiting an archive for research purposes, be prepared to follow their rules, but also try to understand why these rules are in place. Remember, archival repositories hold unique collections that are impossible to replace, so user policies are more restrictive than those of libraries.

Most archives have a similar set of policies and procedures, including requiring you to register once you arrive to conduct research. In most archives, you will be asked to register as a user by showing some form of personal identification and completing a user form (which the archives will keep to document your visit). You may also be asked to lock up purses, backpacks, notebooks, and other non-essential items, only bringing paper, pencil (ink is prohibited in most archives because an errant mark can damage materials), or a computer into the research room for note-taking. A staff member will then conduct a reference interview with you to find out about your research focus and to help determine if, or how, the archives’ collection can help.

Once appropriate collections are identified, an archivist may provide a finding aid to each collection you want to use. A finding aid is an important access and descriptive tool for archival collections. Finding aids reveal information about who or what organization created the collection, the scope of the topics reflected in the collection, the dates of the materials in the collection, and a container list, showing what is in each box of the collection. By using the finding aid, you will be able to request specific boxes and folders from the collection. (A helpful site to finding aids in a number of archival institutions across Texas can be found at Texas Archival Resources Online .)

At this point, the archives staff will probably ask you to fill out “call-slips,” where you request specific boxes and/or folders from the collections you are interested in. The staff will retrieve the boxes/folders and bring them to you in the research room. Don’t be surprised if they give you one box at a time and require you to sit at a table that is being monitored by staff and/or video cameras. Keep in mind that security is a priority in all archival institutions. You will not be allowed to take the materials out of the research room, so your research must be conducted when the archives is open. Budget your time accordingly, keeping in mind that archives have limited hours, and archival research takes time and is unlike using books and other sources, which have indexes and other precise access tools.

Be sure when taking notes from an archives collection that you include bibliographic information that you will need later in order to cite the collection and its contents in your footnotes and bibliography. Many finding aids will show you how to cite a collection, but not all will. If the finding aid you are using doesn’t give you the bibliographic citation, then record the complete title of the collection, the collection’s unique identifying number (if it has one), the box and folder numbers you used, as well as the folder titles. As long as you have this information, then you will be able to write your footnotes and bibliography using any footnoting style and format.

When you find material that you want to copy or scan, then ask the staff about the archives’ copy policy. Some archives will allow you to scan documents using your phone or camera, while others may require that all copies and scans be done by staff members, who will charge you a fee to defray costs. If you think that publishing some of the items you are using may occur in the future (or even if there is only a remote possibility), then be aware that some archives have publication fees associated with the reproduction of archival materials in books, videos, advertisements, television, and other products, especially if these products are commercial in nature (as opposed to being sponsored by non-profits). It never hurts to request the archives’ fee schedule, so you will have this information.

Once you have completed your research, then return the archival boxes/folders to the staff member at the reference desk, retrieve the personal items you locked up when you registered, and depart. If you find that you have questions after leaving the archives, feel free to contact the archives staff to get the answers. They are happy to help.

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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On the Importance of History: Is There a Need to Study History? Research Paper

The Oxford online dictionary (2008) defines history as “the study of past events”. A pertinent question that could be asked is that is there a need to study history? To answer that question and four other important queries, this essay imagines invoking the Great Oracle of Babylon. The queries and the answers of the Oracle are contained in the succeeding paragraphs.

The first query asked was whether history can serve to build human identity? The answer was a resounding ‘yes’. The knowledge accumulated over a shared past gives rise to a set of common beliefs, culture and religious ethos. As Hegel, (1837) states:

“ History is always of great importance for a people; since by means of that it becomes conscious of the path of development taken by its own Spirit, which expresses itself in laws, manners, customs and deeds”(p.181). These are just the ingredients that help build a national identity. It is through history that people identify themselves as German, French and American to name a few. Historical ties built through shared religious beliefs are yet another means for developing identities. In certain cases, it leads to development of pan-national identities. The historical perspective woven with myths and legends produce a rich social and cultural context. All these ingredients build together a sense of ‘belongingness’ amongst the community. Nations that have scant historical background strive to create myths and legends to achieve a national identity. A prime example is Australia, where the myth “that the true ‘Australian Identity’ was to be found in the bush” (MC Coll, 2004, p.20), was used to develop a unique national identity.

The second query asked was does history repeat itself? The Oracle clarified that the conundrum, of the nature of history, whether it is cyclic or linear, depends upon the perceptions of the theorists and their following. For example, Hegel believed that history was directional and was based on the ‘struggle for recognition’. Marx held that history is linear and all facets of history can be explained through dialectical materialism . Cohen (2004) argues that history does repeat itself. He bases his argument on the fact that “Most people throughout history have lived under imperial rule. The current international system, with nearly two hundred independent states and not a single confessed empire, is a historical anomaly” (p.1). Turkey is often cited as an example of history repeating itself. The Great Ottoman Empire was the largest Muslim empire with overtly Muslim culture, religious and social ethos, which spearheaded the spread of Islam over the Middle East. In the aftermath of the First World War, and the dissolution of the Turkish Empire, its leader, Kemal Ataturk strove to establish a modern Turkey built on secular western traditions. These secular traditions have now come under threat from the governing AKP party with its conservative Islamic leanings with one of their agendas being “to lift the ban on wearing headscarves”(Taspinar, 2007, p.126).

