History

Historical method, source criticism, historiography, and deciphering hieroglyphs

What is history?

History is the systematic study of the past, based on evidence — written records, physical artifacts, and other traces left behind by earlier people and events. As an academic discipline, history is less about simply listing past events and more about carefully evaluating evidence to determine what actually happened and why.

Primary and secondary sources

Historians distinguish between two broad types of sources. A primary source is direct evidence from the time period being studied — an original letter, a government record, a photograph, or an artifact created at the time. A secondary source is a later work that analyzes and interprets primary sources — a history book written afterward, drawing conclusions from the original evidence. Good historical research always traces its conclusions back to primary sources rather than relying only on secondary accounts.

Why sources need careful evaluation

Not every historical source is equally reliable, and historians are trained to evaluate a source's reliability carefully: who created it, when, for what purpose, and whether it shows any particular bias or self-interest that might color its account. A document written to justify a decision after the fact, for example, needs to be read differently than a private letter written with no expectation it would ever be read by others.

Organizing the past

Historians organize the past into periods and categories to make it easier to study and discuss — ancient, medieval, and modern history, for example, or the history of a specific country, region, or topic. These divisions are useful organizing tools, though historians recognize that the boundaries between periods are drawn for convenience and don't represent sudden, clean breaks in how people actually lived at the time.

Why history matters

History provides essential context for understanding how present-day institutions, conflicts, and cultures came to be the way they are, and the disciplined evaluation of evidence central to historical study — weighing sources, checking for bias, and following what evidence actually supports — is a transferable skill valuable well beyond history itself.