What are historical research method
Answers
Historical method is the collection of techniques and guidelines that historians use to research and write histories of the past. Primary sources and other evidence including those from archaeology are used.
When was the source, written or unwritten, produced (date)?
Where was it produced (localization)?
By whom was it produced (authorship)?
From what pre-existing material was it produced (analysis)?
In what original form was it produced (integrity)?
What is the evidential value of its contents (credibility)?
The first four are known as historical criticism; the fifth, textual criticism; and, together, external criticism. The sixth and final inquiry about a source is called internal criticism.
The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484 BC – ca.425 BC)[27] has generally been acclaimed as the "father of history". However, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 460 BC – c. 400 BC) is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in his work the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as being the product of the choices and actions of human beings, and looked at cause and effect, rather than as the result of divine intervention (though Herodotus was not wholly committed to this idea himself).[27] In his historical method, Thucydides emphasized chronology, a nominally neutral point of view, and that the human world was the result of the actions of human beings. Greek historians also viewed history as cyclical, with events regularly recurring.[28]
There were historical traditions and sophisticated use of historical method in ancient and medieval China. The groundwork for professional historiography in East Asia was established by the Han dynasty court historian known as Sima Qian (145–90 BC), author of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji). For the quality of his written work, Sima Qian is posthumously known as the Father of Chinese historiography. Chinese historians of subsequent dynastic periods in China used his Shiji as the official format for historical texts, as well as for biographical literature.[citation needed]
Saint Augustine was influential in Christian and Western thought at the beginning of the medieval period. Through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, history was often studied through a sacred or religious perspective. Around 1800, German philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought philosophy and a more secular approach in historical study.[22]
In the preface to his book, the Muqaddimah (1377), the Arab historian and early sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, warned of seven mistakes that he thought that historians regularly committed. In this criticism, he approached the past as strange and in need of interpretation. The originality of Ibn Khaldun was to claim that the cultural difference of another age must govern the evaluation of relevant historical material, to distinguish the principles according to which it might be possible to attempt the evaluation, and lastly, to feel the need for experience, in addition to rational principles, in order to assess a culture of the past. Ibn Khaldun often criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data." As a result, he introduced a scientific method to the study of history, and he often referred to it as his "new science".[29] His historical method also laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history,[30] and he is thus considered to be the "father of historiography"[31][32] or the "father of the philosophy of history".[33]