To the third query whether history is objective, the Oracle’s answer was ambiguous, stating that historical perspectives are often colored by the biases of the recorder and thus writing a truly objective history may be difficult. Selective reading of history and partial understanding of its dynamics created one of the most virulent forms of racist philosophy which was put into practice with vengeance by the Third Reich in Germany. The theory of German Aryan race being the most pure breed of humans was created out of Germanic myths, historical beliefs and a misreading of the nihilistic philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche by the Nazi leaders. Political leaders in power try and unleash revisionist history of their lands to suit their larger political purposes.

The fourth query related to the validity of history as a teacher. To this query, the oracle had an affirmative answer. History does teach the human society valuable lessons. Leaders, strategists and thinkers down the ages have assiduously studied the histories of their adversaries to learn about their strengths, weaknesses and prepare counter-strategies for defeating or deterring the adversary. The past is linked to the present and the future, is a thought, very succinctly put by Nehru,(1946) ” The past becomes something that leads up to the present, the moment of action, the future something that flows from it; and all three are inextricably linked”(p.9). History teaches ethics and with that comes the human interpretation of ethical behavior. “Ethical beliefs, throughout recorded history have had two very different sources, one political, and the other concerned with personal religious and moral convictions”( Russell, 1954, p.28). Thus, it follows that historical lessons serve as a background on which leaders base their convictions, ideas and policies to implement on a national or a global scale.

The fifth query pertained to the existential problem of history. Was it possible that the human society is witnessing an ‘ End of History’ as confidently claimed by Francis Fukuyama and that the Western Liberal Democratic model was the ultimate form of human governance? To this last and final question, the Oracle gave an emphatic ‘no’. History, as the Oracle explained, is created by human dynamics, which are never static, and are always changing with time, circumstances and exercise of human imagination. Imagination produces ideas, ideas are used to create concepts, and concepts lead to formulation of doctrines and strategies. Strategies then are implemented, giving rise to a new set of changed circumstances. Therefore, as long as humans remain in existent, so shall history, its relevance, validity and applicability for the foreseeable future.

Cohen, Eliot A. (2004). Empire’s New Clothes. Web.

Hegel, G.W.F. (1837). The Philosophy of History. Batcoche Books. 2008. Web.

History. (2008). In Oxford Online Dictionary. Web.

Mc Coll, Lisa Marie. (2004). The influence of Bush Identity on Attitudes to Mental Health in a Queensland Community. 2008. Web.

Nehru, Jawaharlal. (1946). The Discovery of India. New York: Penguin Books.

Russell, Bertrand, (1956). Human Society in Ethics and Politics. Cornwall, Great Britain: T.J. Press (Padstow) Ltd.

Taspinar, Omer. (2007). The Old Turk’s Revolt. Foreign Affairs. Vol. 86 No.6 . 114-130.

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Navigating US History: A Student’s Guide to Research Paper Topics

As a student of history, you’re on a constant journey through time. Writing a research paper is more than just an assignment—it’s an opportunity to delve deeper into the events and periods that shaped the world we live in today. Whether you’re just beginning your journey or looking for fresh perspectives on well-trodden paths, this guide will provide a comprehensive list of US history research paper topics.

Table of content

The Importance of History Learning

Studying history provides a deeper understanding of societies, cultures, and the human condition. History shapes our collective memory, instilling a sense of identity and understanding of our place in the world. Exploring different eras helps us comprehend the consequences of certain actions, understand patterns, and better anticipate the future. Writing research papers on US history equips us with an analytical lens to critically assess the past, promoting empathy and encouraging informed citizenship.

The Art of Research Writing

Research writing requires a careful synthesis of existing knowledge with original thought. As a historical researcher, you act as a detective, deciphering mysteries, drawing connections, and unveiling the truths hidden in the annals of time. Your research paper is an exploration of your chosen topic and a demonstration of your analytical skills, critical thinking, and the ability to articulate complex ideas coherently.

Crafting your Research Paper Topic

Selecting an engaging and manageable topic is crucial in the research process. Your topic should be both broad enough to offer plenty of study sources and narrow enough to allow in-depth exploration. Below is a list of possible US history research paper topics.

Colonial Period

The Colonial Period, from the late 15th Century to the late 18th Century, marked the beginning of European settlement in what is now the United States. This era saw significant events such as the arrival of the Pilgrims, the establishment of the thirteen colonies, and the interactions between the settlers and the Native American tribes. This period set the stage for America’s diverse cultural, political, and social foundation.

