The term history has had a dual meaning. Originally it referred to a record of past human events--the word as used by the ancient Greek Herodotus meant inquiry--but in modern times the term has come to be applied to actual past events in human affairs or even in nature. In fact, however, human knowledge of past events, especially those beyond living memory, is based on written records, oral traditions, and physical evidence, all of which must be interpreted. History, therefore, is most usefully understood to refer to the historian's reconstruction of the past. SCOPE OF HISTORY The professional historians of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century defined history in relatively narrow terms. The new "scientific school" of the 19th century insisted that no history was possible without written sources, documents, or inscriptions and that a sharp line divided \Tprehistory\t and history. Only societies that possessed such sources could be considered to have histories. Moreover, insofar as history involved change, only "dynamic" societies, principally those of the West, could be said to be historical. History, it was argued, involved the conscious actions and decisions of people, in brief, those aspects of human behavior that could be articulated and put into writing. Not only subconscious but anonymous processes as well fell outside the province of the historian, whose task was to reconstruct narratively the conscious decisions and deeds of leading historical personalities. This strongly idealistic conception, which in a sense dominated the approach of historians from the Greek writer Thucydides on, has been seriously revised only in the mid-20th century. A reorientation of outlook and method characterizes a large segment of recent historical writing. The change has brought recognition of the interplay of rational and irrational forces, including biological, psychological, economic, and sociological influences, and stress on the need to use nonliterary sources such as hard quantitative data gathered, for example, from parish records or tax registers; symbolic expressions found in art, religion, or folklore; and even climatological evidence. The scope of history has thus been enormously widened. Not only non-Western, including so-called primitive, cultures but also popular attitudes and everyday life have become concerns of historical study. In a sense everything human has become a matter of historical interest. NON-WESTERN HISTORY Today it is generally recognized that preliterate peoples also have histories involving change. Thus in black Africa, historical scholarship is building not only on the accounts left by Muslim chroniclers, but also on a rich tradition of oral history that establishes continuity with a distant past. Nevertheless, as far as written history is concerned, perhaps two major continuous traditions of historical scholarship and writing can be distinguished. One is the Western tradition, which has dual origins in the Hebrew Bible and classical Greek historiography and encompasses historical writing not only in Europe, and much later America, but in the Byzantine and the Islamic worlds as well. The other originated in ancient China but influenced developments in Japan and Korea and elsewhere in the Far East. From its beginnings under the \TChou\t dynasty (c.1000 BC), Chinese historiography has been based on the conviction that human historical experience constitutes the main repository of human wisdom. Operating out of a world view that is both holistic and syncretic, Chinese historians seek to take account of moral, political, social, economic, and natural phenomena and integrate them all into a comprehensive, comprehensible pattern. Accepting both the underlying reality of the Tao (way), which is unchanging, and the visible realities of the world, which change according to the "times," Chinese historians have tried to strike a balance between cyclical and linear change, between documents and analysis, between individuals and social groups, and between the data of history and their significance. Much of Chinese historiography reflected the bureaucratic character of Chinese society. Composed by teams of court historians, these histories evaluated the actions of the preceding dynasty in terms of a timeless morality--the Tao. Although Chinese historiography has been highly continuous, its emphasis has changed significantly over time. In early times, the comprehensive history of \TSsu-ma Ch'ien\t (c.145-c.86 BC) and the dynastic history of Pan-Ku (d. AD 92) stressed personalities and various kinds of cyclical change. However, later historians, such as \TSsu-ma Kuang\t in the 11th century, also focused on the development of customs and institutions and the evolution of administrative structures. In the 19th century China was increasingly exposed to Western historical methods, and historians began to bring a new critical approach to their studies. A similar pattern was followed in the other East Asian countries, whose traditions of historical writing had been molded largely by Chinese influence. India, the other major