BRANCHES OF HISTORY AND THEIR OBJECTS OF STUDY - HISTORY - 2025

The branches of history are military history, history of religion, social history, cultural history, diplomatic history, economic history, environmental history, world history, world history, intellectual history, gender history, and public history.

History is the discovery, collection, organization, analysis, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean a continuous, typically chronological record of important or public events or of a particular trend or institution.

Scholars who write about history are called historians. It is a field of knowledge that uses a narrative to examine and analyze the sequence of events, and sometimes attempts to objectively investigate the patterns of cause and effect that determine events.

Historians discuss the nature of history and its usefulness. This includes discussing the study of the discipline as an end in itself and as a way of providing "perspective" on the problems of the present.

Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by outside sources (such as the legends surrounding King Arthur) are often classified as cultural heritage rather than the "disinterested inquiry" required by the discipline of history. Events in the past before written record are considered prehistory.

Among the scholars of the 5th century BC the Greek historian Herodotus is considered the "father of history." The methods of Herodotus together with his contemporary Thucydides form the basis for the modern study of history.

The modern study of history has many different fields, including those that focus on certain regions and those that focus on certain topical or thematic elements of historical research.

Hence, the importance of history has global relevance for its contributions to each region, culture and socio-political class.

Main branches of history

Due to the multitude of areas of study in history, this discipline has diversified to provide a more objective approach to specific areas through methods and procedures that are adapted to the needs of specific knowledge.

Military history

Military history refers to warfare, strategies, battles, weapons, and the psychology of combat.

The "new military history" since the 1970s has been concerned more with soldiers than generals, with psychology more than tactics, and the broader impact of war on society and culture.

History of religion

The history of religion has been a main topic for secular and religious historians for centuries, and continues to be taught in seminaries and academia.

Among the major newspapers are the History of the Church, the Catholic Historical Review, and the History of Religions.

Topics range from political, cultural, and artistic dimensions to theology and liturgy. This topic studies religions from all regions and areas of the world where human beings have lived.

Social history

Social history is the field that includes the history of ordinary people and their strategies and institutions for coping with life.

In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and is still well represented in departments of history.

The "old" social history, before the 1960s, was a hodgepodge of topics without a central theme, and often included political movements, such as populism, that were "social" in the sense of being outside the elite system.

Social history is contrasted with political history, intellectual history, and the history of great men.

The English historian GM Trevelyan saw it as the bridge between economic history and political history, reflecting that "without social history, economic history is sterile and political history is unintelligible."

Cultural history

Cultural history replaced social history as the dominant form in the 1980s and 1990s.

It often combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine language, popular cultural traditions, and cultural interpretations of historical experience.

Examine the records and narrative descriptions of past knowledge, customs, and arts of a group of people.

How peoples built their memory of the past is an important issue. Cultural history includes the study of art in society as well as the study of images and human visual production (iconography).

Diplomatic history

Diplomatic history focuses on the relations between nations, mainly with respect to diplomacy and the causes of wars.

More recently the causes of peace and human rights are examined. It typically presents the foreign office's views, and long-term strategic values, as the driving force for continuity and change in history.

This type of political history is the study of the behavior of international relations between states or across state borders over time.

Historian Muriel Chamberlain notes that after World War I "diplomatic history replaced constitutional history as the flagship of historical research, at once the most important, most accurate, and most sophisticated of historical studies."

He adds that after 1945, there was a reversed trend, allowing social history to replace it.

Economic history

Although economic history has been well established since the late 19th century, in recent years academic studies have increasingly shifted toward economics departments and away from traditional history departments.

Economic history deals with the history of individual business organizations, business methods, government regulation, labor relations, and the impact on society.

It also includes biographies of individual companies, executives and entrepreneurs.

Environmental history

Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time.

In contrast to other historical disciplines, it highlights the active role that nature plays in influencing human affairs. Environmental historians study how human beings shape and are shaped by their environment.