Research Paper Topics for the Colonial Period

• Role of the Church in Colonial Society.
• Jamestown: Successes and Failures.
• Impact of Tobacco Cultivation on Colonial Economy.
• Life of Indigenous Tribes Pre-Colonization.
• The Salem Witch Trials: Causes and Consequences.
• The Role of Women in Colonial America.
• Early Forms of Democracy: The Mayflower Compact.
• Slavery in the Early Colonies.
• The Transatlantic Trade: Its Impact on the Colonies.
• Comparison of Northern and Southern Colonies.
• Analysis of Colonial Laws and Their Impact on Society.
• Evolution of Education in Colonial America.
• The Great Awakening and Its Impact on American Society.
• Indentured Servitude vs. Slavery: A Comparative Study.
• Navigation Acts and Their Influence on the Colonies.
• Impact of European Diseases on Native American Population.
• The Role of the Dutch in New Amsterdam (New York).
• The French and Indian War: Causes and Consequences.
• The Influence of the Enlightenment in the Colonies.
• Colonial Architecture: A Reflection of Cultural Identity.
• The Pennsylvania Colony: A Quaker Experiment.
• Cultural Exchange between Colonists and Native Americans.
• The Evolution of Colonial Economies: From Mercantilism to Capitalism.

Revolutionary Era

The Revolutionary Era, roughly from the 1760s to the 1780s, marked a period of political upheaval and radical change. It included events such as the American Revolution and the drafting of the US Constitution. This period represents America’s struggle for independence and the nation’s birth.

Research Paper Topics for the Revolutionary Era

• The Impact of the Stamp Act on the Colonies.
• The Boston Massacre: An Analysis.
• Role of Women in the American Revolution.
• The Philosophical Underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence.
• The Continental Congress: Achievements and Challenges.
• The Role of Propaganda in the American Revolution.
• Significance of the Battle of Saratoga.
• Comparative Analysis of the American and Haitian Revolutions.
• The Treaty of Paris (1783): Implications for America.
• Founding Fathers: Contributions and Controversies.
• The Federalist vs. Anti-Federalist Debate.
• The Role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War.
• The Impact of the Revolutionary War on Native Americans.
• Influence of the Enlightenment on the US Constitution.
• George Washington was a Military Leader.
• The Articles of Confederation: Strengths and Weaknesses.
• The Legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
• The Formation and Influence of the Sons of Liberty.
• Impact of the American Revolution on French Political Thought.
• The Bill of Rights: A Study in Civil Liberties.
• The Northwest Ordinance and Its Impact on American Expansion.
• Impact of the Revolutionary Era on American Literature.
• Loyalists during the American Revolution: Their Experiences and Contributions.

Nineteenth Century

The 19th Century was a time of dramatic transformation in America. From the expansion westward to the abolition of slavery and from the Industrial Revolution to the Civil War, these changes forged a new nation. It was an era defined by innovation, conflict, and expansion.

• The Impact of the Cotton Gin on the Southern Economy.
• The Missouri Compromise: An Analysis.
• The Role of Women in the 19th Century.
• Manifest Destiny and Its Impact on American Identity.
• The Abolitionist Movement: Key Figures and Contributions.
• The Mexican-American War: Causes and Consequences.
• The Impact of the Industrial Revolution on American Society.
• Analysis of the Compromise of 1850.
• The Fugitive Slave Act and Its Implications.
• The Influence of Transcendentalism on American Thought.
• The Homestead Act and Westward Expansion.
• Causes and Consequences of the Civil War.
• The Reconstruction Era: Successes and Failures.
• Role of African Americans in the Civil War.
• The Trail of Tears: Causes and Implications.
• The Emancipation Proclamation: Its Impact and Legacy.
• The Indian Removal Act: An Analysis.
• The Influence of the Gold Rush on American Society.
• The Formation of Labor Unions and Workers’ Rights.
• The Women’s Suffrage Movement: Key Events and Figures.
• The Dred Scott Decision and Its Impact on American Politics.
• The Impact of Railroads on Economic and Social Change.
• The Gilded Age: An Analysis of Social and Economic Disparities.

Twentieth Century

Monumental changes in technology, culture, politics, and social norms marked the 20th Century. The US emerged as a global superpower through its involvement in two World Wars, the Cold War, and numerous other international conflicts. This era also witnessed significant social changes, including the Civil Rights Movement, Women’s Liberation, and the Gay Rights Movement.

Research Paper Topics for the Twentieth Century

• Impact of World War I on American Society.
• The Harlem Renaissance: A Cultural Revolution.
• Causes and Consequences of the Great Depression.
• The Influence of the New Deal on American Government.
• Role of Women in World War II.
• The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II.
• The Rise of Suburbia in Post-War America.
• The Cold War: An Analysis of US Foreign Policy.
• The Civil Rights Movement: Key Figures and Milestones.
• Impact of the Vietnam War on American Culture.
• The Watergate Scandal and Its Effect on Public Trust.
• The Feminist Movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
• The Space Race and Its Influence on Technology.
• The Impact of Television on American Society.
• The Environmental Movement and the Creation of the EPA.
• The Gay Rights Movement: Key Events and Figures.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis: An Analysis.
• The Immigration Act of 1965 and Its Impact on American Demographics.
• The War on Drugs: Causes and Consequences.
• The AIDS Epidemic and Its Impact on Public Health Policy.
• The Fall of the Berlin Wall and the End of the Cold War.
• The Role of the Internet in the Digital Age.