civilization of Asia, had no historiographical tradition until it came under first Islamic and then British influence. The lack of such a tradition stems from the Hindu belief that the world is an illusion (maya) and time cyclical. WESTERN HISTORY At some risk of oversimplification, the history of historical writing in the West may be divided into three major periods in terms of the conceptions guiding historical writing. Classical, Medieval, and Early Modern Historiography The first period began in classical Greece with Herodotus and Thucydides in the 5th century BC. Some historical writing is older, of course, including the Egyptian inscriptions and Babylonian and Assyrian chronicles. Early examples of extensive narrative history appear in the Old Testament of the \TBible\t, informed by a providential view of history. In Greece itself the oral tradition of the Homeric epics is older. However, classical Greek and, to a lesser extent, Roman historiography was influenced by Ionian speculative philosophy of nature in the 6th and 5th centuries BC. This outlook restricted the introduction of the mysterious or supernatural into history and focused on secular, particularly political, life. History was regarded foremost as a form of literature or rhetoric, but at the same time it was committed to accuracy. \THerodotus\t, often called the father of history, wrote the first narrative account of the ancient world. However, it was \TThucydides\t who set the model for much of the historical writing to follow. Unlike Herodotus's broadly comparative description of the cultures of his time, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War presented a closely knit narrative of a set of political and military events. Both Thucydides and \TPolybius\t, in his history of the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean world, spelled out methodological guidelines for accurate history based on the critical examination of written and oral sources. Despite their insistence on accuracy, Thucydides and Polybius saw history as a means of political education. Both assumed a constancy in human nature that made such lessons possible but that also forced the historian to explore the motives of political behavior. This model of historical writing--the concern with truth, yet the equally great concern with literary perfection and with the practical political role of history--was typical of the great Roman historians \TLivy\t, \TSallust\t, and \TTacitus\t. Later it characterized the work of the \TRenaissance\t humanist historians, notably Lorenzo Valla (1407-57), Nicolo \TMachiavelli\t, and Francesco \TGuicciardini\t, who like Thucydides and Polybius considered themselves not professional scholars but men active in public life. The rise of Christianity interrupted this tradition. Saint \TAugustine\t's City of God (413-26) distinguished sharply between divine purpose and disjointed human history. In Christian Europe narrative history declined and was replaced by annals and chronicles that often stressed the trivial and the miraculous. In the Muslim Arab world, however, al-\TTabari\t in the 10th century produced a narrative "universal" history, and the work of the 14th-century historian \TIbn Khaldun\t pointed to a developmental history of civilization. Renaissance humanism reintroduced the classical Greek and Roman model but was soon overshadowed by the renewed religious emphasis of the \TReformation\t. Post-Reformation historical writing found its last great expression in Bishop \TBossuet\t's providential view in his Discourse on Universal History (1681). Only with the \TEnlightenment\t, beginning with Pierre \TBayle\t's Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), was historical thought and writing again effectively desecularized. Historical writing in the 18th century was marked by two diverse traditions. One, literary and philosophical, was represented by Edward \Tgibbon\t and particularly by \TVoltaire\t, who attempted a broad comparative study of civilization. The other tradition was derived from the erudition of Benedictine and Bollandist monks, such as Jean MABILLON, who considerably advanced the critical examination of the authenticity of documents but did not themselves contribute to historical syntheses. Only when the Enlightenment tradition of narrative history merged with the new textual criticism was the foundation laid for the new critical history that dominated the 19th century. Nineteenth-Century Historiography A fundamental reorientation in the early 19th century ushered in the second period. The institutional setting of historical studies changed first in Germany and then elsewhere: historical studies became professionalized and were primarily centered at universities. Standards of textual criticism became more stringent, and historical writing was to be based on primary evidence that had been tested for credibility. The most influential mentor of the new orientation was Leopold von \TRanke\t at the University of Berlin. He envisioned history as a rigorous science, although one seeking understanding of unique human motivations