History (past events)
History is the totality of past events and conditions, especially those that shaped people, societies, and institutions.
Historical event: An occurrence in the past regarded as significant to understanding human societies. Events are discrete parts of the broader past, though their significance can change over time.
Historical change: A transformation in societies, institutions, practices, or conditions over time. Change is the process through which the past takes on different forms.
Public history: Historical work created for and with audiences outside academic institutions. It brings evidence about the past into museums, archives, media, and communities.
Annales School: A French historical movement emphasizing long-term social, geographic, and economic structures. It widened historical explanation beyond political events and prominent individuals.
Historical objectivity: The extent to which historical accounts can be impartial and constrained by evidence. It raises how historians can separate warranted claims from their own assumptions.
Historical period: A span of time grouped under a shared name or defining historical conditions. Periodization organizes continuous change into eras that can be compared and studied.
Historical materialism: A theory that explains social change through material production and economic relations. It makes economic structures and class relations central to historical explanation.
Historical memory: The ways groups remember, commemorate, and interpret the past. Shared memories connect past events to present identities and public choices.
Microhistory: The close study of a narrowly defined person, place, or event to reveal broader patterns. Its small scale contrasts with accounts organized around large societies and long periods.
Historical periodization: The practice of dividing the past into named periods with proposed boundaries. Period boundaries can clarify change while obscuring uneven experiences across societies.