Final Thoughts

History research can be a challenging but rewarding endeavor. Remember, the best papers reflect your curiosity and passion for the topic. So, pick a topic that resonates with you, immerse yourself in the research, and enjoy the journey through time.

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Title: realm: reference resolution as language modeling.

Abstract: Reference resolution is an important problem, one that is essential to understand and successfully handle context of different kinds. This context includes both previous turns and context that pertains to non-conversational entities, such as entities on the user's screen or those running in the background. While LLMs have been shown to be extremely powerful for a variety of tasks, their use in reference resolution, particularly for non-conversational entities, remains underutilized. This paper demonstrates how LLMs can be used to create an extremely effective system to resolve references of various types, by showing how reference resolution can be converted into a language modeling problem, despite involving forms of entities like those on screen that are not traditionally conducive to being reduced to a text-only modality. We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it.

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6 Eclipses That Influenced History

By: History.com Staff

Updated: April 8, 2024 | Original: April 4, 2024

Witnessing a lunar or solar eclipse can be an awe-inspiring experience. The astronomical events occur when the Earth and sun, or the Earth and moon become aligned and the sun or moon is temporarily obscured from humans' terrestrial perspective. So it's perhaps not surprising that these rare celestial events have influenced human behavior—particularly before they were widely understood.

From triggering fear to favoring armies, to proving revolutionary theories, the following eclipses have played a part in history.

October 22, 2134 B.C.: Solar eclipse spells doom for Hsi and Ho .

One of the earliest records of an eclipse appears in the ancient Chinese document Shu Ching (Book of History), which describes a day on which “the Sun and Moon did not meet harmoniously.” Historians believe this is a reference to the solar eclipse of October 22, 2134 B.C. The legend tells of two royal astronomers named Hsi and Ho who had shirked their duties and gotten drunk on the job. As a result, they failed to predict the event and were beheaded by the emperor.

May 28, 585 B.C.: Solar eclipse inspires truce between the Lydians and the Medes .

According to the ancient Greek historian Herodotus , a total solar eclipse brought about an unexpected ceasefire between two warring nations as they were fighting near the River Halys in what is now central Turkey. For five years, the Lydians and the Medes were battling for control of Anatolia. During the Battle of Halys, also known as the Battle of the Eclipse , the sky suddenly turned dark as the sun disappeared behind the moon. Interpreting the phenomenon as a sign that the gods wanted the conflict to end, the soldiers put down their weapons and negotiated a truce.

August 27, 413 B.C.: Lunar eclipse plus superstition prove deadly for Athens .

At the height of the Peloponnesian War , a decades-long struggle between Athens and Sparta , Athenian soldiers found themselves locked in a losing battle against the Sicilian city-state of Syracuse (who were allied with Sparta). The Athenian commander, Nicias, ordered a temporary retreat. According to an account by the Greek writer and philosopher Plutarch , as the troops prepared to sail home, a lunar eclipse took place, prompting the highly superstitious Nicias to postpone the departure. The Syracusians took advantage of the delay to stage another attack, overcoming the Athenians and weakening their stronghold on the Mediterranean. The defeat in Sicily marked the beginning of the end of Athenian dominance.

February 29, 1504: Lunar eclipse saves Christopher Columbus from starvation ?

Twelve years after his landing at San Salvador, Christopher Columbus was exploring the Central American coast when woodworms attacked his ship, causing leaks and forcing him to make an emergency stop in Jamaica. He and his crew spent more than a year there awaiting relief. The Indigenous people of the island initially welcomed the men, offering them food and shelter, but cut off their supplies when the Spaniards failed to offer trade in return and some of Columbus' crew members began stealing from them.

According to an account by his son, Ferdinand, Columbus consulted the almanac he had brought with him and read about an upcoming total lunar eclipse . Ferdinand writes that Columbus told the Jamaicans that the gods were unhappy with them for failing to provide assistance and that they would show their disapproval by turning the moon a bloody red color. The eclipse occurred on schedule, and Ferdinand claims the Jamaicans reacted in fear and then promised to resume feeding Columbus and his crew.

It makes a good story, anyway. Many historians, however, are skeptical of the account, particularly since the Indigenous people of the region would have witnessed a lunar eclipse just six years earlier. Nonetheless, research confirms a lunar eclipse did occur at that time. As John McCall, an anthropology professor at Southern Illinois University, notes , "While such stories must be regarded skeptically, the path of the 1504 eclipse is known, and Columbus’ account appears to be consistent with the darker side of his reputation."

August 7, 1869: Solar eclipse makes peace between scientists and native Alaskans .

George Davidson, a prominent astronomer and explorer, had already made surveys of several regions in Alaska—then a relatively uncharted territory—when he set out on a scientific expedition to Chilkat Valley in 1869. He was warned, however, that the local Chilkat Indians had been angered by some American provocation and might welcome him with guns and spears rather than open arms.