Environmental history emerged in the United States from the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its impetus still comes from current global environmental concerns.

The field was founded on conservation issues, but has expanded in scope to include a more general scientific and social history and may deal with cities, population, or sustainable development.

Like all stories, it happens in the natural world. Environmental history tends to focus on particular timescales, geographic regions, or key themes.

It is also a strongly multidisciplinary subject that draws heavily on the humanities and natural sciences.

World history

World history, global history, or transnational history (not to be confused with diplomatic or international history) is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. Examine history from a global perspective.

It should not be confused with comparative history, which, like world history, deals with the history of multiple cultures and nations, but does not do so on a global scale.

World history looks for common patterns that emerge across cultures. Historians of the world use a thematic approach, with two main focal points: integration (how the processes of world history have drawn the people of the world) and difference (how the patterns of world history reveal the diversity of experiences human).

Universal history

Universal history is a term for a work that aims to present the history of humanity as a whole, as a coherent unit.

Universal history in the Western tradition is commonly divided into three parts, namely: ancient, medieval, and modern.

A universal chronicle or world chronicle traces history from the beginning of written information about the past to the present.

Universal history encompasses the events of all times and nations, with the only limitation that they must be established to make possible a scientific treatment of them.

Intellectual history

Intellectual history emerged in the mid-twentieth century, focusing on intellectuals and their books on the one hand and, on the other, on the study of ideas as disincorporated objects with a career of their own.

History of the genre

The history of gender is a branch of History and Gender Studies, which looks at the past from a gender perspective. It is in many ways a consequence of the history of women.

Despite its relatively short life, the History of Gender (and its predecessor History of Women) has had a rather significant effect on the general study of history.

Public history

Public history describes the wide range of activities carried out by people with some background in the discipline of history who generally work outside of specialized academic settings.

The practice of public history has deep roots in the areas of historical preservation, archival science, oral history, museum curation, and other related fields.

Some of the most common settings for public history are museums, historic houses and historic sites, parks, battlefields, archives, film and television companies, and all levels of government.

References

1. Leopold von Ranke. Universal history: the oldest historical group of nations and the Greeks. Scribner, 1884. An epitome of universal history By A. Harding. Page 1.
2. The Origin and Goal of History, (London: Yale University Press, 1949).
3. Guha, Ramachandra. 1999 Environmentalism: A Global History.
4. Simmons, Ian G. (1993). Environmental History: A Concise Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. ISBN 1-55786-445-4.
5. H. Waters, Herodotus the Historian (1985)
6. Peter N. Stearns; Peters Seixas; Sam Wineburg, eds. (2000). "Introduction". Knowing Teaching and Learning History, National and International Perspectives. New York & London: New York University Press. p. 6. ISBN 0-8147-8141-1.
7. Scott Gordon and James Gordon Irving, The History and Philosophy of Social Science. Routledge 1991. Page 1. ISBN 0-415-05682-9
8. Carr, Edward H. (1961). What is History ?, p.108, ISBN 0-14-020652-3
9. Robert Whaples, "Is Economic History a Neglected Field of Study ?," Historically Speaking (April 2010) v. 11 # 2 pp 17-20, with responses pp 20-27
10. Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the twentieth century: From scientific objectivity to the postmodern challenge (2005).
11. "Teaching History in Schools: the Politics of Textbooks in India," History Workshop Journal, April 2009, Issue 67, pp 99-110
12. Marwick, Arthur (1970). The Nature of History. The Macmillan Press LTD. p. 169.
13. Tosh, John (2006). The Pursuit of History. Pearson Education Limited. pp. 168-169.
14. David Glassberg, "Public history and the study of memory." The Public Historian (1996): 7-23. in JSTOR
15. Pavkovic, Michael; Morillo, Stephen (2006). What is Military History ?. Oxford: Polity Press (published 31 July 2006). pp. 3–4. ISBN 978-0-7456-3390-9.