Portal:History
Introduction
Herodotus (c. 484 BC – c. 425 BC), often considered the "father of history"
History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as the memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation of information about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians.
History can also refer to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyse a sequence of past events, and objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them. Historians sometimes debate the nature of history and its usefulness by discussing the study of the discipline as an end in itself and as a way of providing "perspective" on the problems of the present.
Stories common to a particular culture, but not supported by external sources (such as the tales surrounding King Arthur), are usually classified as cultural heritage or legends, because they do not show the "disinterested investigation" required of the discipline of history. Herodotus, a 5th-century BC Greek historian is considered within the Western tradition to be the "father of history", and, along with his contemporary Thucydides, helped form the foundations for the modern study of human history. Their works continue to be read today, and the gap between the culture-focused Herodotus and the military-focused Thucydides remains a point of contention or approach in modern historical writing. In East Asia, a state chronicle, the Spring and Autumn Annals was known to be compiled from as early as 722 BC although only 2nd-century BC texts have survived.
Ancient influences have helped spawn variant interpretations of the nature of history which have evolved over the centuries and continue to change today. The modern study of history is wide-ranging, and includes the study of specific regions and the study of certain topical or thematical elements of historical investigation. Often history is taught as part of primary and secondary education, and the academic study of history is a major discipline in university studies.
Selected periods of history
The Diamond Sutra, of Dunhuang, China was published in 868 AD as the first printed book in world history using woodblock printing techniques. This image is a front piece for the book which was instrumental in spreading East-Asian Buddhism. Post-classical times were an era of religion. Matters of faith took part in the development of political power and in the personal lives of most ordinary people in both the New and Old World. Geographic regions were often divided based on a location's religious affiliation.
For more maps, images and other media please see *Post-classical history at Wikimedia Commons
Post-classical history (also called the Post-Antiquity era, Post-Ancient Era, or Pre-Modern Era) is a periodization commonly used by the school of "world history" instead of Middle Ages (Medieval), which is roughly synonymous. The period runs from about AD 500 to 1450 though there may be regional differences and debates. The era was globally characterized by the expansion of civilizations geographically, the development of three of the great world religions (Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism), and development of networks of trade between civilizations. Read more...- Contemporary history, in English-language historiography, is a subset of modern history which describes the historical period from approximately 1945 to the present. The term "contemporary history" has been in use at least since the early 19th century.
Contemporary history is politically dominated by the Cold War (1945–91) between the United States and Soviet Union whose effects were felt across the world. The confrontation, which was mainly fought through proxy wars and through intervention in the internal politics of smaller nations, ultimately ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1991, following the Revolutions of 1989. The latter stages and aftermath of the Cold War enabled the democratisation of much of Europe, Africa, and Latin America. In the Middle East, the period after 1945 was dominated by conflict involving the new state of Israel and the rise of petroleum politics, as well as the growth of Islamism after the 1980s. The first supranational organisations of government, such as the United Nations and European Union, emerged during the period after 1945, while the European colonial empires in Africa and Asia collapsed, gone by 1975. Countercultures rose and the sexual revolution transformed social relations in western countries between the 1960s and 1980s, epitomised by the Protests of 1968. Living standards rose sharply across the developed world because of the post-war economic boom, whereby such major economies as Japan and West Germany emerged. The culture of the United States, especially consumerism, spread widely. By the 1960s, many western countries had begun deindustrializing; in their place, globalization led to the emergence of new industrial centres, such as Japan, Taiwan and later China, which exported consumer goods to developed countries. Read more... 
The Space Age is a time period encompassing the activities related to the Space Race, space exploration, space technology, and the cultural developments influenced by these events. The Space Age is generally considered to have begun with Sputnik (1957). Read more...- The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age system, preceded by the Stone Age (Neolithic) and the Bronze Age. It is an archaeological era in the prehistory and protohistory of Europe and the Ancient Near East, and by analogy also used of other parts of the Old World.
The three-age system was introduced in the first half of the 19th century for the archaeology of Europe in particular, and by the later 19th century expanded to the archaeology of the Ancient Near East. Its name harks back to the mythological "Ages of Man" of Hesiod. As an archaeological era it was first introduced for Scandinavia by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen in the 1830s. By the 1860s, it was embraced as a useful division of the "earliest history of mankind" in general and began to be applied in Assyriology. The development of the now-conventional periodization in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East was developed in the 1920s to 1930s.
As its name suggests, Iron Age technology is characterized by the production of tools and weaponry by ferrous metallurgy (ironworking), more specifically from carbon steel.
The duration of the Iron Age varies depending on the region under consideration. It is defined by archaeological convention, and the mere presence of some cast or wrought iron is not sufficient to represent an Iron Age culture; rather, the "Iron Age" begins locally when the production of iron or steel has been brought to the point where iron tools and weapons superior to their bronze equivalents become widespread. For example, Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger comes from the Bronze Age. In the Ancient Near East, this transition takes place in the wake of the so-called Bronze Age collapse, in the 12th century BC. The technology soon spreads throughout the Mediterranean region and to South Asia.
Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern and Central Europe is somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe is reached still later, by about 500 BC. Read more... 
Charlemagne's empire included most of modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, Austria and northern Italy.
The Early Middle Ages or Early Medieval Period, sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages, are typically regarded as lasting from the 5th or 6th century to the 10th century CE. They marked the start of the Middle Ages of European history. The term "Late Antiquity" is used to emphasize elements of continuity with the Roman Empire, while "Early Middle Ages" is used to emphasize developments characteristic of the earlier medieval period. As such it overlaps with Late Antiquity, following the decline of the Western Roman Empire, and precedes the High Middle Ages (c. 10th to 13th centuries).
The period saw a continuation of trends evident since late classical antiquity, including population decline, especially in urban centres, a decline of trade, a small rise in global warming and increased migration. The Early Middle Ages was labelled the "Dark Ages" in the 19th century, a characterization based on the relative scarcity of literary and cultural output from this time. However, the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantine Empire, continued to survive, though in the 7th century the Islamic caliphates conquered swathes of formerly Roman territory. Read more...- The early modern period of modern history follows the late Middle Ages of the post-classical era. Although the chronological limits of the period are open to debate, the timeframe spans the period after the late portion of the post-classical age (c. 1500), known as the Middle Ages, through the beginning of the Age of Revolutions (c. 1800) and is variously demarcated by historians as beginning with the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, with the Renaissance period, and with the Age of Discovery (especially with the voyages of Christopher Columbus beginning in 1492, but also with Vasco da Gama's discovery of the sea route to the East in 1498), and ending around the French Revolution in 1789.
Historians in recent decades have argued that from a worldwide standpoint, the most important feature of the early modern period was its globalizing character. The period witnessed the exploration and colonization of the Americas and the rise of sustained contacts between previously isolated parts of the globe. The historical powers became involved in global trade, as the exchange of goods, plants, animals, food crops, and slaves extended to the Old World and the New World. The Columbian Exchange greatly affected the human environment. Read more... 
A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in 1835. Textiles were the leading industry of the Industrial Revolution and mechanized factories, powered by a central water wheel or steam engine, were the new workplace.
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the US, in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the factory system. The Industrial Revolution also led to an unprecedented rise in the rate of population growth.
Textiles were the dominant industry of the Industrial Revolution in terms of employment, value of output and capital invested. The textile industry was also the first to use modern production methods. Read more...
Petrarch, who conceived the idea of a European "Dark Age". From Cycle of Famous Men and Women, Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, c. 1450
The "Dark Ages" is a historical periodization traditionally referring to the Middle Ages, that asserts that a demographic, cultural, and economic deterioration occurred in Western Europe following the decline of the Roman Empire.
The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" (lack of records) with earlier and later periods of "light" (abundance of records). The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity. The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment. Read more...
From the Apocalypse in a Biblia Pauperum illuminated at Erfurt around the time of the Great Famine. Death sits astride a lion whose long tail ends in a ball of flame (Hell). Famine points to her hungry mouth.
The Late Middle Ages or Late Medieval Period was the period of European history lasting from 1250 to 1500 AD. The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern period (and in much of Europe, the Renaissance).
Around 1300, centuries of prosperity and growth in Europe came to a halt. A series of famines and plagues, including the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the Black Death, reduced the population to around half of what it was before the calamities. Along with depopulation came social unrest and endemic warfare. France and England experienced serious peasant uprisings, such as the Jacquerie and the Peasants' Revolt, as well as over a century of intermittent conflict, the Hundred Years' War. To add to the many problems of the period, the unity of the Catholic Church was temporarily shattered by the Western Schism. Collectively, those events are sometimes called the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Read more...
Viking age picture stone, Gotland.
The Viking Age (793–1066 AD) is a period in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, following the Germanic Iron Age. It is the period of history when Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its seas and rivers for trade, raids, colonization, and conquest. In this period, the Norsemen settled in Norse Greenland, Newfoundland, and present-day Faroe Islands, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Normandy, Scotland, England, Wales, Ireland, Isle of Man, the Netherlands, Germany, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey.
Viking travellers and colonists were seen at many points in history as brutal raiders. Many historical documents suggest that their invasion of other countries was retaliation in response to the encroachment upon tribal lands by Christian missionaries, and perhaps by the Saxon Wars prosecuted by Charlemagne and his kin to the south, or were motivated by overpopulation, trade inequities, and the lack of viable farmland in their homeland. Read more...
Modern history saw extreme changes in the way people lived including industrialization
Modern history, the modern period or the modern era, is the linear, global, historiographical approach to the time frame after post-classical history. Modern history can be further broken down into periods:- The early modern period began approximately in the early 16th century; notable historical milestones included the European Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and the Protestant Reformation.
- The late modern period began approximately in the mid-18th century; notable historical milestones included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, and the Russian Revolution. It took all of human history up to 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion; the next billion came just over a century later, in 1927.
- Contemporary history is the span of historic events from approximately 1945 that are immediately relevant to the present time.
This article primarily covers the 1800–1950 time period with a brief summary of 1500–1800. For a more in depth article on modern times before 1800, see Early Modern period. Read more...
The Bronze Age is a historical period characterized by the use of bronze, and in some areas proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies.
An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by producing bronze by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Bronze itself is harder and more durable than other metals available at the time, allowing Bronze Age civilizations to gain a technological advantage. Read more...
Cantino planisphere 1502, earliest surviving chart showing the explorations of Columbus to Central America, Corte-Real to Newfoundland, Gama to India and Cabral to Brazil. Tordesillas line depicted, Biblioteca Estense, Modena
The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (approximately from the beginning of the 15th century until the end of the 18th century), is an informal and loosely defined term for the period in European history in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor in European culture and which was the beginning of globalization. It also marks the rise of the period of widespread adoption in Europe of colonialism and mercantilism as national policies. Many lands previously unknown to Europeans were discovered by them during this period, though most were already inhabited. From the perspective of many non-Europeans, the Age of Discovery marked the arrival of invaders from previously unknown continents.
Global exploration started with the Portuguese discoveries of the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and the Azores in 1419 and 1427, the coast of Africa after 1434 and the sea route to India in 1498; and from the Crown of Castile (Spain), the trans-Atlantic voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas between 1492 and 1502 and the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519–1522. These discoveries led to numerous naval expeditions across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, and land expeditions in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia that continued into the late 19th century, and ended with the exploration of the polar regions in the 20th century. Read more...- 17th century philosophy is generally regarded as seeing the start of modern philosophy, and the shaking off of the medieval approach, especially scholasticism. It succeeded the Renaissance and preceded the Age of Enlightenment. It is often considered to be part of early modern philosophy. Read more...
A visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet.
The Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) is a historic period in the 21st century characterized by the rapid shift from traditional industry that the Industrial Revolution brought through industrialization, to an economy based on information technology. The onset of the Information Age is associated with the Digital Revolution, just as the Industrial Revolution marked the onset of the Industrial Age. The definition of what "digital" means (or what "information" means) continues to change over time as new technologies, user devices, methods of interaction with other humans and devices enter the domain of research, development and market launch.
During the Information Age, digital industry shapes a knowledge-based society surrounded by a high-tech global economy that exerts influence on how the manufacturing and service sectors operate in an efficient and convenient way. In a commercialized society, the information industry can allow individuals to explore their personalized needs, therefore simplifying the procedure of making decisions for transactions and significantly lowering costs both for producers and for buyers. This is accepted overwhelmingly by participants throughout the entire economic activities for efficacy purposes, and new economic incentives would[original research?] then be indigenously encouraged, such as the knowledge economy.[page needed] Read more...- The Enlightenment (also known as the The Age of Enlightenment or The Age of Reason) was an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 18th century, the "Century of Philosophy".
French historians traditionally place the Enlightenment between 1715 (the year that Louis XIV died) and 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution). International historians begin the period in the 1620s, with the start of the scientific revolution. Les philosophes (French for "the philosophers") of the period widely circulated their ideas through meetings at scientific academies, Masonic lodges, literary salons, coffee houses and in printed books and pamphlets. The ideas of the Enlightenment undermined the authority of the monarchy and the Church and paved the way for the political revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries. A variety of 19th-century movements, including liberalism and neo-classicism, trace their intellectual heritage to the Enlightenment. Read more... 
The High Middle Ages, or High Medieval Period, was the period of European history that commenced around 1000 and lasted until around 1250. The High Middle Ages were preceded by the Early Middle Ages and were followed by the Late Middle Ages, which ended around 1500 (by historiographical convention).
Key historical trends of the High Middle Ages include the rapidly increasing population of Europe, which brought about great social and political change from the preceding era, and the Renaissance of the 12th century, including the first developments of rural exodus and of urbanization. By 1250, the robust population increase had greatly benefited the European economy, which reached levels that would not be seen again in some areas until the 19th century. That trend faltered during the Late Middle Ages because of a series of calamities, most notably the Black Death, but also numerous wars as well as economic stagnation. Read more...
An early nuclear power plant that used atomic energy to generate electricity.
The Atomic Age, also known as the Atomic Era, is the period of history following the detonation of the first nuclear ("atomic") bomb, Trinity, on July 16, 1945, during World War II. Although nuclear chain reactions had been hypothesized in 1933 and the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction (Chicago Pile-1) had taken place in December 1942, the Trinity test and the ensuing bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II represented the first large-scale use of nuclear technology and ushered in profound changes in sociopolitical thinking and the course of technology development.
While atomic power was promoted for a time as the epitome of progress and modernity, entering into the nuclear power era also entailed frightful implications of nuclear warfare, the Cold War, mutual assured destruction, nuclear proliferation, the risk of nuclear disaster (potentially as extreme as anthropogenic global nuclear winter), as well as beneficial civilian applications in nuclear medicine. It is no easy matter to fully segregate peaceful uses of nuclear technology from military or terrorist uses (such as the fabrication of dirty bombs from radioactive waste), which complicated the development of a global nuclear-power export industry right from the outset. Read more...- Modern history saw extreme changes in the way people lived including industrialization
Modern history, the modern period or the modern era, is the linear, global, historiographical approach to the time frame after post-classical history. Modern history can be further broken down into periods:- The early modern period began approximately in the early 16th century; notable historical milestones included the European Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, and the Protestant Reformation.
- The late modern period began approximately in the mid-18th century; notable historical milestones included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, and the Russian Revolution. It took all of human history up to 1804 for the world's population to reach 1 billion; the next billion came just over a century later, in 1927.
- Contemporary history is the span of historic events from approximately 1945 that are immediately relevant to the present time.
This article primarily covers the 1800–1950 time period with a brief summary of 1500–1800. For a more in depth article on modern times before 1800, see Early Modern period. Read more...
.jpg)
Selected images
Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), Turkey
Empires, 1898
Great Mosque of Kairouan, Tunisia, founded 670 CE
China has become a leader in wind power and solar panels.
The September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks influenced U.S. foreign policy.
Gutenberg Bible, produced using movable type c. 1450
Terracotta army, China, c. 210 BCE
Battle during 1281 Mongol invasion of Japan
The Pantheon in Rome, Italy, now a Catholic church
Collegium Maius of Kraków's Jagiellonian University, Copernicus's first alma mater
Last Moon landing: Apollo 17 (1972)
Pillar erected by India's Maurya Dynasty Emperor Ashoka
Cave painting, Lascaux, France, c. 15,000 BCE
Angkor Wat temple, Cambodia, early 12th century
Russian chapel, Fort Ross, California, U.S.
World population, 10,000 BCE – 2,000 CE (vertical population scale is logarithmic)
"Venus of Willensdorf", Austria, c. 26,500 BCE
Atomic bombings: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 1945
Persepolis, Achaemenid Empire, 6th century BCE
1570 world map, with Europeans' discoveries
Ming Dynasty section, Great Wall of China
Watt's steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution.
_-_the_epitome_of_Byzantine_architecture_-_panoramio.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpeg)
.jpg)
.png)
Selected histories by subject
- According to tradition, the history of the Catholic Church begins with Jesus Christ and his teachings (c. 4 BC – c. AD 30) and the Catholic Church is a continuation of the early Christian community established by Jesus. The Church considers its bishops to be the successors to Jesus's apostles and the Church's leader, the Bishop of Rome (also known as the Pope) to be the sole successor to Saint Peter, who ministered in Rome in the first century AD, after his appointment by Jesus as head of the church. By the end of the 2nd century, bishops began congregating in regional synods to resolve doctrinal and policy issues. By the 3rd century, the bishop of Rome began to act as a court of appeals for problems that other bishops could not resolve.
Christianity spread throughout the early Roman Empire, despite persecutions due to conflicts with the pagan state religion. In 313, the struggles of the Early Church were lessened by the legalisation of Christianity by the Emperor Constantine I. In 380, under Emperor Theodosius I, Catholicism became the state religion of the Roman Empire by the decree of the Emperor, which would persist until the fall of the Western Empire, and later, with the Eastern Roman Empire, until the Fall of Constantinople. During this time, the period of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, there were considered five primary sees (jurisdictions within the Catholic Church) according to Eusebius: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, known as the Pentarchy. Read more... 
The history of medicine shows how societies have changed in their approach to illness and disease from ancient times to the present. Early medical traditions include those of Babylon, China, Egypt and India. The Indians introduced the concepts of medical diagnosis, prognosis, and advanced medical ethics. The Hippocratic Oath was written in ancient Greece in the 5th century BCE, and is a direct inspiration for oaths of office that physicians swear upon entry into the profession today. In the Middle Ages, surgical practices inherited from the ancient masters were improved and then systematized in Rogerius's The Practice of Surgery. Universities began systematic training of physicians around 1220 CE in Italy.
During the Renaissance, understanding of anatomy improved, and the microscope was invented. Prior to the 19th century, humorism (also known as humoralism) was thought to explain the cause of disease but it was gradually replaced by the germ theory of disease, leading to effective treatments and even cures for many infectious diseases. Military doctors advanced the methods of trauma treatment and surgery. Public health measures were developed especially in the 19th century as the rapid growth of cities required systematic sanitary measures. Advanced research centers opened in the early 20th century, often connected with major hospitals. The mid-20th century was characterized by new biological treatments, such as antibiotics. These advancements, along with developments in chemistry, genetics, and radiography led to modern medicine. Medicine was heavily professionalized in the 20th century, and new careers opened to women as nurses (from the 1870s) and as physicians (especially after 1970). Read more...- The history of money concerns the development of social systems that provide at least one of the functions of money. Such systems can be understood as means of trading wealth indirectly; not directly as with barter. Money is a mechanism that facilitates this process.
Money may take a physical form as in coins and notes, or may exist as a written or electronic account. It may have intrinsic value (commodity money), be legally exchangeable for something with intrinsic value (representative money), or only have nominal value (fiat money). Read more... - The Scientific Revolution was a series of events that marked the emergence of modern science during the early modern period, when developments in mathematics, physics, astronomy, biology (including human anatomy) and chemistry transformed the views of society about nature. The Scientific Revolution took place in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance period and continued through the late 18th century, influencing the intellectual social movement known as the Enlightenment. While its dates are debated, the publication in 1543 of Nicolaus Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) is often cited as marking the beginning of the Scientific Revolution.
The concept of a scientific revolution taking place over an extended period emerged in the eighteenth century in the work of Jean Sylvain Bailly, who saw a two-stage process of sweeping away the old and establishing the new. The beginning of the Scientific Revolution, the Scientific Renaissance, was focused on the recovery of the knowledge of the ancients; this is generally considered to have ended in 1632 with publication of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. The completion of the Scientific Revolution is attributed to the "grand synthesis" of Isaac Newton's 1687 Principia. The work formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation thereby completing the synthesis of a new cosmology. By the end of the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment that followed Scientific Revolution had given way to the "Age of Reflection." Read more... - The history of Artificial Intelligence (AI) began in antiquity, with myths, stories and rumors of artificial beings endowed with intelligence or consciousness by master craftsmen. The seeds of modern AI were planted by classical philosophers who attempted to describe the process of human thinking as the mechanical manipulation of symbols. This work culminated in the invention of the programmable digital computer in the 1940s, a machine based on the abstract essence of mathematical reasoning. This device and the ideas behind it inspired a handful of scientists to begin seriously discussing the possibility of building an electronic brain.
The field of AI research was founded at a workshop held on the campus of Dartmouth College during the summer of 1956. Those who attended would become the leaders of AI research for decades. Many of them predicted that a machine as intelligent as a human being would exist in no more than a generation and they were given millions of dollars to make this vision come true. Read more... - The history of logic deals with the study of the development of the science of valid inference (logic). Formal logics developed in ancient times in India, China, and Greece. Greek methods, particularly Aristotelian logic (or term logic) as found in the Organon, found wide application and acceptance in Western science and mathematics for millennia. The Stoics, especially Chrysippus, began the development of predicate logic.
Christian and Islamic philosophers such as Boethius (died 524), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, died 1037) and William of Ockham (died 1347) further developed Aristotle's logic in the Middle Ages, reaching a high point in the mid-fourteenth century, with Jean Buridan. The period between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw largely decline and neglect, and at least one historian of logic regards this time as barren. Empirical methods ruled the day, as evidenced by Sir Francis Bacon's Novum Organon of 1620. Read more... 
Newton's reflector, the first reflecting telescope
The history of science is the study of the development of science and scientific knowledge, including both the natural and social sciences (the history of the arts and humanities is termed history of scholarship). Science is a body of empirical, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the natural world, produced by scientists who emphasize the observation, explanation, and prediction of real-world phenomena. Historiography of science, in contrast, studies the methods employed by historians of science.
The English word scientist is relatively recent—first coined by William Whewell in the 19th century. Previously, investigators of nature called themselves "natural philosophers". While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity (for example, by Thales and Aristotle), and the scientific method has been employed since the Middle Ages (for example, by Ibn al-Haytham and Roger Bacon), modern science began to develop in the early modern period, and in particular in the scientific revolution of 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Traditionally, historians of science have defined science sufficiently broadly to include those earlier inquiries. Read more...