During a tense initial meeting on August 6, Davidson explained that he had come for purely scientific reasons, telling the Chilkat that he was especially anxious to observe a total eclipse of the sun the following day. It's not known what the Chilkat thought of the eclipse or Davidson’s prediction, but after the event, Davidson and his party report that they were able to continue their explorations .

May 29, 1919: Solar Eclipse Confirms Einstein's Big Theory

In an effort to test Albert Einstein 's then-four-year-old theory of general relativity , English scientists, led by physicist Sir Arthur Eddington, took advantage of a total solar eclipse. During the eclipse, as the moon blocked sunlight, more stars were visible near the sun. The team's measurements taken during the eclipse confirmed that starlight bent around the sun. It was an early confirmation of Einstein's theory that massive objects warp the fabric of space-time and that distortion manifests as gravity.

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The Life of O.J. Simpson: A Timeline

He was a football star, actor, commercial pitchman, and a defendant in a gruesome double murder whose trial gripped the nation.

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By Victor Mather

O.J. Simpson, who died on Wednesday at 76 , lived a life that made him one of the most famous people in America, as well as, at various times, the most celebrated and most reviled.

A Heisman Trophy winner when he played football at the University of Southern California, he reached superstar status as a running back with the Buffalo Bills. As a commercial pitchman and a Hollywood actor, he became a household name across much of America.

But fame turned to infamy when he was charged in the 1994 double murder of his former wife and her friend. He was acquitted after a trial that riveted the nation.

Here is a look at a man who never seemed to stop making news, for good and ill.

Heisman Trophy Winner

Mr. Simpson, who was born in San Francisco in 1947, first came to the attention of many Americans as a football star at the University of Southern California. In his two years playing for the Trojans, he was the game’s best running back, and tallied 33 touchdowns.

As a junior in 1967, he was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy as the college game’s best player, then won the award in 1968, his second and final year at U.S.C.

Professional Stardom

Mr. Simpson was drafted first overall by the Buffalo Bills in 1969, and by his fourth season he was a superstar. In 1973, he ran for 2,003 yards , which stood as a record for more than a decade, and won the N.F.L.’s Most Valuable Player Award; he was in the Top 5 in M.V.P. voting three other times as well.

He became known as the Juice, and his talent and likability propelled him to even greater notoriety. His on-field accomplishments and fame were all the more impressive given that he seldom played for good teams; his only playoff game, a loss, came in 1974.

He retired in 1979 after playing his final two seasons for the San Francisco 49ers.

Even those who knew little about football got to know the Juice as he began appearing in television advertisements, notably a series of ads for Hertz starting in 1975, in which he dashed through airports on his way to get his rental car. “Nobody has more of what it takes to rent you a Fairmont, Mustang, LTD or other fine car faster,” he said in one ad .

He also tried his hand at announcing, including a stretch from 1983 to 1985 on “Monday Night Football.”

Hollywood Calls

Mr. Simpson began appearing in television and movie roles even as his football career continued, including some big budget projects like “The Towering Inferno” in 1974, in which he played the building’s chief of security, and the blockbuster mini-series “Roots” in 1977.

His biggest success, though, came in the three “Naked Gun” films, in which he played Detective Nordberg. In a running series of gags, Nordberg was continuously injured, often in scenes played for broad laughs. In one particularly memorable scene , at the end of the first film, Nordberg is seen flying down stadium steps in a wheelchair before being catapulted off a ledge and flipping into the air.

Divorce and Reports of Abuse

The prosecution in Mr. Simpson’s murder trial said he abused his second wife , Nicole Brown Simpson, whom he married in 1985, throughout their relationship.

The abuse left Ms. Simpson bruised and terrified, but the police rarely took substantive action. After one call to the authorities, on New Year’s Day, 1989, officers found her badly beaten and half-naked, hiding in the bushes outside their home. “He’s going to kill me!” she sobbed. Mr. Simpson pleaded no contest to a charge of spousal abuse ; he was sentenced to probation and community service, and was ordered to pay a fine.

The confrontations continued after the couple divorced in 1992. On Oct. 25, 1993, Ms. Simpson called the police again. “He’s back,” she told a 911 operator, and officers once more intervened.

June 12, 1994

Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman Are Murdered

Ms. Simpson and her friend Ronald L Goldman, were stabbed to death at her home in Los Angeles on June 12, 1994.

Mr. Simpson was questioned and charged with murder. But he did not turn himself in initially. Instead, five days after the killings, he led the police on a bizarre, hourslong low-speed chase in a white 1993 Ford Bronco driven by his friend and former teammate Al Cowlings. The chase was shown live on nearly every television network, even pre-empting the N.B.A. Finals.

‘The Trial of the Century’

Mr. Simpson’s trial lasted for nine months and gripped the nation for all that time. Multiple television networks broadcast the trial every day, and minor figures, like Kato Kaelin, who was staying in Mr. Simpson’s guesthouse at the time of the killings, became celebrities.

