HISTORY. The word "history" is used in two senses. It may mean either the record of events or events themselves. Origi nally limited to inquiry and statement, it was only in compara tively modern times that the meaning of the word was extended to include the phenomena which form or might form their sub ject. It was perhaps by a somewhat careless transference of ideas that this extension was brought about. Now indeed it is the corn moner meaning. We speak of the "history of England" without reference to any literary narrative. We term kings and statesmen the "makers of history," and sometimes say that the historian only records the history which they make. History in this con nection is obviously not the record, but the thing to be recorded. History in the wider sense is all that has happened, not merely all the phenomena of human life, but those of the natural world as well. It includes everything that undergoes change; and as modern science has shown that there is nothing absolutely static, therefore the whole universe, and every part of it, has its history. This idea of universal activity has in a sense made physics itself a branch of history. It is the same with the other sciences— especially the biological division, where the doctrine of evolution has induced an attitude of mind which is distinctly historical.
But the tendency to look at things historically is not merely the attitude of men of science. Our outlook upon life differs in just this particular from that of preceding ages. We recognize the unstable nature of our whole social fabric, and are therefore more and more capable of transforming it. In short, the historical spirit of the age has invaded every field. The world-picture pre sented in the Encyclopedia Britannica is that of a dynamic uni verse, of phenomena in process of ceaseless change. Owing to this insistent change all things which happen, or seem to happen, are history in the broader sense of the word. The Encyclopedia Britannica itself is a history of them in the stricter sense—the description and record of this universal process. This narrower meaning is the subject of the rest of this article.
The earliest prose origins of history are the inscriptions. Their inadequacy is evident from two standpoints. Their permanence depends not upon their importance, but upon the durability of the substance on which they are inscribed. Sealed to all but those who know how to read them, they lie forgotten for centuries while oral tradition flourishes—being within the reach of every man. Next to the inscriptions (sometimes identical with them) are the early chronicles frequently preserved in temples. These were of various kinds : simple religious annals, votive tablets recording miracles accomplished at a shrine, lists of priests and priestesses, accounts of benefactions, of prodigies and portents. In some cases, as in Rome, the pontiffs kept a kind of register, not merely of religious history, but of important political events as well. Down to the time of the Gracchi (131 B.C.) the Pontifex Maximus inscribed the year's events upon annual tablets of wood which were preserved in the Regia, the official residence of the pontiff in the Forum. These pontifical "annals" thus came to be a sort of civic history.
The first historians were the logographi of Ionian cities ; men who carried their inquiry (/nstorie) beyond both written record and oral tradition to a study of the world around them. Their "saying" (logos) was gathered mostly from contemporaries, and upon the basis of a widened experience they became critics of their traditions. They were the forerunners of the "father of history," Herodotus (q.v.). It is easy for the student now to show the inadequacy of his sources, yet the work of Herodotus remains a scientific achievement as remarkable for its approximation to truth as for the vastness of its scope. It was his chief glory to have joined to this scientific spirit an artistic sense which enabled him to cast the material into the truest literary form. In Thu cydides a higher art than that of Herodotus was combined with a higher science. He scorned the story-teller "who seeks to please the ear rather than to speak the truth," and yet his rhetoric is the culmination of Greek historical prose. He withdrew from vulgar applause, conscious that his narrative would be considered "dis appointing to the ear," yet he recast the materials out of which he constructed it in order to lift that narrative into the realm of pure literature. Speeches, letters and documents are re-worded to be in tone with the rest of the story. It was his art, in fact, which really created the Peloponnesian war out of its separate parts. And yet this art was merely the language of a scientist. The "laborious task" of which he speaks is that of