The evolutionary origin of religions and religious behavior is a field of study related to evolutionary psychology, the origin of language and mythology, and cross-cultural comparison of the anthropology of religion. Some subjects of interest include Neolithic religion, evidence for spirituality or cultic behavior in the Upper Paleolithic, and similarities in great ape behavior. Read more...- The history of science and technology (HST) is a field of history which examines how humanity's understanding of the natural world (science) and ability to manipulate it (technology) have changed over the centuries. This academic discipline also studies the cultural, economic, and political impacts of scientific innovation.
Histories of science were originally written by practicing and retired scientists, starting primarily with William Whewell, as a way to communicate the virtues of science to the public. In the early 1930s, after a famous paper given by the Soviet historian Boris Hessen, was focused into looking at the ways in which scientific practices were allied with the needs and motivations of their context. After World War II, extensive resources were put into teaching and researching the discipline, with the hopes that it would help the public better understand both Science and Technology as they came to play an exceedingly prominent role in the world. In the 1960s, especially in the wake of the work done by Thomas Kuhn, the discipline began to serve a very different function, and began to be used as a way to critically examine the scientific enterprise. At the present time it is often closely aligned with the field of science studies. Read more... - The history of electromagnetic theory begins with ancient measures to understand atmospheric electricity, in particular lightning. People then had little understanding of electricity, and were unable to explain the phenomena. Scientific understanding into the nature of electricity grew throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the work of researchers such as Ampère, Coulomb, Faraday and Maxwell.
In the 19th century it had become clear that electricity and magnetism were related, and their theories were unified: wherever charges are in motion electric current results, and magnetism is due to electric current. The source for electric field is electric charge, whereas that for magnetic field is electric current (charges in motion). Read more... - From its beginnings in the 1960s, writing software has evolved into a profession concerned with how best to maximize the quality of software and of how to create it. Quality can refer to how maintainable software is, to its stability, speed, usability, testability, readability, size, cost, security, and number of flaws or "bugs", as well as to less measurable qualities like elegance, conciseness, and customer satisfaction, among many other attributes. How best to create high quality software is a separate and controversial problem covering software design principles, so-called "best practices" for writing code, as well as broader management issues such as optimal team size, process, how best to deliver software on time and as quickly as possible, work-place "culture", hiring practices, and so forth. All this falls under the broad rubric of software engineering. Read more...
- Axial Age (also Axis Age, from German: Achsenzeit) is a term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers in the sense of a "pivotal age" characterizing the period of ancient history from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE.
During this period, according to Jaspers' concept, new ways of thinking appeared in Persia, India, China and the Greco-Roman world in religion and philosophy, in a striking parallel development, without any obvious direct cultural contact between all of the participating Eurasian cultures. Jaspers identified key thinkers from this age who had a profound influence on future philosophies and religions, and identified characteristics common to each area from which those thinkers emerged. Read more... - The history of logic deals with the study of the development of the science of valid inference (logic). Formal logics developed in ancient times in India, China, and Greece. Greek methods, particularly Aristotelian logic (or term logic) as found in the Organon, found wide application and acceptance in Western science and mathematics for millennia. The Stoics, especially Chrysippus, began the development of predicate logic.
Christian and Islamic philosophers such as Boethius (died 524), Ibn Sina (Avicenna, died 1037) and William of Ockham (died 1347) further developed Aristotle's logic in the Middle Ages, reaching a high point in the mid-fourteenth century, with Jean Buridan. The period between the fourteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century saw largely decline and neglect, and at least one historian of logic regards this time as barren. Empirical methods ruled the day, as evidenced by Sir Francis Bacon's Novum Organon of 1620. Read more... 
The 1871 periodic table constructed by Dmitri Mendeleev. The periodic table is one of the most potent icons in science, lying at the core of chemistry and embodying the most fundamental principles of the field.
The history of chemistry represents a time span from ancient history to the present. By 1000 BC, civilizations used technologies that would eventually form the basis of the various branches of chemistry. Examples include extracting metals from ores, making pottery and glazes, fermenting beer and wine, extracting chemicals from plants for medicine and perfume, rendering fat into soap, making glass,
and making alloys like bronze.
The protoscience of chemistry, alchemy, was unsuccessful in explaining the nature of matter and its transformations. However, by performing experiments and recording the results, alchemists set the stage for modern chemistry. The distinction began to emerge
when a clear differentiation was made between chemistry and alchemy by Robert Boyle in his work The Sceptical Chymist (1661). While both alchemy and chemistry are concerned with matter and its transformations, chemists are seen as applying scientific method to their work. Read more...- Some scholars trace the origins of natural science as far back as pre-literate human societies, where understanding the natural world was necessary for survival. People observed and built up knowledge about the behavior of animals and the usefulness of plants as food and medicine, which was passed down from generation to generation. These primitive understandings gave way to more formalized inquiry around 3500 to 3000 BC in the Mesopotamian and Ancient Egyptian cultures, which produced the first known written evidence of natural philosophy, the precursor of natural science. While the writings show an interest in astronomy, mathematics and other aspects of the physical world, the ultimate aim of inquiry about nature's workings was in all cases religious or mythological, not scientific.
A tradition of scientific inquiry also emerged in Ancient China, where Taoist alchemists and philosophers experimented with elixirs to extend life and cure ailments. They focused on the yin and yang, or contrasting elements in nature; the yin was associated with femininity and coldness, while yang was associated with masculinity and warmth. The five phases – fire, earth, metal, wood and water – described a cycle of transformations in nature. Water turned into wood, which turned into fire when it burned. The ashes left by fire were earth. Using these principles, Chinese philosophers and doctors explored human anatomy, characterizing organs as predominantly yin or yang and understood the relationship between the pulse, the heart and the flow of blood in the body centuries before it became accepted in the West. Read more... - Political science as a separate field is a rather late arrival in terms of social sciences. However, the term "political science" was not always distinguished from political philosophy, and the modern discipline has a clear set of antecedents including also moral philosophy, political economy, political theology, history, and other fields concerned with normative determinations of what ought to be and with deducing the characteristics and functions of the ideal state. Read more...
Ploughing with a yoke of horned cattle in Ancient Egypt. Painting from the burial chamber of Sennedjem, c. 1200 BC.
The history of agriculture records the domestication of plants and animals and the development and dissemination of techniques for raising them productively. Agriculture began independently in different parts of the globe, and included a diverse range of taxa. At least eleven separate regions of the Old and New World were involved as independent centers of origin.
Wild grains were collected and eaten from at least 20,000 BC. From around 9500 BC, the eight Neolithic founder crops – emmer wheat, einkorn wheat, hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas, and flax – were cultivated in the Levant. Rye may have been cultivated earlier but this remains controversial. Rice was domesticated in China by 6200 BC with earliest known cultivation from 5700 BC, followed by mung, soy and azuki beans. Pigs were domesticated in Mesopotamia around 11,000 BC, followed by sheep between 11,000 BC and 9000 BC. Cattle were domesticated from the wild aurochs in the areas of modern Turkey and Pakistan around 8500 BC. Sugarcane and some root vegetables were domesticated in New Guinea around 7000 BC. Sorghum was domesticated in the Sahel region of Africa by 5000 BC. In the Andes of South America, the potato was domesticated between 8000 BC and 5000 BC, along with beans, coca, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Bananas were cultivated and hybridized in the same period in Papua New Guinea. In Mesoamerica, wild teosinte was domesticated to maize by 4000 BC. Cotton was domesticated in Peru by 3600 BC. Camels were domesticated late, perhaps around 3000 BC. Read more...
Selected historical figures
Galileo Galilei (Italian: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Galileo has been called the "father of observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of the scientific method", and the "father of modern science".
Galileo studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and "hydrostatic balances", inventing the thermoscope and various military compasses, and using the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects. His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the observation of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, the observation of Saturn and the analysis of sunspots. Read more...
Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. In 1953, he co-authored with James Watson the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Together with Watson and Maurice Wilkins, he was jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". The results were based partly on fundamental studies done by Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and Wilkins.
Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played a crucial role in research related to revealing the helical structure of DNA. He is widely known for the use of the term "central dogma" to summarize the idea that once information is transferred from nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) to proteins, it cannot flow back to nucleic acids. In other words, the final step in the flow of information from nucleic acids to proteins is irreversible. Read more...
Portrait of Frederick the Great, by Anton Graff, 1781
Frederick II (German: Friedrich; 24 January 1712 – 17 August 1786) was King of Prussia from 1740 until 1786, the longest reign of any Hohenzollern king. His most significant accomplishments during his reign included his military victories, his reorganization of Prussian armies, his patronage of the arts and the Enlightenment and his final success against great odds in the Seven Years' War. Frederick was the last Hohenzollern monarch titled King in Prussia and declared himself King of Prussia after achieving sovereignty over most historically Prussian lands in 1772. Prussia had greatly increased its territories and became a leading military power in Europe under his rule. He became known as Frederick the Great (Friedrich der Große) and was nicknamed Der Alte Fritz ("The Old Fritz") by the Prussian people and eventually the rest of Germany.
In his youth, Frederick was more interested in music and philosophy than the art of war. Nonetheless, upon ascending to the Prussian throne he attacked Austria and claimed Silesia during the Silesian Wars, winning military acclaim for himself and Prussia. Toward the end of his reign, Frederick physically connected most of his realm by acquiring Polish territories in the First Partition of Poland. He was an influential military theorist whose analysis emerged from his extensive personal battlefield experience and covered issues of strategy, tactics, mobility and logistics. Read more...
Sanger in 1922
Margaret Higgins Sanger (born Margaret Louise Higgins, September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966, also known as Margaret Sanger Slee) was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.
Sanger used her writings and speeches primarily to promote her way of thinking. She was prosecuted for her book Family Limitation under the Comstock Act in 1914. She was afraid of what would happen, so she fled to Britain until she knew it was safe to return to the US. Sanger's efforts contributed to several judicial cases that helped legalize contraception in the United States. Due to her connection with Planned Parenthood, Sanger is a frequent target of criticism by opponents of abortion. However, Sanger drew a sharp distinction between birth control and abortion and was opposed to abortion through the bulk of her career. Sanger remains an admired figure in the American reproductive rights movement. She has been criticized for supporting eugenics. Read more...
Sadaharu Oh (Japanese: 王貞治, Ō Sadaharu; born May 20, 1940), also known as Wang Chen-chih (Chinese: 王貞治; pinyin: Wáng Zhēnzhì), is a retired Japanese-born Chinese baseball player and manager who played 22 seasons for the Yomiuri Giants in Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) from 1959 to 1980. Oh holds the world lifetime home run record, having hit 868 home runs during his professional career. He established many NPB batting records, including runs batted in (RBIs) (2,170), slugging percentage (.634), bases on balls (2,390), and on-base plus slugging (OPS) (1.080). In 1977, Sadaharu Oh became the first recipient of the People's Honour Award. He was inducted into the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame in 1994.
Oh batted and threw left-handed and primarily played first base. Originally signed with the powerhouse Yomiuri Giants in 1959 as a pitcher, Oh was soon converted to a full-time hitter. Under the tutelage of coach Hiroshi Arakawa, Oh developed his distinctive "flamingo" leg kick. It took Oh three years to blossom, but he went on to dominate the baseball league in Japan. He was a 15-time home-run champion and was named to the All-Star team 18 times. More than just a power hitter, Oh was a five-time batting champion and won the Japanese Central League's batting triple crown twice. With Sadaharu Oh at first base, the Yomiuri Giants won 11 championships. Oh was named the Central League's Most Valuable Player nine times. In addition to the world career home run record, he held Japan's single-season home run record with 55, until Wladimir Balentien broke the record in 2013. Read more...
