The title page to The Historians' History of the World.

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History is the study of the past, focused on human activity and leading up to the present day. It is possible to characterize History as the true discourse of past. more...

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The modern discipline of History is dedicated to the institutional production of this discourse. More precisely, history is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race ; as well as the study of all events in time, in relation to humanity. Those who study it as a profession are called historians. This emphasis on the 'human' has made human subjects central to the narratives of the classical discourse of modern history. Consequently, history has assumed a sense which is broader than being solely the true narratives of human past.History is not just the past as an object of systematic knowledge or the discipline that produces knowledge out of that object; history also carries a sense that is implicit in the expression :'making history'. Thus History often signifies the production of events having transformative potentials that ushers in the future. This is how a temporal schema connecting the past, the present and the future is foregrounded through the signifier history. The historical temporality is grounded within the idea of autonomuos human subjects endowed with 'historical subjectivity' which aids them in the production of events and at once helps them to record and narrate past events as history.

All events that are remembered and preserved in some form constitute the historical record. Some historians study universal history. Others focus on certain methods, such as chronology, demography, historiography, genealogy, paleography, or cliometrics, or on certain areas, such as History of Brazil (1889–1930), History of China, or History of Science.

Broad discipline

The study of history has sometimes been classified as part of the humanities and at other times as part of the social sciences It can also be seen as a bridge between those two broad areas, incorporating methodologies from both. Some individual historians strongly support one or the other classification. In modern academia, history is increasingly classified as a social science. In the 20th century the study of history was revolutionized by French historian Fernand Braudel, by using such outside disciplines as economics, anthropology, and geography in the study of global history.

Traditionally, historians have attempted to answer historical questions through the study of written documents, although historical research is not limited merely to these sources. In general, the sources of historical knowledge can be separated into three categories: what is written, what is said, and what is physically preserved, and historians often consult all three. Historians frequently emphasize the importance of written records, which would limit history to times after the development of writing. This emphasis has led to the term prehistory to refer to any period of human history predating surviving written records. Since writing emerged at different times throughout the world, and since some kinds of written records are more perishable than others, the distinction between prehistory and history is often blurred.