consulting all possible evidence and weighing conflicting accounts. It is this which makes his rhetoric worth while, "an everlasting possession, not a prize competition which is heard and forgotten." From the sublimity of Thucydides and Xenophon's straightfor ward story, history passed with Theopompus and Ephorus into the field of rhetoric. A revival of the scientific instinct of investi gation is discernible in Timaeus the Sicilian, at the end of the 4th century; but his attack upon his predecessors was the text of a more crushing attack upon himself by Polybius, who declares him lacking in critical insight and biased by passion. Polybius' com ments upon Timaeus reach the dignity of a treatise upon history. He protests against its use for controversial pamphlets which dis tort the truth. "Directly a man assumes the moral attitude of an historian he ought to forget all considerations, such as love of one's friends, hatred of one's enemies. . . . He must sometimes praise enemies and blame friends. For, as a living creature is rendered useless if deprived of its eyes, so, if you take truth from History, what is left but an improfitable tale" (bk. xii. 14). These are the words of a Ranke. Unfortunately Polybius, like most modern scientific historians, was no artist. His style is the very opposite to that of Isocrates and the rhetoricians. It is often only clear in the light of inscriptions, so closely does it keep to the sources. The style found no imitator; history passed from Greece to Rome in the guise of rhetoric. In Dionysius of Hancarnassus the rhetoric was combined with an extensive study of the sources; but the influence of the Greek rhetoricians upon Roman prose was deplorable from the standpoint of science. Cicero, although he said that the duty of the historian is to conceal nothing true, to say nothing false, would in practice have written the kind of history that Polybius denounced. History for him is the mine from which to draw argument in oratory and example in educa tion. It is not the subject of a scientific curiosity.
History-writing in Rome (except for the Greek writers resident there) was until the first half of the 1st century B.C. in the form of annals. Then came rhetorical ornamentation—and the Cicero nian era. The first Roman historian who rose to the conception of a science and art combined was Sallust, the student of Thu cydides. The Augustan age produced in Livy a great popular historian and natural artist and a trained rhetorician (in the speeches). From Livy to Tacitus the gulf is greater than from Herodotus to Thucydides. Tacitus is at least a consummate ar tist. His style ranges from the brilliancy of his youth to the stern ness and sombre gravity of age, passing almost to poetic expres sion in its epigrammatic terseness. Yet in spite of his searching study of authorities, his keen judgment of men, and his perception of underlying principles of moral law, his view was warped by the heat of faction, which glows beneath his external objectivity. After him Roman history-writing speedily degenerated. Sueto nius' Lives of the Caesars is but a superior kind of journalism. But his gossip of the court became the model for historians, whose works, now lost, furnish the main source for the Historia Augusta. The importance to us of this uncritical collection of biographies is sufficient comment on the decline of history-writing in the lat ter empire. Finally, from the 4th century the epitomes of Eutro pius and Festus served to satisfy the lessening curiosity in the past and became the handbooks for the middle ages. The single figure of Ammianus Marcellinus stands out of this age like a belated disciple of Tacitus. But the world was changing from antique to Christian ideals just as he was writing, and with him we leave this outline of ancient history.
Early Christian History.—The 4th and 5th centuries saw a great revolution in the history of history. The story of the pagan past slipped out of mind, and in its place was set, by the genius of Eusebius, the story of the world force which had super seded it, Christianity, and of that small fraction of antiquity from which it sprang—the Jews. Christianity from the first had forced thinking men to reconstruct their philosophy of history, but it was only after the Church's triumph that its point of view became dominant in historiography. Three centuries more passed before the pagan models were quite lost to sight. But from the 7th century to the i7th (from Isidore of Seville and the English Bede for a thousand years) mankind was to look back along the line of Jewish priests and kings to the Creation. Egypt was of interest only as it came into Israelite history, Babylon and Nin eveh were to illustrate the judgments of Yahweh, Tyre and Sidon to reflect the glory of Solomon.