Icon of St. Basil the Great from the
St. Sophia Cathedral of Kiev
Basil of Caesarea, also called Saint Basil the Great (Greek: Ἅγιος Βασίλειος ὁ Μέγας, Ágios Basíleios o Mégas; Coptic: Ⲡⲓⲁⲅⲓⲟⲥ Ⲃⲁⲥⲓⲗⲓⲟⲥ; 329 or 330 – January 1 or 2, 379), was the bishop of Caesarea Mazaca in Cappadocia, Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). He was an influential theologian who supported the Nicene Creed and opposed the 'heresies' of the early Christian church, fighting against both Arianism and the followers of Apollinaris of Laodicea. His ability to balance his theological convictions with his political connections made Basil a powerful advocate for the Nicene position.
In addition to his work as a theologian, Basil was known for his care of the poor and underprivileged. Basil established guidelines for monastic life which focus on community life, liturgical prayer, and manual labor. Together with Pachomius, he is remembered as a father of communal monasticism in Eastern Christianity. He is considered a saint by the traditions of both Eastern and Western Christianity. Read more...
Bust of Menander. Marble, Roman copy of the Imperial era after a Greek original (ca. 343–291 BC).
Menander (/məˈnændər/; Greek: Μένανδρος Menandros; c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC) was a Greek dramatist and the best-known representative of Athenian New Comedy. He wrote 108 comedies and took the prize at the Lenaia festival eight times. His record at the City Dionysia is unknown but may well have been similarly spectacular.
One of the most popular writers of antiquity, his work was lost during the Middle Ages and is known in modernity in highly fragmentary form, much of which was discovered in the 20th century. Only one play, Dyskolos, has survived almost entirely. Read more...
Pope Innocent III (Latin: Innocentius III; 1160 or 1161 – 16 July 1216), born Lotario dei Conti di Segni (anglicized as Lothar of Segni) reigned from 8 January 1198 to his death in 1216.
Pope Innocent was one of the most powerful and influential of the medieval popes. He exerted a wide influence over the Christian states of Europe, claiming supremacy over all of Europe's kings.
He was central in supporting the Catholic Church's reforms of ecclesiastical affairs through his decretals and the Fourth Lateran Council. This resulted in a considerable refinement of Western canon law.
He is furthermore notable for using interdict and other censures to compel princes to obey his decisions, although these measures were not uniformly successful. Read more...
Carl Philipp Gottfried (or Gottlieb) von Clausewitz (/ˈklaʊzəvɪts/; 1 June 1780 – 16 November 1831) was a Prussian general and military theorist who stressed the "moral" (meaning, in modern terms, psychological) and political aspects of war. His most notable work, Vom Kriege (On War), was unfinished at his death.
Clausewitz was a realist in many different senses and, while in some respects a romantic, also drew heavily on the rationalist ideas of the European Enlightenment.
Clausewitz's thinking is often described as Hegelian because of his dialectical method; but, although he was probably personally acquainted with Hegel, there remains debate as to whether or not Clausewitz was in fact influenced by him. He stressed the dialectical interaction of diverse factors, noting how unexpected developments unfolding under the "fog of war" (i.e., in the face of incomplete, dubious, and often completely erroneous information and high levels of fear, doubt, and excitement) call for rapid decisions by alert commanders. He saw history as a vital check on erudite abstractions that did not accord with experience. In contrast to the early work of Antoine-Henri Jomini, he argued that war could not be quantified or reduced to mapwork, geometry, and graphs. Clausewitz had many aphorisms, of which the most famous is "War is the continuation of politics by other means." Read more...
Fosse with Viveca Lindfors in the musical Pal Joey (1963)
Robert Louis Fosse (June 23, 1927 – September 23, 1987) was an American dancer, musical theatre choreographer, director, and film director.
He won eight Tony Awards for choreography, more than anyone else, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for four Academy Awards, winning for his direction of Cabaret. Read more...
John Edgar Hoover (January 1, 1895 – May 2, 1972) was an American law enforcement administrator and the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States. He was appointed as the director of the Bureau of Investigation – the FBI's predecessor – in 1924 and was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director for over 37 years until his death in 1972 at the age of 77. Hoover has been credited with building the FBI into a larger crime-fighting agency than it was at its inception and with instituting a number of modernizations to police technology, such as a centralized fingerprint file and forensic laboratories.
Later in life and after his death, Hoover became a controversial figure as evidence of his secretive abuses of power began to surface. He was found to have exceeded the jurisdiction of the FBI, and to have used the FBI to harass political dissenters and activists, to amass secret files on political leaders, and to collect evidence using illegal methods. Hoover consequently amassed a great deal of power and was in a position to intimidate and threaten others, even sitting presidents of the United States. Read more...
Sullivan in 1955
'Edward Vincent Sullivan (September 28, 1901 – October 13, 1974) was an American television personality, sports and entertainment reporter, and syndicated columnist for the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune New York News Syndicate. He is principally remembered as the creator and host of the television variety program The Toast of the Town, later popularly—and, eventually, officially—renamed The Ed Sullivan Show. Broadcast for 23 years from 1948 to 1971, it set a record as the longest-running variety show in US broadcast history. "It was, by almost any measure, the last great TV show," said television critic David Hinckley. "It's one of our fondest, dearest pop culture memories."
Sullivan was a broadcasting pioneer at many levels during television's infancy. As TV critic David Bianculli wrote, "Before MTV, Sullivan presented rock acts. Before Bravo, he presented jazz and classical music and theater. Before the Comedy Channel, even before there was the Tonight Show, Sullivan discovered, anointed and popularized young comedians. Before there were 500 channels, before there was cable, Ed Sullivan was where the choice was. From the start, he was indeed 'the Toast of the Town'." In 1996, Sullivan was ranked number 50 on TV Guides "50 Greatest TV Stars of All Time". Read more...
Plaster cast bust of Thucydides (in the Pushkin Museum) from a Roman copy (located at Holkham Hall) of an early fourth-century BC Greek original
Thucydides (/θjuːˈsɪdɪdiːz/; Greek: Θουκυδίδης Thoukydídēs [tʰuːkydídɛːs]; c. 472 – c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect, without reference to intervention by the deities, as outlined in his introduction to his work.
He also has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by and constructed upon the emotions of fear and self-interest. His text is still studied at universities and military colleges worldwide. The Melian dialogue is regarded as a seminal work of international relations theory, while his version of Pericles' Funeral Oration is widely studied by political theorists, historians, and students of the classics. Read more...
A portrait of Vesalius from De humani corporis fabrica
Andreas Vesalius (/vɪˈseɪliəs/; 31 December 1514 – 15 October 1564) was a 16th-century Flemish anatomist, physician, and author of one of the most influential books on human anatomy, De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body). Vesalius is often referred to as the founder of modern human anatomy. He was born in Brussels, which was then part of the Habsburg Netherlands. He was professor at the University of Padua and later became Imperial physician at the court of Emperor Charles V.
Andreas Vesalius is the Latinized form of the Dutch Andries van Wesel. It was a common practice among European scholars in his time to Latinize their names. His name is also given as Andrea Vesalius, André Vésale, Andrea Vesalio, Andreas Vesal, André Vesalio and Andre Vesale. Read more...
Wegener, circa 1924–1930
Alfred Lothar Wegener (/ˈveɪɡənər/; German: [ˈʔalfʁeːt ˈveːgənɐ]; 1 November 1880 – November 1930) was a German polar researcher, geophysicist and meteorologist.
During his lifetime he was primarily known for his achievements in meteorology and as a pioneer of polar research, but today he is most remembered as the originator of the theory of continental drift by hypothesizing in 1912 that the continents are slowly drifting around the Earth (German: Kontinentalverschiebung). His hypothesis was controversial and not widely accepted until the 1950s, when numerous discoveries such as palaeomagnetism provided strong support for continental drift, and thereby a substantial basis for today's model of plate tectonics. Wegener was involved in several expeditions to Greenland to study polar air circulation before the existence of the jet stream was accepted. Expedition participants made many meteorological observations and were the first to overwinter on the inland Greenland ice sheet and the first to bore ice cores on a moving Arctic glacier. Read more...
Bahá'u'lláh (/bəˈhɑːʊˌlɑː/; Persian : بهاءالله ; November 12 , 1817 – May 29, 1892), was a Persian religious leader and the founder of the Bahá'í Faith, which advocates universal peace and unity among all races, nations, and religions.
At the age of 27, Bahá'u'lláh became a follower of the Báb, a Persian merchant who began preaching that God would soon send a new prophet similar to Jesus or Muhammad. The Báb and thousands of followers were executed by the Iranian authorities for their beliefs. Bahá'u'lláh faced exile from his native Iran, and in Baghdad in 1863 claimed to be the expected prophet of whom the Báb foretold. Thus, Bahá'ís regard Bahá'u'lláh to be a Manifestation of God, fulfilling of the eschatological expectations of Islam, Christianity, and other major religions. Read more...
Artistic representation of Muhammad Ahmad
Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah (Arabic: محمد أحمد ابن عبد الله; 12 August 1844 – 22 June 1885) was a Nubian religious leader of the Samaniyya order in Sudan who, as a youth, moved from orthodox religious study to a mystical interpretation of Islam. On 29 June 1881, he was proclaimed the Mahdi by his disciples, the messianic redeemer of the Islamic faith. His proclamation came during a period of widespread resentment among the Sudanese population towards the oppressive policies of the Turco-Egyptian rulers and was supported by the messianic belief popular among the various Sudanese religious sects of the time. He led a successful war of liberation from the Ottoman-Egyptian military occupation and achieved a remarkable victory over the British, who were the de facto rulers of Egypt. He then created a vast Islamic state extending from the Red Sea to Central Africa and founded a movement that remained influential in Sudan a century later.
From his announcement of the Mahdiyya in June 1881 until 1898, many of the theological and political doctrines of the Mahdiyya were established and promulgated among the growing ranks of the Mahdi's supporters, the Ansars. After Muhammad Ahmad's unexpected death on 22 June 1885, his chief deputy, Abdallahi ibn Muhammad took over the administration of the nascent Mahdist state. Read more...
Golding in 1983
Sir William Gerald Golding, CBE (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, playwright, and poet. Best known for his novel Lord of the Flies, he won a Nobel Prize in Literature and was awarded the Booker Prize for fiction in 1980 for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book in what became his sea trilogy, To the Ends of the Earth.
Golding was knighted in 1988. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Golding third on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Brasenose College, Oxford offers a non-stipendiary William Golding Fellowship in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Read more...
17th century painting
Vytautas (c. 1350 – October 27, 1430), also known as Vytautas the Great (Lithuanian: Vytautas Didysis, Belarusian: Вітаўт Кейстутавіч (Vitaŭt Kiejstutavič), Polish: Witold Kiejstutowicz or Witold Wielki, Ruthenian: Vitovt, Latin: Alexander Vitoldus, Old German: Wythaws or Wythawt) from the 15th century onwards, was a ruler of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which chiefly encompassed the Lithuanians and Ruthenians. He was also the Prince of Hrodna (1370–1382), Prince of Lutsk (1387–1389), and the postulated king of the Hussites.
