History

History is the academic study of the past and the way that certain institutions have changed over time, including politics, society, science, culture, military, and religion. Historians use a mix of primary sources (sources created during the time period a historian is studying) and secondary sources (sources created by other historians analyzing the past) in order to come to conclusions about the past. Historians attempt to remain impartial in their analysis of the past, attempting not to place their own values and beliefs onto the people who lived in the past. An important element of history is the concept of historiography, which is the study of how different historians have analyzed a particular historical event and how that analysis has changed over time. Oftentimes, historians will start a history analysis with an overview of how other historians have discussed the topic before them. 

The first scholar (that we know of) who applied a rigorous, scientific, perspective to studying the past was the scholar, Herodotus, who wrote a history of the Greco-Persian wars during the 5th century BC. The modern discipline of history was founded by German historian Leopold von Ranke in the mid 19th century. His work focused on primary, written, documents and mostly focused on powerful leaders (i.e. kings, emperors, etc). As a historian, Karl Marx dismissed the focus that Ranke had on powerful leaders as the drivers of history, instead, arguing that economic forces played a much larger role in the development of history.  During the 20th century (and especially during the second half of that century), historians have focused on including more different types of evidence (notably, non-written evidence such as oral history) as well as new subjects of study (such as ordinary people).