Christian history begins with the triumph of the Church. With Eusebius of Caesarea the apologetic pamphlets of the age of per secutions gave way to a calm review of three centuries of Chris tian progress. Eusebius' biography of Constantine shows what distortion of fact the father of church history permitted himself, but the ecclesiastical history was fortunately written for those who wanted to know what really happened, and remains to-day an invaluable repository of Christian antiquities. With the con tinuations of Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, and the Latin manual which Cassiodorus had woven from them (the Historia tripartita), it formed the body of church history during all the middle ages. An even greater influence, however, was exercised by Eusebius' Chronica. Through Jerome's translation and addi tions, the scheme of this world's chronology became the basis for all mediaeval world chronicles. It settled until our own day the succession of years from the Creation to the birth of Christ, fitting the Old Testament story into that of ancient history. Henceforth the Jewish past (that one path back to the beginning of the world) was marked out by the absolute laws of mathematics and reve lation.
From the first, Christianity had a philosophy of history. Its earliest apologists sought to show how the world had followed a divine plan in its long preparation for the life of Christ. From this central fact of all history, mankind should continue through war and suffering until the divine plan was completed at the judg ment day. This idea received its classic statement in St. Augus tine's City of God. The terrestrial city, whose eternity had been the theme of pagan history, had just fallen before Alaric's Goths. Augustine's explanation of its fall passes in review. not only the calamities of Roman history (combined with a pathetic percep tion of its greatness) but carries the survey back to the origin of evil at the Creation. The Roman Empire (the last general form of the earthly city) must at last yield to the heavenly. This is the main thread of Augustine's philosophy of history. The his torical demonstration of its truth was left by Augustine for his disciple, Paulus Orosius (q.v.), whose Seven Books of Histories against tile Pagans, written as a supplement to the City of God, was the first attempt at a Christian "World History." The commonest form of mediaeval historical writing was the chronicle. Utterly lacking in perspective and dominated by the idea of the miraculous, they are for the most part a record of the trivial or the marvellous. Individual historians sometimes recount the story of their own times with sober judgment, but seldom know how to test their sources when dealing with the past. Con tradictions are often copied down without the writer noticing them, and since the middle ages forged and falsified so many doc uments (monasteries, towns, and corporations gaining privileges or titles of possession by the bold use of them) the narrative of mediaeval writers cannot be relied upon unless we can verify it by collateral evidence. Some historians, like Otto of Freising, Guibert of Nogent, or Bernard Gui, would have been scientific if they had had our appliances for comparison. But even men like Roger Bacon, who deplored the inaccuracy of texts, had worked out no general method to apply in their restoration. Toward the close of the middle ages the vernacular literatures were adorned with Villani's and Froissart's chronicles. But the merit of both lies in their journalistic qualities of contemporary narrative. Neither was a history in the truest sense.
The Renaissance marked the first great gain in the historic sense, in the efforts of the humanists to realize the spirit of the antique world. They did not altogether succeed ; antiquity to them meant largely Plato and Cicero. Their interests were lit erary, and the un-Ciceronian centuries were generally ignored. Those in which the foundations o'' modern Europe were laid, which produced parliaments, cathedrals, cities, Dante and Chau cer, were grouped alike on one dismal level and at a later date christened the middle ages. History became the servant to liter ature, an adjunct to the classics. But if the literary side of hu manism has been a barrier to the progress of scientific history, the discovery and elucidation of texts first made that progress pos sible. Laurentius Valla's brilliant attack on the "Donation of Constantine" (144o) and Ulrich von Hutten's rehabilitation of Henry IV. from monkish tales mark the rise of the new science. For a while it remained but a phase of humanism. It was north of the Alps that it parted company with the grammarians. Clas sical antiquity was an Italian past, the German scholars turned back to the sources of their national history. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had discovered Otto of Freising and Jordanes. Maximilian I. encouraged the search for manuscripts, and Vienna became a great humanistic centre. Conrad Celtes left his Germania illustrata unfinished, but he had found the works of Hroswitha. Conrad Peutinger gathered all sorts of Chronicles in his room in Vienna, publishing among them those of Greg ory of Tours. This national movement of the 15th century was not paralleled in France or England, where the classical human ities reigned. The Reformation meanwhile gave another turn to the work of German scholars.
