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In the 18th and 19th centuries, the word history became more closely associated with factual accounts and evidence-based inquiry, coinciding with the professionalization of historical inquiry. [24] The dual meaning, referring to both mere stories and factual accounts of the past, is present in the terms for history in many other European languages.
Historical method is the collection of techniques and guidelines that historians use to research and write histories of the past. Secondary sources, primary sources and material evidence such as that derived from archaeology may all be drawn on, and the historian's skill lies in identifying these sources, evaluating their relative authority, and combining their testimony appropriately in order ...
British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper said Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation. [5] Trevor-Roper said examining possible alternative outcomes of history is not a "parlour-game", but is an essential part of historians' work. [6]
David Summers, building on the work of E. H. Gombrich, defines historicism negatively, writing that it posits "that laws of history are formulatable and that in general the outcome of history is predictable," adding "the idea that history is a universal matrix prior to events, which are simply placed in order within that matrix by the historian ...
The Allegory On the Writing of History shows Truth (top) watching the historian write history, while advised by Wisdom (Jacob de Wit,1754) Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject ...
The ensemble of procedures by which the historian–according to personal perspective, temperament, social conditioning, and conscious choice–imposes a pattern of meaning or significance on his subject; the process of selection, arrangement, accentuation, and synthesis of historical facts that establishes the personal stamp of an individual ...
Historical determinism is the belief that events in history are entirely determined or constrained by various prior forces and, therefore, in a certain sense, inevitable. It is the philosophical view of determinism applied to the process or direction by which history unfolds. Historical determinism places the cause of the event behind it.
Significant historical documents can be deeds, laws, accounts of battles (often given by the victors or persons sharing their viewpoint), or the exploits of the powerful. Though these documents are of historical interest, they do not detail the daily lives of ordinary people, or the way society functioned.