Historical method
Historical method is the collection of techniques and guidelines that historians use to research and write histories of the past.
In the philosophy of history, the question of the nature, and the possibility, of a sound historical method is raised within the sub-field of epistemology.
An author's trustworthiness in the main may establish a background probability for the consideration of each statement, but each piece of evidence extracted must be weighed individually.
Bernheim (1889) and Langlois & Seignobos (1898) proposed a seven-step procedure for source criticism in history:[5] Subsequent descriptions of historical method, outlined below, have attempted to overcome the credulity built into the first step formulated by the nineteenth century historiographers by stating principles not merely by which different reports can be harmonized but instead by which a statement found in a source may be considered to be unreliable or reliable as it stands on its own.
[11] R. J. Shafer (1974) offers this checklist for evaluating eyewitness testimony:[12] Louis Gottschalk adds an additional consideration: "Even when the fact in question may not be well-known, certain kinds of statements are both incidental and probable to such a degree that error or falsehood seems unlikely.
Satisfactory answers to the second and third questions may provide the historian with the whole or the gist of the primary testimony upon which the secondary witness may be his only means of knowledge.
More recent evidence concerning the potential reliability or unreliability of oral tradition has come out of fieldwork in West Africa and Eastern Europe.
Around 1800, German philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought philosophy and a more secular approach in historical study.
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.
In 1851, Herbert Spencer summarized these methods:"From the successive strata of our historical deposits, they [historians] 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.
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.
[33] Contrary to Buckle's dream, the 19th-century historian with greatest influence on methods became Leopold von Ranke in Germany.
For Ranke, historical data should be collected carefully, examined objectively and put together with critical rigor.
The heart of science is searching out order and regularity in the data being examined and in formulating generalizations or laws about them.
[35]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.
American historians, motivated by the civil rights era, focused on formerly overlooked ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups.
[37] Overall, Marx and Engels claimed to have identified five successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe.