In one of the most riveting moments, Mr. Simpson was asked to try on bloody gloves found at the crime scene. Mr. Simpson claimed the gloves were too tight; his lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. alluded to this in his closing argument, saying, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”

The verdict, despite significant DNA and other evidence, was not guilty on both counts. The result divided Americans: A majority felt it was a miscarriage of justice and continued to assume that Mr. Simpson was guilty, while some, including many Black Americans, believed the verdict to be justified.

Civil Judgment

After the acquittal, the parents of Ms. Simpson and Mr. Goldman filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Mr. Simpson. The jury found Mr. Simpson liable and ordered him to pay more than $30 million.

But Mr. Simpson said that his no longer having acting and endorsement work meant he was broke. The families ultimately received only a small fraction of the judgment.

Theft Charges and Prison

Mr. Simpson and several other men entered a hotel room in Las Vegas in 2007; Mr. Simpson claimed they were seeking sports memorabilia that had been stolen from him. A gun was brandished.

Mr. Simpson was arrested and in 2008 and was found guilty of armed robbery and kidnapping. He was released on parole in 2017 after serving nine years of a 33-year sentence.

Release and Later Life

Upon his release from prison in 2017, Mr. Simpson settled in Florida and led what was, for him, a relatively low-key life. He played a lot of golf and posted videos regularly on Twitter, generally opening with “It’s me, yours truly,” offering thoughts on professional sports and frequently urging his 800,000 followers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.

In his final post , on Feb. 11, Mr. Simpson, as usual looking relaxed, spoke optimistically about his health and incorrectly predicted that the 49ers would win the Super Bowl.

An earlier version of a picture caption with this article referred incorrectly to a glove that was an important piece of evidence in Mr. Simpson’s murder trial. It was not a golf glove.

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Victor Mather covers sports as well as breaking news for The Times. More about Victor Mather

Screen Rant

10 most iconic uses of "to me, my x-men" in franchise history.

The most important motto in X-Men history is also its most recurring. As such, here are many of the most memorable instances the X-Men were summoned.

• From Professor Xavier to Cyclops to Jean Grey, the iconic, "To me, my X-Men," phrase holds deep significance and leadership across generations.
• The evolution of this rallying cry reflects character growth and pivotal moments in X-Men lore, from Xavier's initial call to Scott's newfound control over his powers.
• Whether it's Kitty Pryde leading the Days of Future Past X-Men or Emma Frost resurrecting Professor X and Magneto, the phrase symbolizes unity, power, and change.

There is arguably no phrase in X-Men lore more iconic than, "To me, my X-Men!" Ever since its first appearance on-panel in 1963, the slogan has been repeated across the entirety of the franchise in all mediums (especially comics). It seems to have gained a newfound popularity and attention thanks to the title of the premiere episode of Disney's X-Men ' 97 .

Now, a new generation of fans are discovering just how rooted and integral this one seemingly simple phrase is to the franchise. As these new fans begin to research and understand the significance of that same quote, it makes sense to start with a collection of the most important and memorable instances in which the, " To me, my X-Men! " quote has been used.

10 The Famous Slogan Debuts On-Panel (Sort Of)

X-men #1 by stan lee, paul reinman, sam rosen, and jack kirby.

As a phrase, " To me, my X-Men! " dates as far back as the very first issue of The X-Men . The official debut of Marvel's strangest superheroes to date features its most iconic line as the final one of the issue. Granted, in totality, the line is different from what it would become in later years. To end the premiere issue, a congratulatory Professor Xavier utters, " And now, return to me, my X-Men! " In later years, the phrase would be shortened ever so slightly to become the X-Men's major motto. Yes, it is a little different from the actual motto, but this rendition is essential for what would come later .

Readers never would have gotten the official phrase in isolation if not for this extended first appearance. It's also significant that, while numerous people have echoed the phrase over the years, the first to do so is none other than the leader of the X-Men, Professor Charles Xavier.

9 Pete Wisdom Impersonates Xavier

Excalibur #93 by warren ellis, casey jones, tom simmons, ariane lenshoek, and richard starkings.

The name Pete Wisdom may not mean much to some readers, as he is one of the more obscure characters in X-Men lore, at least compared to names like Wolverine or Cyclops. However, the secret agent certainly makes an impression during this issue of Excalibur , or rather gives an impression of Charles Xavier . Pete is wheelchair bound after a violent encounter with Colossus, who beats Pete within an inch of his life after seeing his ex, Kitty Pryde, move on from him and into Wisdom's arms.

Peter miraculously survives, but rather than mope around, he decides to take advantage of the moment by grabbing a bald cap for the perfect Professor X cosplay . Even if he gets a groan from his girlfriend, he at least gets some chuckles from a couple of members of Excalibur.

8 Cyclops is Ready to Lead After Controlling His Powers

Astonishing x-men #23 by joss whedon, john cassaday, laura martin, and chris eliopoulos.

