THE BOYS' BRIGADE

History as an Academic Discipline

Overview of History Discipline:
Throughout the world, studying history is an essential element of a good liberal arts education.  Knowledge of history is indispensable to understanding who we are and where we fit in the world.
As a discipline, history is the study of the past.  In other words, historians study and interpret the past.  In order to do this, they must find evidence about the past, ask questions of that evidence, and come up with explanations that make sense of what the evidence says about the peoples, events, places, and time periods under consideration.  Because it is impossible for a single historian to study the history of all peoples, events, places, and time periods, historians develop specialties within the discipline.   Historians may study the history of particular groups of people (e.g. women’s history or African-American history), they may study particular events (e.g. history of the Vietnam War or the Crusades), they may study the history of a single country or region (e.g. Pacific Northwest history or Chinese history), or they may confine their interest to a limited time period (e.g. early American history or Medieval history). 
In addition to limiting the scope of their historical study, historians also take different approaches to their inquiries.  For example, they may decide to look at the cultural or social relationships between the people they are studying, at the intellectual or religious debates within a particular society or group, at the political or economic history of a country or region, or at the history of the environment or science and technology during a pivotal time frame.  Because different historians take different approaches to their research and writing, and because individual historians bring different perspectives and different questions to their work, historical interpretations are constantly changing and evolving.
The study of history is therefore dynamic and forever new.  Far from being the study of facts and dates, understanding history means understanding how to read and interpret the past.  It is through reading and interpreting our various pasts that we can know and understand the present and the future.
For more information on the study of history, see:

• American Historical Association: http://www.historians.org/index.cfm
• Organization of American Historians: http://www.oah.org/

 THINK ON THESE;

1. I think that the move to “social history” in the late 60s early 70s was a key development, as historians moved to write histories of populations, lifestyles, and cultures using some really creative applications of quantitative method. It was the culmination of a trend that had started in the 1950s (or earlier), but using the methods of sociology to answer historical questions broadened the scope of what we considered “history” in ways that, in my own bias, I find key to our understanding of how societies and cultures move through time.
2. The move to environmental history, seeing the environment as a historical actor, and as constraining the choices of historical actors transformed the possibilities for how we understand the ultimate and proximate reasons for cultural change.
3. I like that for the most part, during the 1980s, history avoided the most irritating parts of the “linguistic turn” (i.e., poststructural criticism/theory), but am irritated that in the history of sexuality, it was overly influenced by postmodernism (especially by Foucault) and has yet to extricate itself from the most problematic parts of postmodernism’s assumptions, which actually use historicism to make unhistorical claims.
4. I think the historical profession is doing the best of all the social sciences at reaching the public. But I find academically that, like many of the social sciences, the tightening of the job market for academic historians and the glut of PhDs has produced a lot of mediocre work, as new professors are under extreme pressure to publish at all costs (like I said, I think this is a problem in all the social sciences, not just history).
5. Despite what I just said in No. 3 above, I’d like to see historians engaging more in sociological and anthropological theory and methods (again my own bias), because although I love historical method, I often find basic mistakes in historical analysis of cultural and social phenomena, given what other social scientists have been researching about how societies and cultures function. [To be fair, I likewise think that sociologists and anthropologists should be required to understand the basics of historical method and especially the researched history of their areas of research, as I often find astounding historical ignorance in social scientific research. I'm not a believer in interdisciplinary utopias, but I deifnitely think that overlapping disciplines need to be aware of the research in the other social sciences.]