rather than formulating broad generalizations, and he stressed the need for systematic mining of the archives. Ranke's example of researching, writing, and teaching was paralleled in France, the United States, and elsewhere, though somewhat later in Britain. The new orientation was closely linked with a new historical outlook, sometimes called \Lhistoric\lism, that broke with the classical conception of a static human nature. History, now understood in developmental terms, was seen to supply the key to understanding all things human. At the same time, however, every epoch and every culture was viewed as unique. The cosmopolitan perspective of the Enlightenment gave way to concentration on national history. Nevertheless, the classical tradition of historiography was not totally disregarded. Although specialization threatened to become dominant, the great historians of the 19th century--Jakob \TBurckhardt\t, Thomas \TMacaulay\t, Jules \TMichelet\t, and Ranke himself--continued to write histories that combined a broad historical perspective with a sense of literary style. Twentieth-Century Historiography A more radical break with conventional models of scholarship occurred in the 20th century. Already at the turn of the 20th century, a number of historians and historical theorists--Karl Lamprecht in Germany, Henri Berr in France, Frederick Jackson \TTurner\t in the United States--had called for a closer integration of history and the modern social sciences. But the conscious attempt to conceive of history as a "historical social science" emerged only after World War II. Marc \TBloch\t and Lucien Febvre, the founders of the French journal Annales, which was perhaps the most important forum for discussing new approaches, were important forerunners of the new history. Bloch, Febvre, and Fernand \TBraudel\t turned consciously away from concentrating on politics and events to exploring the relatively stable structures found in the study of geography, the economy, society, and culture, which supply the framework for historical life. "The repetitive, the irrational, and the quasi-instinctual," which the American historian H. Stuart Hughes still regarded as not historical in 1958, were now viewed as central concerns of history. Such concerns led some historians into what is called \Tpsychohistory\t. As introduced by Erik \TErikson\t, however, psychohistory has been neo-Freudian and has thus concentrated heavily on individual biographies isolated from a broader social context. The new "historical social science" as conceived by the Annales historians, on the other hand, seeks a comprehensive "total history" that emphasizes structures over development, culture and society over politics, collective behavior and attitudes over the ideas of individuals. Such an approach lends itself to quantification of data facilitated by new computer technology. Quantitative methods have proved particularly useful in studying the material bases of popular life, such as the relation between demographic and economic development. The quantitative approach has gone beyond statistical illustration to the application of mathematical models to demographic, economic, and even political phenomena. The role of politics is by no means neglected but is linked more closely to its social and economic context. Marxist historians in particular have focused on social conflict and historical development. Indeed Marxist historians, especially in the West, have increasingly engaged in dialogue with non-Marxist, social science-oriented historians. Despite its diversity, contemporary historical writing is marked by certain common characteristics that distinguish it from the older historiography. Analysis and explanation play a greater role than in the older narrative history. Except in the case of psychohistory, events are seen more sharply in the context of social structures. The scope of historical studies has expanded immensely as wider segments of society, a diversity of cultures, and a variety of previously neglected aspects of human life have become subjects of historical study. The sharp gulf that the older tradition established between history as a field of study concerned with unique human intentions and the generalizing social sciences has narrowed as new generations of historians have explored ways of understanding the interaction of individual and collective behavior in the context of time. Georg G. Iggers Bibliography: Breisach, Ernst, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (1983); Canby, Courtland, et al., eds., The World of History (1985); Fitzsimons, Mathew A., et al., eds., The Development of Historiography (1954; repr. 1967), and The Past Recaptured (1986); Gay, Peter, et al., eds., Historians at Work, 4 vols. (1972); Gilbert, Felix, and Graubard, Stephen A., eds., Historical Studies Today (1971); Howard, Michael, The Lessons of History (1991); Iggers, Georg G., New Directions in European Historiography, rev. ed. (1984); Stanford, Michael, The Nature of Historical Knowledge (1987); Stephens, Lester D., Historiography: A Bibliography (1975). See also: \Toral history\t.