As much as "To me, my X-Men" has become a recurring staple of the X-Men franchise, Scott Summers' lack of control over his power beams is a recurring staple of the Cyclops character. It's been established that Cyclops struggles to control his powers due to brain damage from a childhood plane crash (or at least the emotional trauma from partaking in that plane crash, depending on who is writing). That's been the consistent explanation for his visor for years, but during the Astonishing X-Men series of old, steps were taken for Cyclops to finally gain control over his powers.

Cyclops Proves Exactly Why He's the Ultimate Superhero Leader

Finally, with control of his powers for once in his life following an encounter with the agents of S.W.O.R.D., Cyclops is ready to lead the X-Men better than he ever has before. " To me, my X-Men ," he says with the same bravado that's connecting with those who have viewed him say it in X-Men '97.

7 Kickstarting the Krakoa Era

House of x #1 by jonathan hickman, pepe larraz, marte gracia, vc's clayton cowles, and tom muller.

Perhaps the most important nod to Xavier's original iconic line is seeing him repeat it at the dawn of the Krakoa Era of X-Men . Up until this point, the franchise had maintained the usual status quo of Professor X guiding the next generation by way of his school and the X-Men team comprised of his top students. The Krakoa Era was ready to reflect something completely different when Jonathan Hickman launched it in 2019. Now, as the Krakoa Era comes to a close, it becomes easier to think of the highs and lows of that era in retrospect.

The very first words spoken in the first issue of the Krakoa Era come from Professor X as he greets a group of resurrected mutants. " To me, my X-Men, " he says, harkening back to the final words of the very first issue of The X-Men. This sole moment ranks up there among some of the highest highs of the era because it is so symbolic of a new beginning.

6 Madelyne Pryor leads Dark X-Men

Dark web: x-men #3 by gerry duggan, phil noto, rod reis, and vc's cory petit.

Madelyne Pryor has such a complicated standing in the Marvel Universe. Even as 2023 helped mold her into a big-time player , it's hard to argue whether the Jean Grey clone is truly a villain, or a complex character who rightfully has a chip on her shoulder. This is a character who has had so much taken away from her and is merely on a warpath to get what she believes is owed to her. That narrative is especially evident in her fight with Jean Grey in the Dark Web event, where Jean finally starts to understand where Pryor is coming from.

Not only does Jean decide that Madelyne has earned the right to lead her own X-Men in New York City, but she earned the right to say the famous battle cry at the center of this list . Jean even supplies Maddie with a megaphone to say it loud and proud.

X-Men Fixes Its Oldest Mistake In One Triumphant Moment

5 kitty pryde leads the days of future past x-men, x-men: days of future past - doomsday by marc guggenheim, manuel garcía, cam smith, yen nitro, and clayton cowles.

She's gone by many names over the years - Kitty Pryde, Captain Kate Pryde, Sprite, Shadowcat - but the most deserving name she gains in the future is the leader of the X-Men . In X-Men: Days of Future Past - Doomsday , Marvel revisits the timeline from the seminal Days of Future Past story. Here, readers are graced with a new generation of X-Men with a roster led by Pryde . The team also features Magneto, Synch, Bishop, Rachel Summers, and Laura Kinney's Wolverine.

When Xavier first coined the phrase in 1963, it introduced the X-Men to an entire generation of comic readers. In repeating that line, Pryde singlehandedly enters the X-Men into a new, hopeful generation of mutanthood. And considering what came prior, for those familiar with the Days of Future Past storyline, it's a much-needed rechristening for the squad. After a dark period for mutantkind, Pryde is ready to lead the X-Men into a new dawn.

4 Xavier Kills Cassandra Nova

New x-men #116 by grant morrison, mark morales, dan green, hi-fi design, richard starkings, and frank quitely.

Cassandra Nova is the evil twin sister of Professor Xavier whom he failed to kill in the womb and who sports a healing factor even better than Wolverine's . Introduced at the start of writer Grant Morrison's franchise-redefining New X-Men , Cassandra Nova's level of evil knows no bounds as she orchestrates a mutant massacre in Genosha. Even the typically pacifist Charles Xavier knows that it's time for his sister to go. She reaches Cerebra in an attempt to amplify her power, only for Emma Frost to snap her neck, but that's not enough to stop her.

Before Cassandra gets a chance to use that aforementioned healing factor, her brother shoots several bullets into her. Even the surrounding X-Men are shaken by the sight of their professor wielding a gun. Xavier calling his X-Men to him with his sister's blood pouring down his face is a haunting twist on the more uplifting 1963 moment that introduced that line into canon .

3 Cyclops Ushers in a New Dream

All-new x-men #9 by brian michael bendis, stuart immonen, wade von grawbadger, marte gracia, rain beredo, and vc's cory petit.

There was a time when Cyclops fully believed in Xavier's dream. But when he becomes disillusioned with his mentor's worldview, Scott Summers goes rogue to carve out a dream of his own . In doing so, he breaks away from the original X-Men lineup in hopes of forming his own Extinction team, a team so powerful that they give the Avengers a run for their money and stake a claim to the title of " Earth's Mightiest Heroes ." Led by Cyclops, the Extinction team also features the likes of Emma Frost, Magik, Magneto, Colossus, Storm, and Hope Summers.

