Professional Documents
Culture Documents
WHAT IS HISTORY?
DEFINITION AND SUBJECT MATTER
HISTORY
• Derived from the Greek word historia which means “knowledge acquired
through inquiry or investigation.”
• as a discipline, it existed for around 2,400 years and is as old as
mathematics and philosophy.
• Was then adapted to classical Latin and historia became known as the
account of the past of a person or of a group of people through written
documents and historical evidences. This meaning stuck until the early parts
of the twentieth century
• Became an important academic discipline
THE MEANING OF HISTORY
Excerpts from Understanding History: A Primer of Historical Method by Louis
Gottschalk (1950, New York: Knopf, p. 17
The English word history is derived form the Greek noun istoiα, meaning
learning. As used by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, history meant a systematic
account of a set of natural phenomena, whether or not chronological factoring was a
factor in the account…. In the course of time, however, the equivalent Latin word
scientia (English, science) came to be used more regularly to designate non-
chronological systematic accounts of natural phenomena; and the word history was
reserved usually for accounts of phenomena (especially human affairs0 in
chronological order.
By its most common definition, the word history now means, “the past of
mankind.” …
DUTY OF HISTORIANS