section_path: Methods
section_name: Methods
paragraph_text: Methods
  
  Europeans have written and published extensively to pull together a "universal history" in the early modern period. This written corpus and discourse in Europe includes ethnographic encounters, comparative philosophy, as well as archaeological discovery.
  
  Herodotus, from the 5th century BC, has been acclaimed as the "father of history". However, his contemporary Thucydides is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as the product of the choices and actions of humans, and looked at cause and effect, rather than the result of divine intervention (though Herodotus was not wholly committed to this idea himself). In his historical method, Thucydides emphasized chronology, a nominally neutral point of view, and that the human world was the result of human actions. Greek historians viewed history as cyclical, with events regularly recurring.
  
  There was sophisticated use of historical method in ancient and medieval China. The groundwork for professional historiography in East Asia was established by court historian Sima Qian (145–90 BC), author of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) and posthumously known as the Father of Chinese historiography. 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.
  
  In the preface to his book, the Muqaddimah (1377), the Arab historian and early sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, warned of 7 mistakes he thought historians 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 to feel the need for experience, in addition to rational principles, in order to assess a culture of the past. Ibn Khaldun criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced a scientific method to the study of history, and referred to it as his "new science". His method laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history, and so is sometimes considered to be the "father of historiography" or the "father of the philosophy of history".
  
  In the West, historians developed modern methods of historiography in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and Germany. In 1851, Herbert Spencer summarized these methods:"From the successive strata of our historical deposits, they diligently gather all the highly colored fragments, pounce upon everything that is curious and sparkling and chuckle like children over their glittering acquisitions; meanwhile the rich veins of wisdom that ramify amidst this worthless debris, lie utterly neglected. Cumbrous volumes of rubbish are greedily accumulated, while those masses of rich ore, that should have been dug out, and from which golden truths might have been smelted, are left untaught and unsought."
  
  By the "rich ore" Spencer meant scientific theory of history. Meanwhile, Henry Thomas Buckle expressed a dream of history becoming one day a science: "In regard to nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious have been explained and have been shown to be in accordance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been done because men of ability and, above all, men of patient, untiring thought have studied events with the view of discovering their regularity, and if human events were subject to a similar treatment, we have every right to expect similar results. Contrary to Buckle's dream, the 19th-century historian with greatest influence on methods became Leopold von Ranke in Germany. He limited history to "what really happened" and by this directed the field further away from science. For Ranke, historical data should be collected carefully, examined objectively and put together with critical rigor. But these procedures "are merely the prerequisites and preliminaries of science. The heart of science is searching out order and regularity in the data being examined and in formulating generalizations or laws about them."
  
  As Historians like Ranke and many who followed him have pursued it, no, history is not a science. Thus if Historians tell us that, given the manner in which he practices his craft, it cannot be considered a science, we must take him at his word. If he is not doing science, then, whatever else he is doing, he is not doing science. The traditional Historian is thus no scientist and history, as conventionally practiced, is not a science.
  
  In the 20th century, academic historians focused less on epic nationalistic narratives, which often tended to glorify the nation or great men, to more objective and complex analyses of social and intellectual forces. A major trend of historical methodology in the 20th century was to treat history more as a social science rather than art, which traditionally had been the case. Leading advocates of history as a social science were a diverse collection of scholars which included Fernand Braudel and E. H. Carr. Many are noted for their multidisciplinary approach e.g. Braudel combined history with geography. Nevertheless, these multidisciplinary approaches failed to produce a theory of history. So far only one theory of history came from a professional historian. Whatever other theories of history exist, they were written by experts from other fields (for example, Marxian theory of history). The field of digital history has begun to address ways of using computer technology, to pose new questions to historical data and generate digital scholarship.
  
  In opposition to the claims of history as a social science, historians such as Hugh Trevor-Roper argued the key to historians' work was the power of the imagination, and hence contended that history should be understood as art. French historians associated with the Annales school introduced quantitative history, using raw data to track the lives of typical individuals, and were prominent in the establishment of cultural history (cf. histoire des mentalités). Intellectual historians such as Herbert Butterfield have argued for the significance of ideas in history. American historians, motivated by the civil rights era, focused on formerly overlooked ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups. A genre of social history to emerge post-WWII was Alltagsgeschichte (History of Everyday Life). Scholars such as Ian Kershaw examined what everyday life was like for ordinary people in 20th-century Germany, especially in Nazi Germany.
  
  The Marxist theory of historical materialism theorises that society is fundamentally determined by the material conditions at any given time – in other words, the relationships which people have with each other in order to fulfill basic needs such as feeding, clothing and housing themselves and their families. Overall, Marx and Engels claimed to have identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe. Marxist historiography was once orthodoxy in the Soviet Union, but since the communism's collapse there, its influence has significantly reduced.
  
  Marxist historians sought to validate Karl Marx 's theories by analyzing history from a Marxist perspective. In response to the Marxist interpretation of history, historians such as François Furet have offered anti-Marxist interpretations of history. Feminist historians argued for the importance of studying the experience of women. Postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. Keith Windschuttle 's 1994 book, The Killing of History defended the worth of history.
  
  Today, most historians begin their research in the archives, on either a physical or digital platform. They often propose an argument and use research to support it. John H. Arnold proposed that history is an argument, which creates the possibility of creating change. Digital information companies, such as Google, have sparked controversy over the role of internet censorship in information access.