The Past in the Present

The study of history, in contrast to other disciplines in international studies, is part of the humanities. Economics, anthropology, geography, and political science are generally thought of as social sciences; anthropology and geography also have elements of the natural sciences. History has connections to the social sciences, many colleges and universities link history to the social sciences. The Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions of history. “The branch of knowledge that deals with past events; the formal record or study of past events, esp. human affairs.” “A written narrative constituting a continuous chronological record of important or public events”. Postmodernists emphasize the cultural mediation of historical memory; in some ways, they argue, historical narratives reveal more about the author’s beliefs and cultural milieu than history “as it really was”. Primary sources include artifacts, diaries, letters, memoirs, e-mails, autobiographies, interviews, official documents, visual images, coins, stamps, demographic statistics, economic records, and polls.

Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies · History · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Philosophy, History, and Historiography