Periodization Hand Note

The Varieties of History

Because educated people believe that history provides a sence of persective to
understand the present and how society arrived at a particular point in time,there
are many different types of history.

Political history: Political history is one of the oldest genres of history and
obviously has many subdivisions, such as local, territorial, provincial, and
national.Political History practiced in such a way relied on readily available forms
of evidence such as state papers, autobiographies, memoirs,and newspaper
chronicling the leading figures of a particular period.

Sometimes regional histories will transcend the political boundaries of provinces

or states, such as the western or Prairie Provinces, or in the United States, the West
or the South. There are numerous historical studies of parties, elections,
governments, and popular movements.

Administrative history: Administrative history, which considers the development

of various branches of government and how they function, is related to political
history.

Diplomatic history: Diplomatic history or international relations concerns

relations between and among states, including alliances and alignments, the origins
of wars, peace negotiations, and treaties.Associated with this vast field is the
history of international law, of the laws of war, of international arbitration, and of
international organizations.

Military History: Military history considers the financing, organization and

training, arming and employment in peace or war of the various forms of the
military, and militarism. This field encompasses grand strategy as well as
battlefield tactics, and can include the social, economic and intellectual effects of
wars.

Economic history: studies the various forms of economic endeavour over time,
and was triggered in part by the development of economics as a separate discipline,
but also by the transformation of life in the modern world due to the agricultural
and industrial revolutions. But forms of cultivation and production of goods
through the ages have been the subjects of innumerable historical investigations.
Histories of prices and wages, of housing and labour,of companies and businesses,
just to name a few, are subdisciplines of economic history. The history of
technology is both autonomous and wedded to economic history.
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 Periodization Hand Note

Intellectual history: Intellectual history or the history of ideas analyses the

evolution of ideas and their expression in texts in relation to the cultural
environment of their era.

Cultural history: Cultural history extends from customs and conventions,

ordinary artefacts, and popular culture to the pinnacles of human achievement in
literature, painting, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts.

Religious history: Religious history examines the importance of the spiritual

dimensions of life, and evaluates the contributions of religious organizations,
churches and popular movements to the political and cultural experience of each
age.

The histories of science and medicine, which examine how scientific knowledge
evolves and influences society, have developed to the point that many large history
departments now include scholars in one or the other, perhaps both subjects. That
there are now historians of the environment reflects current concerns about the
global ecology and the future of the planet.

Social history: Social history has been investigated in remarkably innovative ways
and with rich results in the last half-century, revealing humankind's changing
views and treatment of the stages of life - birth, childhood, youth, adulthood and
old age - in the past. Studies of the family, of the poor and the rich, of various
classes and orders (serfs, peasants, labourers, middle class, and aristocracy) have
proliferated. Historical demography has reconstituted populations from parish
registers, identified their forms of employment, established the extent of their
wealth, counted their children, gauged their life expectancies, and measured the
incidence of plague, warfare, fire and storm upon them.

Family history: Family history explores attitudes toward marriage, contraception,

abortion, childhood, child rearing, widowhood, and patterns of inheritance. Family
sizes and child rearing practices have varied in ways that may characterize an era
more fundamentally than events which give the era its name.

The history of everyday life illuminates the most mundane but fundamental sides
of existence in previous centuries, the changing diets, clothing, housing, and
heating of humankind. These details often derive from an economic history of the
consumer whose purchasing power eventually constituted a mass market with far
reaching effects.

In recent decades historians have developed several new forms of history.

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Psychohistory, which is found almost entirely in biography, took its impulse from
the work of Sigmund Freud, his successors, and some dissenters from his canon.
The study of popular mentalities delineates the outlook of large numbers of
previously unheard but not entirely inarticulate people in earlier societies as
evidenced in their actions.

Finally,the areas that historians focus on are virtually unlimited in scope.Some

historians carefully examine an event or a specific culture setting in an effort to
better understand the past.Such studies tend to focus intently on the local and the
particular,and extrapolate from there.Other historians may focus on a narrow
subject,but look at change or persistence over an extended period of time,Yet other
historians look broadly at trends within a society that are part of a larger regional
or even global perspective.

 The World of History

World history or global history as a field of historical study examines history from
a global perspective.World History attempts to recognize and address two
structures that have profoundly shaped professional history-writing:

1. A tendency to use current nation-states to set the boundaries and agendas of

studies of the past.
2. A deep legacy of Eurocentric assumptions

Thus World History tends to study networks, connections, and systems that cross
traditional boundaries of historical study like linguistic, cultural, and national
borders. World History is often concerned to explore social dynamics that have led
to large-scale changes in human society, such as industrialization and the spread
of capitalism, and to analyse how large-scale changes like these have affected
different parts of the world. Like other branches of history-writing in the second
half of the twentieth century, World History has a scope far beyond historians'
traditional focus on politics, wars, and diplomacy, taking in a panoply of subjects
like gender history, social history, cultural history, and environmental history.

Md.Rocky Hossain
Dept. of History
Cell:01845207462
FB: https://www.facebook.com/rocky.hossain.1088