The Fields of study of history Refer to the classification of the study of the same according to different themes, historical periods and areas of interest. Historians have written in the context of their own age and according to the dominant ideas during it.
People live in the present, plan and care about the future. However, history is the study of the past according to its description in written sources. Those events that occurred prior to documentary records are considered part of prehistory.
History as an academic discipline uses narrative to examine and analyze a sequence of past events and objectively determine the cause and effect patterns that define them. The study of history has been classified as part of the humanities and sometimes as part of the social sciences, although from another perspective could be considered as a bridge between both disciplines.
There are different methods to organize and classify history, including chronological, cultural, territorial and thematic. These divisions are not mutually exclusive and often overlap.
The 12 main study fields of history
1- Military
It concerns the methods of war, strategies, battles, weapons and the psychology of combat. The so-called"new military history"since the 1970s has been more focused on soldiers than on senior military commanders. Equally, psychology has taken a preponderant role beyond the tactics and general impact of war on society and culture.
2- Religious
The study of religion has been a subject of study for religious and secular historians throughout the centuries and still remains valid today in seminaries and academies. The topics that cover it are multiple and range from its political, cultural and artistic dimension to theology and liturgy.
This field of study has existed in all regions of the world where the human race has inhabited.
3- Social
It is the field of study of ordinary people and the strategies and institutions they use to deal with life. Its"era of gold"was between the decades of 1960 and 1970 and still today it is represented in the departments of history of many universities of the world.
4- Cultural
The cultural study of history replaced the social one during the 1980s and 1990s. Combining the approaches of anthropology with history, looks at the language, folk traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience.
It examines the vestiges and narrative descriptions of the knowledge, traditions and artistic expressions of the different groups of people.
5- Diplomatic
This field of study focuses on the relationship between nations, mainly diplomatic as well as the origins of war. In more recent times it seeks to analyze the causes of peace and human rights.
6- Economic
Although the economic study of history has been established since the late nineteenth century, in recent years academic studies in this field have turned more and more to economic areas rather than history in schools and universities.
The history of business deals with organizations, business methods, government regulations, labor relations and their impact on society.
7- Environmental
It is a field of study that emerged in the 1980s and focuses on the history of the environment, especially in the long term, as well as the impact of human activities on it.
8- world
It is the study of the main civilizations of the world during the last 3000 years. It is a field of study rather than teaching research.
It gained popularity in the United States and Japan, among other countries, after the 1980s when they realized that students needed more exposure to the world as globalization progressed.
9- Popular
It is a field of study that seeks to tell historical events from the perspective of ordinary people. It is the history of the world told from the perspective of popular movements.
Those individuals and groups not previously considered in other types of historical recounting are the main focus in this field: the dispossessed, the oppressed, the poor, the discontented and the forgotten.
10- Intellectual
The field of intellectual study deals with the history of the ideas arisen in the middle of century XX with a main focus directed towards the intellectuals and their writings as well as the study of the ideas like independent entities with a historical own load.
eleven- Of genre
This field of study is a derivation of historical studies of gender, which seeks to observe and analyze the past from a gender perspective. In a way it is derived from the history of women and, although its emergence is recent, has had a significant impact on the general study of history.
12- Public
Public history describes the wide range of activities undertaken by people with some kind of history preparation who generally work outside the academic field.
This field of study is linked to the preservation of history, archivology, oral history, museographic healing and other related fields.
References
- History. Taken from wikipedia.org.
- Fields of Study. Taken from wikipedia.org.