KINDS OF HISTORY Hist is a magnificent mansion

KINDS OF HISTORY Hist. is a magnificent mansion. Travelyan aptly describes it as dwelling place of all subjects. It is like a joint family. 1. Political History Seeley : “Hist. is past politics and politics is present history”. • Political hist. is the story of kings, queens, courtiers, …. • It is about the kings’ conquests, wars, and treaties. • About their deeds and misdeeds. • Also about the rise and the fall of kings and their kingdoms, empires… • Voltaire, Machiavelli, Macaulay …

2. Constitutional History • It is an important branch of pol. hist. Still it attains an independent discipline. • It deals with the state organization i. e. the Constitution of the Government.

3. Parliamentary History • It is a subsection of Constitutional History dealing with one particular political institution. – the Parliament. • The Parliamentary govt. provides a unique experience to people in democratic countries as India. • The study of History of England is impossible without the study of its Parliamentary Hist. .

4. Legal History • It is an off-shoot of Constitutional and Parliamentary hist. Yet, it differs from them in many ways. • It is the hist. about the Parliamentary enactments, their interpretations, and applications. • The codified laws of Hamurabi of Babylon, Manu of India, and Napoleon of France …are the considerable significance to legal historians.

5. Military History • MH narrates the story of Military operation. • It deals with warfare in every form and aspect; technical, tactical and strategic. • It also covers military engineering, ballistics, logistics and military transport. • The military historians are not merely concerned with military planning but also the impact of wars on fate of the nations and life of the people. • Thucydides’ The history of the Peloponnesian war is a classic example of MH. • Outstanding works have been written on the South Indian Rebellion, the Great Indian Mutiny, the American Civil War and the First and the Second World Wars. • At present, MH includes land, naval and aerial warfare.

6. Diplomatic History • The hist. of relations between sovereign states. i. e. International Hist. i. e. the study of inter-state relations. It has assumed importance esp. after the First World War. • External relations between states are maintained by ambassadors, trained experts and practitioners of diplomacy. • The diplomatic historians should always have an eye on the developments on the world stage. They have to deal with the legal, political, cultural and economic issues.

7. Social History • Trevelyan, the well known author of SH of England, defined it as “history with the politics left out”. • The Dutch historian P. J. Blok called it “the thought and the work, the daily life, the belief, the needs, the habits of our ancestors”. • In short, SH is the hist. of human society in its social aspects. It is also concerned with the origin and development of the social institutions. • It is also dynamic because it deals with social change.

8. Economic History • Sir William Ashley defines economic history as “the hist. of actual human practice with respect to the material basis of life”. • N. S. B. Gras defines it as “the story of the various ways in which man has obtained a living”. • Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was the classical treatise on EH. • Karl Marx’s economic interpretation of hist. widened the scope of economic hist. and stimulated the study of economic factors.

9. Intellectual History • IH is the hist. of human thought. • R. G. Coolingwood considered hist. as the expression of idea. i. e. the influence of ideas and ideologies on human hist. Ø R. G. Coolingwood’s ‘The Idea of History”; Ø H. E. Barnes’ ‘An Intellectual and Cultural History of the Western World’; ØAlfred North Whitehead’s ‘Adventure of Ideas’ …some of the outstanding contributions to IH.

10. Biographical History • Biographers sought to explain historical events in terms of success or failure of historical heroes and heroines. • The biographical approach to hist. received unprecedented impetus since Thomas Carlyle came out with his assertion that hist. was the compound of the biographies of great men. – “hist. is the biography of great men”. • e. g. ØCommunism is considered to be the brain child of Karl Marx. Ø Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 is attributed to the stupidity of Tzar Nicholas II. ØThe World War II is said to be due to the individual wickedness of Hitler. ØLenin, Mao-tse-Tung and Mahatma Gandhi are claimed to be responsible for the liberation of Russia, China and India respectively.

11. National History • It is the study about how the nation states emerged; • It is the biography of the people, their spirit of nationalism, fought for the liberation of their nation, sacrificed their lives for that…etc.

12. Universal History (World History) • This idea was absent during the ancient Greece – a land of City States. • It was by the emergence of the Roman Empire, unifying all powers against the Greeks, an idea about universal hist. came. • A new universal attitude towards hist. was developed as a result of the introduction of Christian ideas. • History became universal in its scope. The adoption of a single chronological framework for all historical events dating before and after the birth of Christ (B. C and A. D) became the symbol of this universalism. • Hegel, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant are some of the eminent persons, idealists who unified historical and philosophical thoughts.

13. Local History • This kind of hist. has potentialities and possibilities. • The research scholars take up local hist. ; get into research and come out with new findings. • This must, however, be pursued with reference to general history and to larger issues. • E. g. The French Revolution, The Freedom Struggle of India …all local hist.

14. New History • This is a post-war phenomenon. • James Harvey Robinson (1863 -1936) consciously coined the term ‘New History’ • This attempt is an attack on old traditional hist. which is considered to be irrelevant and negligent of the human experiences. • ‘New History’ gives special attention to economic, intellectual and other forces which have a bearing of social problems.

15. Total History • New History and Total History are like twins. • Both seeks to bridge the gap between historical and social studies. Thus the walls that separated history from social sciences are sought to the pulled down. • To achieve this, the liberal-minded progressive historians scrupulously relied of records, strictly dealt with the problems of forgery in them and adopted the critical method. • Both NH and TH truly laid the foundation of Structural History.

16. Structural History • Fernand Braudel, French historian propounds this concept of SH. • He recognizes structural forces such as geographical factors, economic systems and mental frame work, which are more fundamental. • It concentrates on the structure of a system and the relations between its elements, rather than on the function of those elements. • More than men and events, impersonal forces – geographical and geological – shapes the rhymes and rhythms of hist.

17. Pop-History • History became popular in the 1960 s. • With the publication of H. G. Well’s Outline of History, hist. became immensely popular. Historians started writing and revising their historical books. ‘The Human Adventure’, ‘The Story of mankind were some of the books published.

18. Subaltern History • Sub-altern = any subordinate. In hist. it is the subclass, group, caste… • This term is taken from Antonio Gramsi. Friedrich Nietzche, the German philosopher coined the word. • It is primarily a reactional hist. Hence it is called ‘a hist. of protest’. A reaction to the elitist treatment of the history of the nation’s freedom struggle. • This study concentrates on the role of the subgroups in the grass-root domine of politics.