THE 12 MAJOR FIELDS OF STUDY IN HISTORY - HISTORY - 2025

The fields of study of history refer to the classification of the study of it according to different themes, historical periods and areas of interest. Historians have written in the context of their own era and according to the prevailing ideas during it.

People live in the present, plan and worry about the future. However, history is the study of the past according to its description in written sources. Those events that occurred before the documentary records are considered part of prehistory.

History as an academic discipline uses narrative to examine and analyze a sequence of past events and objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that define them.

The study of history has been classified as part of the humanities and sometimes as part of the social sciences, although from another perspective it could be considered as a bridge between both disciplines.

There are different methods for organizing and classifying history, including chronological, cultural, territorial, and thematic. These divisions are not mutually exclusive and often overlap.

The 12 major fields of study in history

1- Military

It concerns the methods of warfare, strategies, battles, weapons, and the psychology of combat. The so-called “new military history”, beginning in the 1970s, has been focused more on the soldiers than on the high command of the military.

Likewise, psychology has taken a leading role beyond tactics and the general impact of war on society and culture.

2- Religious

The study of religion has been a subject of study for religious and secular historians throughout the centuries and is still valid today in seminaries and academies. The themes that cover it are multiple and range from its political, cultural and artistic dimension to theology and liturgy.

This field of study has existed in all regions of the world where the human race has inhabited.

3- Social

It is about the field of study of ordinary people and the strategies and institutions they use to deal with life. Its “golden age” occurred between the 1960s and 1970s and is still represented today in the history departments of many universities around the world.

4- Cultural

The cultural study of history replaced the social one during the 1980s and 1990s. Combining the approaches of anthropology with history, it looks at language, popular traditions, and cultural interpretations of historical experience.

Examine the vestiges and narrative descriptions of the knowledge, traditions and artistic expressions of different groups of people.

5- Diplomat

This field of study focuses on the relationship between nations, mainly diplomatic ones, as well as the origins of war. In more recent times it seeks to analyze the causes of peace and human rights.

6- Economic

Although the economic study of history was established since the late nineteenth century, in recent years academic studies in this field have turned more and more to economic areas more than history in schools and universities.

The history of business deals with organizations, business methods, government regulations, labor relations, and their impact on society.

7- Environmental

It is a field of study that emerged in the 1980s and focuses on the history of the environment, especially in the long term, as well as the impact that human activities have on it.

8- World

It is the study of the main civilizations of the world during the last 3000 years. It is a field of study of teaching rather than research.

It gained popularity in the United States and Japan, among other countries, after the 1980s when it was realized that students needed greater exposure to the world as globalization progressed.

9- Popular

It is a field of study that seeks to tell historical events from the perspective of ordinary people. It is the history of the world told from the perspective of popular movements.

Those individuals and groups not previously taken into account in other types of historical retelling are the main focus in this field: the dispossessed, the oppressed, the poor, the nonconforming, and the forgotten.

10- Intellectual

The field of intellectual study deals with the history of ideas that emerged in the mid-20th century with a main focus directed towards intellectuals and their writings as well as the study of ideas as independent entities with their own historical load.

11- Gender

This field of study is a derivation of historical gender studies, which seeks to observe and analyze the past from a gender perspective. In a way it is derived from the history of women and, although its emergence is recent, it has had a significant impact on the general study of history.

12- Public

Public history describes the wide range of activities undertaken by people with some background in history who generally work outside the academic field.

This field of study is linked to the preservation of history, archival, oral history, museum curation and other related fields.

References

1. History. Taken from wikipedia.org.
2. Fields of Study. Taken from wikipedia.org.