In modern Lithuania, Vytautas is revered as a national hero and was an important figure in the national rebirth in the 19th century. Vytautas is a popular male given name in Lithuania. In commemoration of the 500-year anniversary of his death, Vytautas Magnus University was named after him. Monuments in his honour were built in many towns in the independent Lithuania during the interwar period from 1918 to 1939. Read more...
Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, 1st Duke of Bronté, KB (29 September 1758 – 21 October 1805) was a British flag officer in the Royal Navy. He was noted for his inspirational leadership, grasp of strategy, and unconventional tactics, which together resulted in a number of decisive British naval victories, particularly during the Napoleonic Wars. He was wounded several times in combat, losing the sight in one eye in Corsica and most of one arm in the unsuccessful attempt to conquer Santa Cruz de Tenerife. He was shot and killed during his final victory at the Battle of Trafalgar near the port city of Cádiz in 1805.
Nelson was born into a moderately prosperous Norfolk family and joined the navy through the influence of his uncle, Maurice Suckling, a high-ranking naval officer himself. He rose rapidly through the ranks and served with leading naval commanders of the period before obtaining his own command in 1778. He developed a reputation in the service through his personal valour and firm grasp of tactics but suffered periods of illness and unemployment after the end of the American War of Independence. The outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars allowed Nelson to return to service, where he was particularly active in the Mediterranean. He fought in several minor engagements off Toulon and was important in the capture of Corsica and subsequent diplomatic duties with the Italian states. In 1797, he distinguished himself while in command of HMS Captain at the Battle of Cape St Vincent. Read more...
_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg)
Selected historical disciplines
- Political history is the narrative and analysis of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is interrelated to other fields of history, especially diplomatic history, as well as constitutional history and public history.
Political history studies the organization and operation of power in large societies. By focusing on the elites in power, on their impact on society, on popular response, and on the relationships with the elites in other social history, which focuses predominantly on the actions and lifestyles of ordinary people, or people's history, which is historical work from the perspective of the common people. Read more... - In historical studies, prosopography is an investigation of the common characteristics of a historical group, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable, by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis. Prosopographical research has the goal of learning about patterns of relationships and activities through the study of collective biography; it collects and analyses statistically relevant quantities of biographical data about a well-defined group of individuals. This makes it a valuable technique for studying many pre-modern societies. Read more...
William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand
Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, "old", and γράφειν, graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Read more...- Archontology is the study of historical offices and important positions in state, international, political, religious and other organizations and societies. It includes chronology, succession of office holders, their biographies and related records. Read more...
- Radiocarbon dating (also referred to as carbon dating or carbon-14 dating) is a method for determining the age of an object containing organic material by using the properties of radiocarbon, a radioactive isotope of carbon.
The method was developed in the late 1940s by Willard Libby, who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work in 1960. It is based on the fact that radiocarbon (14
C) is constantly being created in the atmosphere by the interaction of cosmic rays with atmospheric nitrogen. The resulting 14
C combines with atmospheric oxygen to form radioactive carbon dioxide, which is incorporated into plants by photosynthesis; animals then acquire 14
C by eating the plants. When the animal or plant dies, it stops exchanging carbon with its environment, and from that point onwards the amount of 14
C it contains begins to decrease as the 14
C undergoes radioactive decay. Measuring the amount of 14
C in a sample from a dead plant or animal such as a piece of wood or a fragment of bone provides information that can be used to calculate when the animal or plant died. The older a sample is, the less 14
C there is to be detected, and because the half-life of 14
C (the period of time after which half of a given sample will have decayed) is about 5,730 years, the oldest dates that can be reliably measured by this process date to around 50,000 years ago, although special preparation methods occasionally permit accurate analysis of older samples. Read more... - A universal history is a work aiming at the presentation of the history of mankind as a whole, coherent unit.
A universal chronicle or world chronicle traces history from the beginning of written information about the past up to the present.
Universal history embraces the events of all times and nations in so far as scientific treatment of them is possible. Read more... - Philosophy of history is the philosophical study of history and the past. The term was coined by Voltaire. Read more...
Joseph Scaliger's De emendatione temporum (1583) began the modern science of chronology
Chronology (from Latin chronologia, from Ancient Greek χρόνος, chrónos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia) is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".
Chronology is a part of periodization. It is also a part of the discipline of history including earth history, the earth sciences, and study of the geologic time scale. Read more...- Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection between textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics. Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist.
In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics. Read more... - Joseph Scaliger's De emendatione temporum (1583) began the modern science of chronology
Chronology (from Latin chronologia, from Ancient Greek χρόνος, chrónos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia) is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".
Chronology is a part of periodization. It is also a part of the discipline of history including earth history, the earth sciences, and study of the geologic time scale. Read more... 
More probability density is found as one gets closer to the expected (mean) value in a normal distribution. Statistics used in standardized testing assessment are shown. The scales include standard deviations, cumulative percentages, Z-scores, and T-scores.
Statistics is a branch of mathematics dealing with data collection, organization, analysis, interpretation and presentation. In applying statistics to, for example, a scientific, industrial, or social problem, it is conventional to begin with a statistical population or a statistical model process to be studied. Populations can be diverse topics such as "all people living in a country" or "every atom composing a crystal". Statistics deals with all aspects of data, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments.
See glossary of probability and statistics.
When census data cannot be collected, statisticians collect data by developing specific experiment designs and survey samples. Representative sampling assures that inferences and conclusions can reasonably extend from the sample to the population as a whole. An experimental study involves taking measurements of the system under study, manipulating the system, and then taking additional measurements using the same procedure to determine if the manipulation has modified the values of the measurements. In contrast, an observational study does not involve experimental manipulation. Read more...
Venus de Milo, at the Louvre .
Art history is the study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts; that is genre, design, format, and style. The study includes painting, sculpture, architecture, ceramics, furniture, and other decorative objects.
Art history is the history of different groups of people and their culture represented throughout their artwork. Art historians compare different time periods in art history. Such as a comparison to Medieval Art to Renaissance Art. This history of cultures is shown in their art work in different forms. Art can be shown by attire, architecture, religion, sports. Or more visual pieces of art such as paintings, drawings, sculptures. Read more...- Psychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. It attempts to combine the insights of psychoanalysis with the research methodology of the social sciences to understand the emotional origin of the social and political behavior of groups and nations, past and present. Its subject matter is childhood and the family, and psychological studies of anthropology and ethnology. Read more...
The family tree of Ludwig Herzog von Württemberg (ruled 1568–1593)
Genealogy (from Greek: γενεαλογία genealogia from γενεά genea, "generation" and λόγος logos, "knowledge"), also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.
The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motives, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling. Read more...- Diplomatics (in American English, and in most anglophone countries), or diplomatic (in British English), is a scholarly discipline centred on the critical analysis of documents: especially, historical documents. It focuses on the conventions, protocols and formulae that have been used by document creators, and uses these to increase understanding of the processes of document creation, of information transmission, and of the relationships between the facts which the documents purport to record and reality.
The discipline originally evolved as a tool for studying and determining the authenticity of the official charters and diplomas issued by royal and papal chanceries. It was subsequently appreciated that many of the same underlying principles could be applied to other types of official document and legal instrument, to non-official documents such as private letters, and, most recently, to the metadata of electronic records. Read more... - World history or global history (not to be confused with diplomatic, transnational or international history) is a field of historical study that emerged as a distinct academic field in the 1980s. It examines history from a global perspective. It is not to be confused with comparative history, which, like world history, deals with the history of multiple cultures and nations, but does not do so on a global scale. World history looks for common patterns that emerge across all cultures. World historians use a thematic approach, with two major focal points: integration (how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together) and difference (how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experiences). Read more...
- William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand
Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, "old", and γράφειν, graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Read more... - Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urban sociology, urban geography, business history, and archaeology. Urbanization and industrialization were popular themes for 20th-century historians, often tied to an implicit model of modernization, or the transformation of rural traditional societies.
The history of urbanization focuses on the processes of by which existing populations concentrate themselves in urban localities over time, and on the social, political, cultural and economic contexts of cities. Most urban scholars focus on the "metropolis," a large or especially important city. There is much less attention to small cities, towns or (until recently) to suburbs. However social historians find small cities much easier to handle because they can use census data to cover or sample the entire population. In the United States from the 1920s to the 1990s many of the most influential monographs began as one of the 140 PhD dissertations at Harvard University directed by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. (1888-1965) or Oscar Handlin (1915-2011). The field grew rapidly after 1970, leading one prominent scholar, Stephan Thernstrom, to note that urban history apparently deals with cities, or with city-dwellers, or with events that transpired in cities, with attitudes toward cities – which makes one wonder what is not urban history. Read more... 
Allegory on writing history by Jacob de Wit (1754). An almost naked Truth keeps an eye on the writer of history. Pallas Athena (Wisdom) on left gives advice.
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Scholars discuss historiography by topic – such as the "historiography of the United Kingdom", the "historiography of Canada", "historiography of the British Empire", the "historiography of early Islam", the "historiography of China" – and different approaches and genres, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the ascent of academic history, there developed a body of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties – such as to their nation state – is a debated question.
The research interests of historians change over time, and there has been a shift away from traditional diplomatic, economic, and political history toward newer approaches, especially social and cultural studies. From 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history increased from 31 to 41 percent, while the proportion of political historians decreased from 40 to 30 percent. In 2007, of 5,723 faculty in the departments of history at British universities, 1,644 (29%) identified themselves with social history and 1,425 (25%) identified themselves with political history. Read more...
Did you know...
- ... that Joseph Stalin asked Franklin D. Roosevelt for aluminium, implying enough of it would bring him victory in World War II?
- ... that before becoming a prehistorian, Hans-Jürgen Häßler lived in a refugee camp and trained as a plumber?
- ... that Teuira Henry reconstructed her English missionary grandfather's lost manuscript describing Tahitian history by using his notes?
- ... that despite never completing his university studies, R. H. Wilenski was appointed a special lecturer in the history of art at the University of Manchester?
- ... that the ending of Avengers: Infinity War inspired the largest user ban in Reddit's history?
- ... that conquistador Pedro de Portocarrero founded the first Spanish colonial town within the territory of the modern Mexican state of Chiapas?
Need help?
Do you have a question about History that you can't find the answer to?
Consider asking it at the Wikipedia reference desk.
Get involved
For editor resources and to collaborate with other editors on improving Wikipedia's History-related articles, see WikiProject History.
Selected historical concepts
Cultural identity can be expressed through certain styles of clothing or other aesthetic markers
Cultural identity is the identity or feeling of belonging to a group. It is part of a person's self-conception and self-perception and is related to nationality, ethnicity, religion, social class, generation, locality or any kind of social group that has its own distinct culture. In this way, cultural identity is both characteristic of the individual but also of the culturally identical group of members sharing the same cultural identity or upbringing. Read more...
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approach based on combining numerous disciplines from science and the humanities, and explores human existence in the context of this bigger picture. It integrates studies of the cosmos, Earth, life, and humanity using empirical evidence to explore cause-and-effect relations, and is taught at universities and secondary schools often using web-based interactive presentations.