At this point in time, Cyclops and his fellow rogues have been M.I.A. for a considerable amount of time, so when All-New X-Men #9 ends with Scott Summers and his mighty squadron showing up on the front lawn of Xavier's school, it's serious business. To usher in his new dream, Cyclops repeats the lines of his former mentor, ready to re-shape the dream in his image .

2 Emma Frost Resurrects Xavier and Magneto

Inferno #4 by jonathan hickman, valerio schiti, stefano caselli, david curiel, and vc's joe sabino.

Emma Frost undoubtedly ranks among one of the X-Men's most proficient leaders and most powerful mutants, which is why this moment feels so significant. When it comes time to resurrect both Professor X and Magneto, it's Emma Frost who does the deed. Emma Frost standing tall and hovering over two of the most historically important members of the X-Men is borderline symbolic . For her to do so while saying, " To me, my X-Men " takes that symbolism to a whole other level.

One can argue that the visual suggests that it positions Emma as being far more powerful than either Max or Charles. Another argument could suggest that it foreshadows Emma being upgraded from being one of the X-Men's key leaders into the one and only leader, or at least the highest ranking leader of the team.

1 Cyclops Lets Jean Grey "Take it From Here"

X of swords: destruction #1 by jonathan hickman, tini howard, pepe larraz, marte gracia, vc's clayton cowles, and tom muller.

Cyclops has been frequently namedropped and featured throughout this list, which makes sense. " To me, my X-Men " is typically a phrase reserved for the leader of the team, so it's only natural that Xavier and Scott are the ones who have probably said it the most in the comics over the years. For that same reason, it is a big deal to see Cyclops pass the baton, maybe even the torch, so to speak, to Jean Grey . He gives her the go-ahead to not just lead the charge, but to say "To me, my X-Men."

Jean Grey has always been one of the most pivotal members of the X-Men since its inception. Whether they be merely teammates or romantically linked, it's been established that Cyclops rightfully trusts Jean more than anyone else on the team. It's just as much Jean's X-Men as it is Xavier's or Cyclops', and Scott trusting her to issue the signature " To me, my X-Men " rallying cry puts her on the same level as the team's greatest leaders.

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Purdue Star Zach Edey Makes History As Back-to-Back Winner of Men's Wooden Award

• Author: Madison Williams

In this story:

Purdue's Zach Edey was named the recipient of the 2024 John R. Wooden Award on Wednesday, taking home the honor for the second straight year and becoming the first unanimous back-to-back winner in over 50 years.

Edey led the Boilermakers to a 34–5 record and an appearance in the NCAA tournament national title game on Monday against UConn. That marked Edey's final collegiate basketball game as he declared for the NBA draft, which begins on June 26. He is expected to be a late first-round or early second-round pick.

In his senior season, Edey averaged 25.0 points, 12.2 rebounds and 2.2 blocks in 37 games.

🧹 The Back-to-Back NPOY Sweep. @zach_edey is the @WoodenAward winner. The first back-to-back unanimous NPOY in over 50 years! pic.twitter.com/BEojRZUUii — Purdue Men's Basketball (@BoilerBall) April 10, 2024

The 7'4" center also was named the AP Player of the Year for the second consecutive season last week. He is the first men's college basketball player since Virginia's Ralph Sampson during the 1980s to win these two awards in back-to-back seasons.

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Baisakhi 2024: Know The History And Importance OF Festival

Baisakhi marks a new beginning, encouraging individuals to reflect on their journey, shed negativity and embrace positivity..

Baisakhi 2024 will be celebrated on April 13.

Baisakhi, also known as Vaisakhi, is a harvest festival that is celebrated primarily in Punjab and northern India. It is an occasion of joy, unity and renewal, marking the harvest season's abundance. From the day of Baisakhi, Hindu month of Vaisakh begins. The festival is celebrated in the month of April, according to corresponding date in the Hindu calendar, either on April 13 or 14. This year, Baisakhi will be celebrated on April 13 (Saturday). On the same day, other harvest festivals like Bohag Bihu in Assam and Vishu in Kerala are also celebrated.

Importance of Baisakhi

Baisakhi embodies the spirit of gratitude for the bountiful harvest, fostering a sense of community and sharing among people. It's a time to rejoice in the fruits of labour, to dance to the beats of the dhol and to indulge in sumptuous traditional delicacies.

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Beyond its agricultural roots, Baisakhi stands as a beacon of spiritual awakening. It marks a new beginning, encouraging individuals to reflect on their journey, shed negativity and embrace positivity. For Sikhs, it's a time to reaffirm their commitment to the principles of Sikhism and to honour the sacrifices made by their forefathers.

History of Baisakhi

It commemorates the formation of the Khalsa Panth by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, symbolising courage, equality and the pursuit of justice.

The 10th Sikh Guru asked who in a crowd of thousands was prepared to die for the cause of religion. Eventually five men volunteered and Guru Gobind Singh baptised them after which they became the first five members of a group called Khalsa. The tradition of Sikh baptism during the Baisakhi festival originated from this historic event.

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