History is the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another.It is the study of the past from the present to foresee the future.Those who study history are called 'students of history' or 'historians'. History is a tool to understanding the world around us and to understand ourselves as well. History is all about the historians experience.
The impact you make in the world makes you.History is all about time,space change.The totality of the activities of man over time and space.Everyone is a contributor and participant of history and that is why it is called a process and a study.As a process including man.woman.girl,boy.old,young,rich,poor,strong.mighty,weak,lawyers.historians,archaeologists, anthropologists,scientists,pastors,priests,bishops,doctors, engineers,politicians,beggars,teacher,etc. are part of the process which cannot be static.
Nothing is new in history but your interpretation and contribution is what is new.
History is an important branch of knowledge or discipline in the study of man and society.It has been defined in various forms by different scholars and philosophers for meaningful understanding.History is the totalility of the activities of man over time and space. Karl Marx defined process as the relationship between man and his environment and his environment on man. from the definition, we are referring to the episodes,events,and the totality of changes and experiences which humanity has undergone ever since the emergence of human existence. History is further more defined as an academic discipline as the construction,study and explanation of these changes which humanity has undergone.Edward Hallett Carr in his work 'what is history?' defined history as the continuous processs of interaction between the historian and his facts and unending dialogue between the present and the past.
History is the German floor of other discipline and it is the basis of other discipline.It is for academic convenience that we have other discipline. The approach of history is different.Some other discipline are highly judgemental and some predict the future.However, the methodological approach of history is different from others.History is the organized critical study of past activities of human beings as had produced significant effects on subsequent cause of events.History is centered on society in the past but one that has meaning and value to man in society today.
The subject matter of history is man.History is concerned with all transformation in society.That is to say the changing patterns of man's society.History is not concerned with a stagnant past but one in motion.A phenomenon that makes change inevitable.A person who studies history is a/an historian or a student of history.History is all about the historians experience. History is interpretation.It begins with the handing down of tradition,and tradition means carrying of the habits and lessons of the part into the future.Records of the past begin to be kept for benefit of future generations.Historians have the future in their bones.
The backbone of history is fact. The content of history can be realized only as we experience it.History is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another.The historian collects facts and then he interprets them.History is what the historian makes.Always make sure you study the historian before you study the facts.
Facts alone are needed or wanted in life.All information is within reach and every problem is capable of solution.The facts of history do not exist for any historian till he creates them.The reflection of our position in time forms part of our answer to the broader question of what we take of the society in which we belong or live.Facts are sacred,opinion is free.A mere fact about the part is transformed into a fact of history.The nagging distinction between facts of history and other facts about the past vanishes,because the few known facts are all facts of history.The facts, whether found in documents or not, have stil to be processed by the historian before he can make any use of them.The facts of history were themselves a demonstration of the supreme fact of a beneficent and apparently infinite progress towards higher things.The facts of history is the object of the historian's inquiry of the behaviour of individuals.
The impact you make in the world makes you.Everyone is a contributor and partaker of history.history is everyone's experience and it is the study of the past from the present to foresee the future.When you understand events, you will the people that makes the events!
Objectivity is based on facts-making a decision that is based on facts that cannot be influenced.One offer to critical and sceptical.beware of something nasty which pretends to be something nice! Can you be objective in decision making?
Definitions of history on the Web:
- the aggregate of past events; "a critical time in the school's history"
- a record or narrative description of past events; "a history of France"; "he gave an inaccurate account of the plot to kill the president"; "the story of exposure to lead"
- the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings; "he teaches Medieval history"; "history takes the long view"
- the continuum of events occurring in succession leading from the past to the present and even into the future; "all of human history"
- all that is remembered of the past as preserved in writing; a body of knowledge; "the dawn of recorded history"; "from the beginning of history"
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn - History (from Greek ἱστορία - historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the human past. Scholars who write about history are called historians. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written by English historian Edward Gibbon and published in six volumes. Volume I was published in 1776, and went through six printings. Volumes II and III were published in 1781; volumes IV, V, VI in 1788–89. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_History - History, formerly known as The History Channel, is an international satellite and cable TV channel that broadcasts programs regarding historical events and persons, as well as various metaphysical, pseudoscientific, and paranormal phenomena—often with observations and explanations by noted ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(TV_channel) - The various Unix shells maintain a record of the commands issued by the user during the current session. The history command manipulates this history list. In its simplest form, it prints the history list. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(Unix) - History is a historical journal published on behalf of the Historical Association (by Blackwell).
