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In the 15th century, its meaning shifted to cover the branch of knowledge studying the past in addition to narratives about the past. [23] 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]
In a slightly different sense, the term history refers not to an academic field but to the past itself or to individual texts about the past. History is a broad discipline encompassing many branches. Some focus on specific time periods, such as ancient history, while others concentrate on particular geographic regions, such as the history of ...
Within academia, the history of knowledge is the field covering the accumulated and known human knowledge constructed or discovered during human history and its historic forms, focus, accumulation, bearers, [1] impacts, mediations, distribution, applications, societal contexts, conditions [2] and methods of production.
History can be described as all of the following: Academic discipline – body of knowledge given to – or received by – a disciple (student); a branch or sphere of knowledge, or field of study, that an individual has chosen to specialise in.
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a "primary source" (also called an "original source") is a first hand account of events by someone who lived through them. "Primary sources were made during the historical period that is being investigated."
In the most general usage, every original historian may be said to be a revisionist historian, because the simple act of generating a new understanding of the past necessarily challenges or re-interprets the body of historical knowledge about a subject, though the term may also refer more specifically to re-interpretations of the mainstream or ...
The myth that Columbus proved the Earth was round was propagated by authors like Washington Irving in A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. [31] Columbus was not the first European to visit the Americas: [35] Leif Erikson, and possibly other Vikings before him, explored Vinland, an area of coastal North America.
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers . They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.