Historian David Christian has been credited with coining the term "Big History". Some historians have expressed skepticism towards "scientific history" and argue that the claims of Big History are unoriginal. Others support the scientific merit but point out that cosmology and natural history have been studied since the Renaissance, and that the new term, Big History, continues such work. Read more...- In his "Society must be Defended", Michel Foucault posited that the victors of a social struggle use their political dominance to suppress a defeated adversary's version of historical events in favor of their own propaganda, which may go so far as historical revisionism. (See Michel Foucault's analysis of historical and political discourse above.) Nations adopting such an approach would likely fashion a "universal" theory of history, a manifest destiny in the US, to support their aims, with a teleological and deterministic philosophy of history used to justify the inevitableness and rightness of their victories.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Culture of Defeat took a completely different view—according to him, defeat is a major driver for the defeated to reinvent himself, while the victor—confirmed in his attitudes and methods, dissatisfied by the high losses and paltry gains made, may be less creative and fall back. The concept evokes Hegel's Master–slave dialectics—the master is dependent of the work of the slave, the slave has to take his master's and his own interests into account, gets more knowledge and more insight as the master; and in realising that the world around him was created by his own hands he may gain self-consciousness and emancipation. Schivelbusch worked on three basic examples, the South and its Lost cause after the Civil War, France after the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, and Germany following World War I. Wolfgang Schivelbusch view includes complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations, from every level of society and sees a need and rise of creativity and various narratives for the defeated. Read more... - A future history is a postulated history of the future and is used by authors of science fiction and other speculative fiction to construct a common background for fiction. Sometimes the author publishes a timeline of events in the history, while other times the reader can reconstruct the order of the stories from information provided therein. Read more...
- Historical classification groups the various history topics into different categories according to subject matter as shown below. Read more...
Periodization is the process or study of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified named blocks of time. This is usually done in order to facilitate the study and analysis of history, understanding current and historical processes, and causality that might have linked those events.
This results in descriptive abstractions that provide convenient terms for periods of time with relatively stable characteristics. However, determining the precise beginning and ending to any "period" is often arbitrary, since it has changed over time over the course of history. Read more...
The present (or here and now) is the time that is associated with the events perceived directly and in the first time, not as a recollection (perceived more than once) or a speculation (predicted, hypothesis, uncertain). It is a period of time between the past and the future, and can vary in meaning from being an instant to a day or longer. In radiocarbon dating, the "present" is defined as AD 1950.
It is sometimes represented as a hyperplane in space-time, typically called "now", although modern physics demonstrates that such a hyperplane cannot be defined uniquely for observers in relative motion. The present may also be viewed as a duration (see specious present). Read more...- Joseph Scaliger's De emendatione temporum (1583) began the modern science of chronology
Chronology (from Latin chronologia, from Ancient Greek χρόνος, chrónos, "time"; and -λογία, -logia) is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. It is also "the determination of the actual temporal sequence of past events".
Chronology is a part of periodization. It is also a part of the discipline of history including earth history, the earth sciences, and study of the geologic time scale. Read more... 
The future is what will happen in the time after the present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected time line that is anticipated to occur. In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.
In the philosophy of time, presentism is the belief that only the present exists and the future and the past are unreal. Religions consider the future when they address issues such as karma, life after death, and eschatologies that study what the end of time and the end of the world will be. Religious figures such as prophets and diviners have claimed to see into the future.
Future studies, or futurology, is the science, art and practice of postulating possible futures. Modern practitioners stress the importance of alternative and plural futures, rather than one monolithic future, and the limitations of prediction and probability, versus the creation of possible and preferable futures. Read more...- Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in history departments in Britain, Canada, France, Germany, and the United States. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history rose from 31% to 41%, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40% to 30%. In the history departments of British and Irish universities in 2014, of the 3410 faculty members reporting, 878 (26%) identified themselves with social history while political history came next with 841 (25%). Read more...
An Evergreen Protective Association volunteer recording an oral history at Greater Rosemont History Day.
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about individuals, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work (published or unpublished) based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
The term is sometimes used in a more general sense to refer to any information about past events that people who experienced them tell anybody else, but professional historians usually consider this to be oral tradition. However, as the Columbia Encyclopedia explains:
Read more...Primitive societies have long relied on oral tradition to preserve a record of the past in the absence of written histories. In Western society, the use of oral material goes back to the early Greek historians Herodotus and Thucydides, both of whom made extensive use of oral reports from witnesses. The modern concept of oral history was developed in the 1940s by Allan Nevins and his associates at Columbia University.
- The categorization of the past into discrete, quantified named blocks of time is called periodization. This is a list of such named time periods as defined in various fields of study. Major categorization systems include cosmological (time periods in the origin and mass evolution of the universe), geological (time periods in the origin and evolution of the Earth), anthropological (time periods in the origin and evolution of humans) and historical (written history). Read more...
- A millennium (plural millennia or millenniums) is a period equal to 1000 years, also called kiloyears. It derives from the Latin mille, thousand, and annus, year. It is often, but not always, related to a particular dating system.
Sometimes, it is used specifically for periods of a thousand years that begin at the starting point (initial reference point) of the calendar in consideration (typically the year "1"), or in later years that are whole number multiples of a thousand years after it. The term can also refer to an interval of time beginning on any date. Frequently in the latter case (and sometimes also in the former) it may have religious or theological implications (see millenarianism). Read more... - Timeline of electromagnetism and classical optics lists, within the history of electromagnetism, the associated theories, technology, and events. Read more...
- Pseudohistory is a form of pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, often using methods resembling those used in legitimate historical research. Pseudohistory frequently presents a big lie or sensational claims about historical facts which would require the revision (re-writing) of the historical record. The related term cryptohistory applied to a pseudohistory based upon or derived from the superstitions inherent to occultism. Pseudohistory is related to pseudoscience and pseudoarchaeology and usage of the terms may occasionally overlap. Read more...
- A decade is a period of 10 years. The word is derived (via French and Latin) from the Ancient Greek: δεκάς, translit. dekas), which means a group of ten. Other words for spans of years also come from Latin: biennium (2 years), triennium (3 years), quadrennium (4 years), lustrum (5 years), century (100 years), millennium (1000 years). Read more...
- In sociology and anthropology, time discipline is the general name given to social and economic rules, conventions, customs, and expectations governing the measurement of time, the social currency and awareness of time measurements, and people's expectations concerning the observance of these customs by others.
The concept of "time discipline" as a field of special attention in sociology and anthropology was pioneered by E. P. Thompson in Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, published in 1967. Coming from a Marxist viewpoint, Thompson argued that observance of clock-time is a consequence of the European industrial revolution, and that neither industrial capitalism nor the creation of the modern state would have been possible without the imposition of synchronic forms of time and work discipline. The new clock time imposed by government and capitalist interests replaced earlier, collective perceptions of time that Thompson believed flowed from the collective wisdom of human societies. While in fact it appears likely that earlier views of time were imposed instead by religious and other social authorities prior to the industrial revolution, Thompson's work identified time discipline as an important concept for study within the social sciences. Read more... - The family tree of Ludwig Herzog von Württemberg (ruled 1568–1593)
Genealogy (from Greek: γενεαλογία genealogia from γενεά genea, "generation" and λόγος logos, "knowledge"), also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.
The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motives, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling. Read more... - Human prehistory is the period between the use of the first stone tools c. 3.3 million years ago by hominins and the invention of writing systems. The earliest writing systems appeared c. 5,300 years ago, but it took thousands of years for writing to be widely adopted and it was not used in some human cultures until the 19th century or even until the present. The end of prehistory therefore came at very different dates in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently.
Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus valley civilization and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts, and to keep historical records; this took place already during the early Bronze Age. Neighboring civilizations were the first to follow. Most other civilizations reached the end of prehistory during the Iron Age. The three-age system of division of prehistory into the Stone Age, followed by the Bronze Age and Iron Age, remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not generally used in those parts of the world where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly with contact with Eurasian cultures, such as the Americas, Oceania, Australasia and much of Sub-Saharan Africa. These areas also, with some exceptions in Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, did not develop complex writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, and their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example 1788 is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia. Read more... - A chronicle (Latin: chronica, from Greek χρονικά chroniká, from χρόνος, chrónos – "time") is a historical account of facts and events arranged in chronological order, as in a time line. Typically, equal weight is given for historically important events and local events, the purpose being the recording of events that occurred, seen from the perspective of the chronicler. This is in contrast to a narrative or history, which sets selected events in a meaningful interpretive context and excludes those the author does not see as important.
Chronicler information sources vary; some chronicles are written from first-hand knowledge, some are from witnesses or participants in events, still others are accounts passed mouth to mouth prior to being written down. Some used written material: Charters, letters, or the works of earlier chroniclers. Still others are tales of such unknown origins so as to hold mythical status. Copyists also affected chronicles in creative copying, making corrections or in updating or continuing a chronicle with information not available to the original author(s). The reliability of a particular chronicle is an important determination for modern historians. Read more... - The timeline of historic inventions is a chronological list of particularly important or significant technological inventions and the people who created the inventions.
Note: Dates for inventions are often controversial. Inventions are often invented by several inventors around the same time, or may be invented in an impractical form many years before another inventor improves the invention into a more practical form. Where there is ambiguity, the date of the first known working version of the invention is used here. Read more... - A century (from the Latin centum, meaning one hundred; abbreviated c.) is a period of 100 years. Centuries are numbered ordinally in English and many other languages.
A centenary is a hundredth anniversary, or a celebration of this, typically the remembrance of an event which took place a hundred years earlier. Read more... - In historiography, the term historical revisionism identifies the re-interpretation of the historical record. It usually means challenging the orthodox (established, accepted or traditional) views held by professional scholars about a historical event, introducing contrary evidence, or reinterpreting the motivations and decisions of the people involved. The revision of the historical record can reflect new discoveries of fact, evidence, and interpretation, which then provokes a revised history. In dramatic cases, revisionism involves a reversal of older moral judgments.
At a basic level, legitimate historical revisionism is a common and not especially controversial process of developing and refining the writing of history. Much more controversial is the reversal of moral findings, in which what had been considered to be positive forces are depicted as being negative. This revisionism is then challenged by the supporters of the previous view, often in heated terms, and becomes an illegitimate form of historical revisionism known as historical negationism if it involves inappropriate methods such as the use of forged documents or implausible distrust of genuine documents, attributing false conclusions to books and sources, manipulating statistical data and deliberately mis-translating texts. This type of historical revisionism presents a re-interpretation of the moral meaning of the historical record. Read more... - Landscape history is the study of the way in which humanity has changed the physical appearance of the environment – both present and past. It is sometimes referred to as landscape archaeology. It was first recognised as a separate area of study during the 20th century and uses evidence and approaches from other disciplines including archaeology, architecture, ecology, aerial photography, local history and historical geography. Read more...
- The history of science and technology (HST) is a field of history which examines how humanity's understanding of the natural world (science) and ability to manipulate it (technology) have changed over the centuries. This academic discipline also studies the cultural, economic, and political impacts of scientific innovation.
Histories of science were originally written by practicing and retired scientists, starting primarily with William Whewell, as a way to communicate the virtues of science to the public. In the early 1930s, after a famous paper given by the Soviet historian Boris Hessen, was focused into looking at the ways in which scientific practices were allied with the needs and motivations of their context. After World War II, extensive resources were put into teaching and researching the discipline, with the hopes that it would help the public better understand both Science and Technology as they came to play an exceedingly prominent role in the world. In the 1960s, especially in the wake of the work done by Thomas Kuhn, the discipline began to serve a very different function, and began to be used as a way to critically examine the scientific enterprise. At the present time it is often closely aligned with the field of science studies. Read more... - Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes.
Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below. The chief problematic aspect of Marxist historiography has been an argument on the nature of history as determined or dialectical; this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and objective factors in creating outcomes. Read more... - A narrative is a report of connected events, real or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images, or both. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".