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(journal) - History is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It was first published in the March 1941 issue of Super Science Stories and reprinted in the 1972 collection The Early Asimov.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(short_story) - "History" is a song by English rock band The Verve, and is featured on their second album, A Northern Soul. It was released 18 September 1995 as the third and final single from the album, charting at #24 in the UK Singles Chart (see 1995 in British music). ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(The_Verve_song) - History is the thirteenth studio album by American singer-songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, released on September 21, 1992 on Charisma Records. The album was recorded following the death of Wainwright's father, Loudon Wainwright Jr.. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(Loudon_Wainwright_III_album) - All human societies have medical beliefs that provide explanations for birth, death, and disease. Throughout history, illness has been attributed to witchcraft, demons, adverse astral influence, or the will of the gods. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(medicine) - History: A Novel (La Storia) is a novel by Italian author Elsa Morante, largely seen to be her most famous and controversial work. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_(novel) - What is history? It sounds such a simple question doesn't it? But it can cause a lot of disagreement. Napoleon called it 'a myth' and Henry Ford called it 'bunk'! Other people think it is much more important, believing, like the American historian David McCullough, that "History is who we are and why we are the way we are."When am I ever going to use this? Why do we need to know this stuff? The questions every teacher loves to hear. The answer is actually pretty simple, "To know yourself".
What is important about history? Why so people need to know all those names and dates. The reality is, they do not, and can not. There are so many important people and dates, it is impossible for any one to know all of them. Besides, it is pretty easy to look up most of the factual information most people need on any thing close to a frequent status. The importance is not in the specifics but the lessons.
In the movie Amistad, John Quincy Adams, played by Anthony Hopkins, is arguing a case before the United States Supreme Court. He meanders around the court chambers looking at the busts of the founding fathers, including his own father, John Adams. He sums up the importance of history very succinctly when he says, "Who we are, is who they were."
The importance of history is the importance of understanding yourself. There can be no true understanding of the present with out knowledge of the past. Everything happening in the world today is a piece of a long line of events, decisions and lives that came before. By not knowing the past, it is not possible to know the present or the future.
No one knows what will happen in the future, but the past can help guide us into the future. The lessons of the past are like a map into the future. The map is blurred and maybe even missing pieces, but it is the best we have. By examining the struggles, successes and failures of our ancestors, we learn how to examine ourselves and move forward.
Not all the lessons learned will be correct or successful. That will be for future generations to study and try to learn from. The mere act of trying to learn from the past and knowing the stories of the many different people is a tribute to their lives. Saying history is boring and worthless is saying the lives of all the people that came before us were worthless. That is certainly not the case.
So remember, history is not just a bunch of names and dates. History is the story of how we became who we now are. You may disagree with some of it, or not care about some, or wish it were something else. Either way you are learning something about yourself right now, and that is the most important name and date to know.
Whatever they think about the usefulness of history most people will, however, agree that history is the study of the past. In fact, historians are a bit like detectives - using evidence to find out what happened and why. This is not an easy job. You must be able to recognise evidence, decide how useful it is and come to conclusions based on what you have found out.
We're going to find out how to do all this by using some real historical sources. Each section will teach you a new skill so that by the end you will be a history detective! You can work through the sections in order or use the navigation tools at the top or left-hand side of the page to go to the section you are interested in. Have fun! 
What follows are a series of quotations about history and the historian's craft. They have been culled from a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination.* * *"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce"Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves." G. M. Trevelyan."To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Cicero"The past is useless. That explains why it is past." Wright Morris"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson"The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid." Livy"What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." G. W. F. Hegel"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life." Fernand Braudel"The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." E. H. Carr"If you do not like the past, change it." William L. Burton"History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx"An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel Eliot Morison"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford"That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna Comnena"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche"The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact." Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Jackson Turner- History is the study of the past, including the prehistory of man, all the way back until our origin in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Modern history is generally thought to begin in Classical Antiquity, around 800 BCE, when large numbers of scholars began to write things down. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 BCE – ca. 425 BCE) and Thucydides (ca. 460 BCE – ca. 400 BCE) are generally considered the "fathers of history," with the latter taking special care to use a scientific approach in the study of history, attributing major events to human choice rather than divine intervention.
Today, history forms a huge component of human knowledge in general, alongside cultural and scientific knowledge, both of which overlap with history. Historians place a great emphasis on primary sources; people writing based on events they or their immediate friends actually experienced, rather than secondary sources, writing merely based on hearsay. Also important are comparisons between primary sources — without comparisons, it can be difficult to validate historical claims. Obviously, the history of an invasion will be written differently by the conquerers and the conquered.
History is generally periodized into several broad strokes, to make it easier to analyze and understand. First is prehistory, extending over a couple hundred thousand years, from the beginning of humanity to the Neolithic Revolution, which began between 10,000 and 8,000 BCE. The Neolithic Revolution heralded the beginning of agriculture, the establishment of the first cities and non-agricultural classes.
Thousands of years after the Neolithic Revolution, various ancient civilizations were founded: Mesopotamia (5000 BCE), the Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BCE), ancient Egypt (3150 BCE), ancient China (3000 BCE), Minoan Crete (2700 BCE), Mycenaean Greece (1600 BCE), Kingdom of Israel (930 BCE), ancient Rome (900 BCE), and many others. Historians study these on a civilization-by-civilization basis, with objectivity as the primary goal.
The end of the era of ancient history is arbitrary, but the year 476 CE, when the Western Roman Empire fell, is often cited. Between 476 and around 1492 is the period of time known as the Middle Ages, while from 1492 to today is called the Modern Era. Modern history focuses mostly on the last 500 years.
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