History

Historians are those who assemble knowledge about the community.

They have been active in almost every society, small or large.

In part out of long practice and in part to sustain themselves, historians have honed the art of collecting information and presenting it in ways tailored specifically to the interests of their audiences.

Over the centuries, the works of good historians continue to be read because human communities reproduce common patterns of behavior.

For example, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Sima Qian, the early giants of written history, wrote analyses of personal characteristic and social situations that still ring true today.

In general, the tales of individual ambitions and group interactions preserve much that is similar over the eons.

Even so, there are distinct genres of history that relate specifically to particular audiences, and there have been times when history has changed in response to new knowledge and new ways of organizing and prioritizing knowledge.

In fact the list of genres and audiences is rather long.

Out of the family came genealogy, from the begettings of the Bible to the family tree of lineages both humble and lordly.

Out of the village came the local history, tales of key local events that included biographies of outstanding local figures.

From the traveler and compiler came geography, which accounted for distant lands and peoples.

From the dynasty came the dynastic chronology of successive rulers and their exploits.

From the warrior came the war story, which recounted heroism in victory or defeat.

The universal history priests accounted for the relations of man and God over time.

From these groupings emerged various themes in history: the dynasty created cultural history, based on the work of palace poets and sculptors, but so did the masses, based on village songs and dances.

Philosophers produced reasoned histories of the world that struggled with the question of where it had come from and where it was going.

All these types of history were born out of their various social settings, and these locales continue to produce new histories for their audiences.

The genealogies and local histories were parochial, while the geographies an universal histories were cosmopolitan.

All were about the world, but more importantly, all were about different portions of it.

These histories maintained their discrete character.

They also became intertwined, in the hands of good storytellers, into myths combining such elements as genealogy, biography, dynastic chronology, geography, and universal history.

Oral histories survived in detail for several generations and then were lost or transformed, yet their basic social message (for example, the truism behind a fable or parable) often survived much longer.

Written histories could be passed on with greater precision.

Such languages as Chinese, Greek, Latin, Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit have sustained long traditions of historical interpretation, and out of these written traditions came civilizational histories.

World history too persisted through all these times, in the minds of those few who strained vigorously against the limits on their knowledge of past and present.

World history emerged from the dreams of prophets, generals, emperors, and perhaps also inventors, as they strove to explore and master the furthest dimensions of their environments and the forces at work within them.

Many people might have been interested in world history.

Neverthless, the tiny, tenuously connected series of world historians persevered, developing their interpretations step by step.

Each of the major written languages preserves contributions to the understanding of world history, but those writing in the modern European languages took the lead in creating the modern vision of world history.

Among European Writers, studies on the history of the ancient world developed out of the tradition of classical studies that began in the Renaissance and thrived thereafter.

Parallel studies of the history of Christianity and of medieval Europe were gradually drawn into these classical studies and included in the analysis of politics elite culture, and ideas.

During the nineteenth century, studies of world history in early times broadened fundamentally as new fields of study emerged especially archaeology, linguistics, Orientalism, and Sinology.

The frameworks and the questions of scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries continue to dominate the study of world history in early times.

This work is centered on “civilization” – the emergence of civilization, the course of civilizational histories, and interactions among civilizations.

This focus on large states and on world religions means that the literature on early world history tended to neglect peoples outside the bounds of “civilization”.

For the world history of times since about 1500, the framework of analysis was formed out of each era’s social analysis.