Narrative can be organized in a number of thematic or formal categories: non-fiction (such as definitively including creative non-fiction, biography, journalism, transcript poetry, and historiography); fictionalization of historical events (such as anecdote, myth, legend, and historical fiction); and fiction proper (such as literature in prose and sometimes poetry, such as short stories, novels, and narrative poems and songs, and imaginary narratives as portrayed in other textual forms, games, or live or recorded performances). Read more... - William Shakespeare's will, written in secretary hand
Palaeography (UK) or paleography (US; ultimately from Greek: παλαιός, palaiós, "old", and γράφειν, graphein, "to write") is the study of ancient and historical handwriting (that is to say, of the forms and processes of writing; not the textual content of documents). Included in the discipline is the practice of deciphering, reading, and dating historical manuscripts, and the cultural context of writing, including the methods with which writing and books were produced, and the history of scriptoria.
The discipline is important for understanding, authenticating, and dating ancient texts. However, it cannot in general be used to pinpoint dates with high precision. Read more... - Counterfactual history, also sometimes referred to as virtual history, is a form of historiography that attempts to answer "what if" questions known as counterfactuals. Black and MacRaild provide this definition: "It is, at the very root, the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen." The method seeks to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline in which certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. It has produced a literary genre which is variously called alternative history, speculative history, or hypothetical history.
One goal is to estimate the relative importance of a specific event, incident or person. For instance, to the counterfactual claim "What would have happened had Hitler drunk coffee instead of tea on the afternoon he committed suicide?", the timeline would have remained unchanged—Hitler in all likelihood still would have committed suicide on April 30, 1945, regardless of what he had to drink that afternoon. However, to the counterfactual "What would have happened had Hitler died in the July 1944 assassination attempt?", all sorts of possibilities become readily apparent, starting with the assumption that the German generals, had they been able to consolidate power over remaining Nazi functionaries such as Goebbels and Himmler, would probably have sued for peace, bringing an early end to World War II. (Historians generally feel popular support for the Party was still very strong in July 1944, and the party apparatus of Himmler, Goebbels, Speer, Bormann, Göring etc. would survive even an assassination of Hitler.) Thus, the counterfactual brings into sharp relief the question of how important Hitler was as an individual and how his personal fate shaped the course of the war and, ultimately, of world history. Read more... 
Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 BC) was a Greek historian who lived in the 5th century BC and one of the earliest historians whose work survives.
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is concerned with events preceding written history, the individual is a historian of prehistory. Some historians are recognized by publications or training and experience. "Historian" became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany and elsewhere. Read more...- The family tree of Ludwig Herzog von Württemberg (ruled 1568–1593)
Genealogy (from Greek: γενεαλογία genealogia from γενεά genea, "generation" and λόγος logos, "knowledge"), also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives.
The pursuit of family history and origins tends to be shaped by several motives, including the desire to carve out a place for one's family in the larger historical picture, a sense of responsibility to preserve the past for future generations, and a sense of self-satisfaction in accurate storytelling. Read more... - Historical thinking is a set of critical literacy skills for evaluating and analyzing primary source documents to construct a meaningful account of the past.
Sometimes called historical reasoning skills, historical thinking skills are frequently described in contrast to history content such as names, dates, and places. This dichotomous presentation is often misinterpreted as a claim for the superiority of one form of knowing over the other. In fact, the distinction is generally made to underscore the importance of developing thinking skills that can be applied when individuals encounter any history content. Most educators agree that together, history content—or facts about the past—and historical thinking skills enable students to interpret, analyze and use information about past events. In doing so, students will realize the complexity of history with all of the pieces and perspectives that cannot be captured through one narrative. Furthermore, as described by Dr. T. Mills Kelly, characteristics of historical thinking develop sourcing skills, the ability to construct and support an argument, and, "the ability to present the past in clear ways, whether in writing or in other media, saying what can be said and not saying what cannot." Read more... 
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States is an example of a social movement. Pictured are marchers at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963.
Social change involves alteration of the social order of a society. It may include changes in social institutions, social behaviours or social relations. Read more...
On this day
Henry Ossian Flipper
- 1600 – The Peruvian stratovolcano Huaynaputina erupted in the largest volcanic explosion in South America in historical times.
- 1811 – Peninsular War: An outnumbered French force under Édouard Mortier routed and nearly destroyed the Spanish at the Battle of the Gebora near Badajoz, Spain.
- 1942 – A book-burning was held and politicians were arrested in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, as part of a simulated Nazi invasion.
- 1965 – Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, along with Generals Lâm Văn Phát and Trần Thiện Khiêm attempted a coup against the military junta of Nguyễn Khánh.
- 1999 – U.S. President Bill Clinton issued a posthumous pardon to Henry Ossian Flipper (pictured), the first African American graduate of West Point, who had been accused of embezzlement in 1881.
Thomas Arundel (d. 1414) · Mary Dilys Glynne (b. 1895) · Sylvia Rivera (d. 2002)
More anniversaries:
History in the making...
- 19 February 2019 – 2020 United States presidential election, 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries
- Vermont Senator and 2016 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, announces on Vermont Public Radio that he is running for President of the United States as a Democrat in 2020. (NPR)
- 18 February 2019 – Kashmir conflict
- Two reported Jaish-e-Mohammed militants, one civilian and four Indian soldiers are killed in a skirmish in the Pulwama district of Indian-administered Kashmir as police search for suspects in Thursday's suicide attack that killed 40 Indian paramilitary police. (arynews)
- 18 February 2019 –
- A suicide bombing kills the bomber and three police officers in Cairo, Egypt. Two others are injured. (Wall Street Journal)
- 18 February 2019 – List of mass shootings in the United States in 2019
- Four people are killed in a shooting at a home in Solon Township, Kent County, Michigan, United States, with police investigating it as a possible murder–suicide. (NBC News) (CBS News)
- 18 February 2019 – 2019 Venezuelan presidential crisis
- In a speech, U.S. President Donald Trump urges the Venezuelan military to abandon Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro or "lose everything". (Reuters)
- 17 February 2019 –
- Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announces the country's major political parties computer networks had been hacked by a "sophisticated state actor." (BBC)
- 17 February 2019 – 2019 Daytona 500
- Denny Hamlin wins the 2019 Daytona 500. It is his second win in the event, the first coming in 2016. (Fox News)
- 16 February 2019 – Sinai insurgency
- Militants attacked an army checkpoint in Sinai Peninsula killing and injuring 15. It is believed that 11 were killed but that has not been confirmed. Seven militants also died in the attack. (The National) (The Times of Israel)
- 16 February 2019 – Afghanistan War
- 32 Afghan border security troops are killed by a Taliban attack in Kandahar, Afghanistan. (The New York Times)
- 15 February 2019 – 2019 Kaduna State massacre
- 66 people were killed by gunmen in Nigeria's Kaduna State including 34 victims being either women or children. The attack happened one day before the scheduled election before it was delayed another week. (Al Jazeera) (BBC)
- 15 February 2019 – Amazon HQ2
- After announcing that it was canceling its New York City headquarters plans the day before, Amazon announces that it will keep its second headquarters in Virginia. (CNET)
- 15 February 2019 – Aurora, Illinois shooting
- Five people are dead and six others are injured during a mass shooting in Aurora, Illinois. The suspected shooter was later killed by police. (CBS Chicago)
- 15 February 2019 – Brumadinho dam disaster
- Eight Vale employees from Minas Gerais are arrested over alleged involvement in a dam collapse that killed at least 166 people. (Financial Times) (The Wall Street Journal)
- 15 February 2019 – United States–Mexico barrier, Trump wall
- U.S. President Donald Trump declares a National Emergency Concerning the Southern Border of the United States. (Fox News)
- The American Civil Liberties Union and watchdog group Public Citizen announced they will file lawsuits challenging the legality of President Trump’s emergency declaration. (Time) (CBS News)
- 15 February 2019 – 2020 United States presidential election, 2020 Republican Party presidential primaries
- Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld announces the launching of a presidential exploratory committee to run for President of the United States in the 2020 United States presidential election. (CNN)
- 14 February 2019 – 2019 Pulwama attack
- At least 46 members of India's security forces are killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up as a convoy of military vehicles drove on a highway in Jammu and Kashmir. (BBC)
- 14 February 2019 – Iraqi insurgency (2017–present)
- A roadside bomb blast kills 8 Shiite militiamen and wounds others. (France 24)
- 14 February 2019 – Special Counsel investigation
- Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe confirms he ordered the probe on U.S. President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice, citing concerns that arose from the dismissal of James Comey. (CBS News)
- 14 February 2019 – Political appointments by Donald Trump
- The U.S. Senate votes to confirm Trump nominee William Barr as United States Attorney General with a vote of 54–45. (NBC News)
Suboutlines
History (timelines) – records of past events and the way things were. It is also a field responsible for the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about the past.
- History, by period (See also Timeline of world history)
- Prehistory – events occurring before recorded history (that is, before written records).
- Colorado prehistory –
- Prehistoric technology – technologies that emerged before recorded history (i.e., before the development of writing).
- Ancient history (timeline) – from ≈3350 BCE to ≈500 CE
- Ancient West
- Classical antiquity (timeline) – long period of cultural history in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the Greco-Roman world.
- Ancient Greece (timeline) – period of Greek history lasting from the Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1100 BC) to 146 BC and the Roman conquest of Greece. It was the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western civilization.
- Ancient Rome (timeline) – civilization that started on the Italian Peninsula and lasted from as early as the 10th century BC to the 5th century AD. Over centuries it shifted from a monarchy to a republic to an empire which dominated South-Western Europe, South-Eastern Europe/Balkans and the Mediterranean region.
- Classical architecture – architecture of classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greek architecture and the architecture of ancient Rome. It also refers to the style or styles of architecture influenced by those.
- Classical antiquity (timeline) – long period of cultural history in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the Greco-Roman world.
- Ancient East
- Ancient China – China from about 2070 to 221 BC, spanning the Xia Dynasty, Shang Dynasty, Zhou Dynasy, the Spring and Autumn period, to the end of the Warring States period.
- Ancient Egypt – ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, along the lower reaches of the Nile River starting about 3150 BC, in what is now the modern country of Egypt.
- Ancient India – India as it existed from pre-historic times (c. 7000 BCE or earlier) to the start of the Middle Ages (c. 500 CE).
- Ancient West
- Middle Ages (Medieval history) (timeline) – historical period following the Iron Age, fully underway by the 5th century and lasting to the 15th century and preceding the early Modern Era. It is the middle period in a three-period division of history: Classic, Medieval, and Modern.
- Renaissance – cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Florence in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. It encompassed a flowering of literature, science, art, religion, and politics, and gradual but widespread educational reform.
- Early modern history – from 1500 to 1899
- Modern history – since 1900.
- Globalization – progression towards the development of an integrated world community, from ancient times to the present
- Prehistory – events occurring before recorded history (that is, before written records).
- History, by region
- History of South Asia (timeline)
- History of Western civilization
- History of existing states
- United States history (timeline)
- History of U.S. states
- History of Alabama • History of Alaska • History of Arizona • History of Arkansas • History of California • History of Colorado • History of Connecticut • History of Delaware • History of Florida • History of Georgia • History of Hawaii • History of Idaho • History of Illinois • History of Indiana • History of Iowa • History of Kansas • History of Kentucky • History of Louisiana • History of Maine • History of Maryland • History of Massachusetts • History of Michigan • History of Minnesota • History of Mississippi • History of Missouri • History of Montana • History of Nebraska • History of Nevada • History of New Hampshire • History of New Jersey • History of New Mexico • History of New York • History of North Carolina • History of North Dakota • History of Ohio • History of Oklahoma • History of Oregon • History of Pennsylvania • History of Rhode Island • History of South Carolina • History of South Dakota • History of Tennessee • History of Texas • History of Utah • History of Vermont • History of Virginia • History of Washington • History of West Virginia • History of Wisconsin • History of Wyoming
- History of U.S. states
- United States history (timeline)
- Historical states
- Ancient Egypt – ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, along the lower reaches of the Nile River starting about 3150 BC, in what is now the modern country of Egypt.
