Outline of history


The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to history:
History – discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about past events. History can also mean the period of time after writing was invented.

Nature of history

History can be described as all of the following:
  • Academic discipline – body of knowledge given to – or received by – a disciple ; a branch or sphere of knowledge, or field of study, that an individual has chosen to specialise in.
  • * one of the humanities – academic discipline that study the human condition, using methods that are primarily analytical, critical, or speculative, as distinguished from the mainly empirical approaches of the natural sciences.
  • Field of science – widely recognized category of specialized expertise within science, and typically embodies its own terminology and nomenclature. Such a field will usually be represented by one or more scientific journals, where peer-reviewed research is published. There are many sociology-related scientific journals.
  • * Social science – field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of human society.

Essence of history

  • Chronology - science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time, such as in historical timelines.
  • Past - totality of events which occurred before a given point in time. The past is contrasted with and defined by the present and the future. The concept of the past is derived from the linear fashion in which human observers experience time, and is accessed through memory and recollection. The past is the domain of history.
  • Time - measure in which events can be ordered from the past through the present into the future, and also the measure of durations of events and the intervals between them. Time is often referred to as the fourth dimension, along with the three spatial dimensions. History describes what happened where, but also when those events took place.

Historical disciplines

Auxiliary sciences of history

Auxiliary sciences of history - scholarly disciplines which help evaluate and use historical sources and are seen as auxiliary for historical research. Auxiliary sciences of history include, but are not limited to:

History by period

History by chronology

Ages of history

Prehistoric Ages

Historic Ages

Other Ages

Regional histories

Regional history

History by continent and country

Eras by region

Era

History by field

History of art

History of culture

History of mathematics

History of philosophy

History of religions

History of science

History of social sciences

History of technology

History of interdisciplinary fields

Methods and tools

  • Prosopography – a methodological tool for the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period
  • Historical revisionism – traditionally used in a completely neutral sense to describe the work or ideas of a historian who has revised a previously accepted view of a particular topic
  • Historiography – study of historical methodology

General concepts

Historians

Lists