- Ancient Rome (timeline) – civilization that started on the Italian Peninsula and lasted from as early as the 10th century BC to the 5th century AD. Over centuries it shifted from a monarchy to a republic to an empire which dominated South-Western Europe, South-Eastern Europe/Balkans and the Mediterranean region.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – six-volume work authored by the celebrated English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794).
- Byzantine Empire (timeline) – the Eastern Roman Empire that existed throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Known simply as the Roman Empire or Romania by its inhabitants and neighbors, the empire was centered on the capital of Constantinople and was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State. Byzantium, however, was distinct from ancient Rome, in that it was Christian and predominantly Greek-speaking, being influenced by Greek, as opposed to Latin, culture.
- Ottoman Empire (timeline) – historical Muslim empire, also known by its contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey. At its zenith in the second half of the 16th century it controlled Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia and North Africa.
- Soviet Union – socialist state on the Eurasian continent that existed from 1922 to 1991. A union of multiple subnational Soviet republics, its government and economy were highly centralized. The Soviet Union was a one-party state, governed by the Communist Party with Moscow as its capital. It was a major ally during World War II, a main participant in the Cold War, and it grew in power to become one of the world's two superpowers (the other being the United States). The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
- History, by subject
- History, by field
- Historical sciences – fields dealing with history
- History of terrorism
- Wars
- American Civil War – civil war in the United States of America from 1861–1865 in which 11 Southern slave states tried to secede.
- World War I (timeline) – major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers,[1] which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (centred on the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred on the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy).
- World War II (timeline) – global military conflict from 1939 to 1945, which involved most of the world's nations forming two opposing military alliances, the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread, largest, most costly, and deadliest war in history.
- Cold War (timeline) – period of political and military tension between the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, accentuated by the rivalry between the two superpowers at that time: America (U.S.) and the Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.).
- Vietnam War – Cold War era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the United States and other anti-communist nations.
Subtopics
History by region – Ancient Egypt • Ancient Greece • Ancient Rome • History of China • History of the Middle East • History of Mesoamerica • History of India
- History by continent – Africa • The Americas • Antarctica • Asia • Australia • Eurasia • Europe • North America • Oceania • South America
List of time periods – Prehistory • Protohistory • Ancient history • Modern history • Future history
- The Ages of history – Stone Age • Copper Age • Bronze Age • Iron Age • Dark Ages (historiography) • Middle Ages • Age of Discovery • Renaissance • Age of Enlightenment • Industrial Age • Space Age • Information Age
History by subject
- History of science – Theories/sociology • Historiography • Mathematics • Pseudoscience • Scientific method
- History of science by era – In early cultures • In Classical Antiquity • In the Middle Ages • In the Renaissance • Scientific Revolution
Recognized content
Featured articles
- Æthelstan A
- Herman Vandenburg Ames
- Anti-tobacco movement in Nazi Germany
- Balfour Declaration
- Battle of Red Cliffs
- Birmingham campaign
- Empire of Brazil
- Byzantine Empire
- Pedro Álvares Cabral
- Court of Chancery
- Cross of Gold speech
- C. R. M. F. Cruttwell
- W. E. B. Du Bois
- Edmund Evans
- Ford Piquette Avenue Plant
- Free State of Galveston
- Halifax Explosion
- Hanged, drawn and quartered
- History of American football
- History of Baltimore City College
- History of biology
- History of Sheffield
- History of Arsenal F.C. (1886–1966)
- History of Aston Villa F.C. (1961–present)
- History of Bradford City A.F.C.
- History of Gibraltar
- History of Gillingham F.C.
- History of Stoke City F.C.
- History of US science fiction and fantasy magazines to 1950
- History of the British farthing
- History of the New York Yankees
- Horrible Histories (2009 TV series)
- Hoysala Empire
- Inaugural games of the Flavian Amphitheatre
- Indigenous people of the Everglades region
- Jarrow March
- LaRouche criminal trials
- Mantra-Rock Dance
- Manzanar
- Maya civilization
- Battle of Midway
- Parliament of 1327
- Peasants' Revolt
- Peterloo Massacre
- President Truman's relief of General Douglas MacArthur
- Rosewood massacre
- The Slave Community
- Unification of Germany
- Wage reform in the Soviet Union, 1956–1962
- William Jennings Bryan 1896 presidential campaign
- William McKinley 1896 presidential campaign
- Zhou Tong (archer)
- Zong massacre
Good articles
- 102nd Intelligence Wing
- 1982 Iranian diplomats kidnapping
- Abir Congo Company
- Agnosticism
- Ambrose Channel pilot cable
- Anarchism in Cuba
- Anuradhapura Kingdom
- Architecture in early modern Scotland
- Aztecs
- Azusa Street Revival
- Barry (dog)
- Bastille
- Belgium in "the long nineteenth century"
- Bodyguard of Lies
- John Wilkes Booth
- Robert Napuʻuako Boyd
- Bristol Bus Boycott
- Letitia Woods Brown
- Burning of women in England
- Bury St Edmunds witch trials
- Bury the Chains
- Treaty of Butre
- Moro River Campaign
- Lydia Canaan
- José María Caro Martínez
- Catholic Church
- The Christian Manifesto
- Christmas in the post-war United States
- Cold War
- Constantine VIII
- Cèllere Codex
- Demographic history of Scotland
- Demolition of al-Baqi
- Dispute between Darnhall and Vale Royal Abbey
- Dreamtime (book)
- Early thermal weapons
- Eastcote House Gardens
- Economy of Scotland in the early modern period
- Education and Democracy: The Meaning of Alexander Meiklejohn
- Education in Medieval Scotland
- Education in early modern Scotland
- Edward of Angoulême
- Ely and Littleport riots of 1816
- Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945
- Encyclopedia of the Central Intelligence Agency
- English Poor Laws
- Family in early modern Scotland
- Federation of Stoke-on-Trent
- Fifty Years of Freedom
- Fortress of Humaitá
- Fujiwara no Teika
- Gadsden Purchase
- Geography of Scotland in the Middle Ages
- Geography of Scotland in the early modern era
- Lionel Gilbert
- Glorious Revolution in Scotland
- Government in early modern Scotland
- Government in medieval Scotland
- Government of Macedonia (ancient kingdom)
- Greater Germanic Reich
- HIAG
- Ha' K'in Xook
- Hampton National Historic Site
- Hindu–German Conspiracy
- History of agriculture
- History of Bombay under Portuguese rule (1534–1661)
- History of Cornell University
- History of Gaza
- History of Hertfordshire
- History of Indiana
- History of malaria
- History of Microsoft
- History of Philadelphia
- History of Pittsburgh
- History of poison
- History of private equity and venture capital
- History of Scotland
- History of Singapore
- History of the Galveston Bay Area
- History of the Song dynasty
- History of the Soviet Union (1964–82)
- History of the United Kingdom during the First World War
- History of Animals
- History of Aston Villa F.C. (1874–1961)
- History of Edinburgh Zoo
- History of Galveston, Texas
- History of Harvard Extension School
- History of KFC
- History of Lima
- History of Macedonia (ancient kingdom)
- History of Mumbai
- History of St. Louis
- History of Wat Phra Dhammakaya
- History of agriculture in Scotland
- History of aspirin
- History of cricket to 1725
- History of hip hop dance
- History of macroeconomic thought
- History of the Georgia Institute of Technology
- History of the Han dynasty
- Hitler's Generals on Trial
- Housing in Scotland
- I Ching
- Curtis P. Iaukea
- Ice trade
- Indigenous peoples in Canada
- Indo-Roman trade relations
- Itzam K'an Ahk II
- Janszoon voyage of 1605–06
- John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
- K'inich Yat Ahk II
- K'inich Yo'nal Ahk I
- Ernst Klink
- Legal history of cannabis in the United States
- Assassination of Abraham Lincoln
- Lisa the Iconoclast
- The Making of the English Landscape
- The Man-Eating Myth
- Manor Farm, Ruislip
- Maritime fur trade
- McMahon–Hussein Correspondence
- Meermin slave mutiny
- Middle Colonies
- Monte Testaccio
- Murrays' Mills
- Music in early modern Scotland
- National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933
- Naval battles of the American Revolutionary War
- Nawabs of Bengal and Murshidabad
- Nazi Germany
- Lynching of Laura and L. D. Nelson
- No Man Knows My History
- Nuova Cronica
- Ocean Village Marina, Gibraltar
- One Day in History
- Museum de Oude Wolden
- Paper Brigade
- Pax Mongolica
- Pied-Noir
- Karl Plagge
- Premiership of Gordon Brown
- Presidency of George Washington
- Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant
- Child prostitution
- Edward William Purvis
- History of Randolph, Tennessee
- Renaissance
- Renaissance in Scotland
- Roman Empire
- Romanticism in Scotland
- Rose Street Club
- Gunther E. Rothenberg
- Royal intermarriage
- Felix Römer
- Scotland during the Roman Empire
- Scotland in the Late Middle Ages
- Scotland in the Middle Ages
- Scotland in the early modern period
- Scotland in the modern era
- Scotland under the Commonwealth
- Scottish religion in the eighteenth century
- Scottish religion in the seventeenth century
- Scottish society in the Middle Ages
- Scottish society in the early modern era
- Shays' Rebellion
- Silver
- Son of God (TV series)
- Spain in Our Hearts
- Spanish flu
- Spanish conquest of Honduras
- Jan Willem Spruyt
- Stanley plan
- David Starkey
- Stolen Childhood
- Stratford Dialectical and Radical Club
- Taoism
- Testaroli
- Texas oil boom
- Topaz War Relocation Center
- Leo Tornikios
- Trade route
- Treaty of Waitangi
- D. H. Turner
- Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands
- Wannsee Conference
- Warfare in early modern Scotland
- Wolfram Wette
- Rwandan Revolution
- Witch trials in early modern Scotland
- Women in early modern Scotland
- Women's March on Versailles
- Workhouse
- Wow! signal
- Wreck of the RMS Titanic
- Yang Shoujing
- Yo'nal Ahk III
Subportals
·
History
- History by period
- History by decade
- History by century
- History by era
- Prehistory
- Ancient history
- Middle Ages
- Renaissance
- Modern history
- History by region
- American Old West • Anglo-Saxon England • Austria-Hungary • British Empire • Bulgarian Empire • Imperial China • East Germany • European military history • German Empire • Canada • Holy Roman Empire • Indian independence movement • Khitan • Mesoamerica • Nazi Germany • New France • North America • Ottoman Empire • Russian Empire • Sasanian Empire • Soviet Union • Transylvania • Weimar Republic
- History by subject
- Crown of Aragon • Disasters • Heraldry • History of art • History of the Latter Day Saint movement • History of Science
- Mythology
- Sports
- Time
- War
- War of 1812 • American Revolutionary War • American Civil War • Ancient warfare • Arab–Israeli conflict • Cold War • Crusades • Italian Wars • Liberation War • Military history of France • Military history of Africa • Military history of the Ottoman Empire • Napoleonic Wars • September 11 attacks • Spanish American wars of independence • Syrian Civil War • World War I • World War II