The movement back to the sources in Germany until the Thirty Years' War was a notable one. Collections were made by Simon Schard ( 1535-73 ) , Johannes Pistorius (1576-16o8), Marquard Freher (1565-1614), Melchior Goldast (1576-1635), and others. After the war Leibnitz began a new epoch, both by his philosophy, with its law of continuity in phenomena, and by his systematic attempt to collect sources through an association (167o). His plan to have documents printed as they were, instead of "cor recting" them, was a notable advance. But from Leibnitz until the 19th century German national historiography made little pro gress—although church historians like Mosheim and Neander stand out among the greatest historians of all time.
France had not paralleled the activity of Maximilian's Renais sance historians. The father of modern French history, or at least of historical research, was Andre Duchesne (1584-1640), whose splendid collections of sources are still in use. Jean Bodin wrote the first treatise on scientific history (Methodus ad facilem historiaruyn cognitionem, 1566), but he did not apply his own principles of criticism ; and it was left for the Benedictine monks of the Congregation of St. Maur to establish definitely the new science. The place of this school in the history of history is absolutely without a parallel. When Luc d'Achery turned from exegetics to patristics and the lives of the saints, as a sort of Christian humanist, he led the way to that vast work of collection and comparison of texts which developed through Mabillon, Montfaucon, Ruinart, Martene, Bouquet, and their associates, into the indispensable implements of modern historians. Here, as in the Reformation, controversy called out the richest product. Jean Mabillon's treatise, De re diplomatica (1681), was due to the criticisms of that group of Belgian Jesuits whose Acta Sanc torum quotquot toto orbe coluntur (1643, etc., see BOLLANDISTS) was destined to grow into the greatest repository of legend and biography the world has seen. In reply to D. Papebroch's crit icisms of the chronicle of St. Denis, Mabillon prepared this man ual for the testing of mediaeval documents. Its canons are the basis, indeed, almost the whole, of the science of diplomatic (q.v.), the touchstone of truth for mediaeval research. Hence forth even the mediocre scholar had a body of technical rules by which to sort out the vast mass of apocrypha in mediaeval documentary sources. Scientific history depends upon imple ments. Without manuals, dictionaries, and easy access to texts, we should go as far astray as any mediaeval chronicler. The France of the Maurists supplied the most essential of these instru ments. The great "glossary" of Du Cange is still in enlarged edi tions the indispensable encyclopaedia of the middle ages. Chro nology and palaeography were placed on a new footing by Dom Bernard de Montfaucon's Palaeographia graeca (1708), the mon umental Art de verifier les dates (3rd ed., 1818-31, in 38 vols.) and the Nouveau Traite de diplomatique (1750-65) of Dom Tassin and Dom Toustain. The collections of texts which the Maurists published are too many and too vast to be enumerated here (see C. Langlois, Manuel de bibliographie historique, pp. 293 seq. Dom Bouquet's Historiens de la Gaule et de la France—the national repertory for French historians—is but one of a dozen tasks of similar magnitude. During the 18th century this deep under-work of scientific history continued to advance, though for the most part unseen by the brilliant writers whose untrust worthy generalities passed for history in the salons of the old regime. Interrupted by the Revolution, it revived in the 19th century, and the roll of honour of the French Ecole des Chartes has almost rivalled that of St. Germain-des-Pres.
The father of critical history in Italy was L. A. Muratori (1672-175o), the Italian counterpart of Leibnitz. His vast collec tion of sources (Rerum Italicarum scriptores), prepared amid every discouragement, remains to-day the national monument of Italian history; and it is but one of his collections. His output is perhaps the greatest of any isolated worker in the whole history of historiography. The same haste, but much less care, marked the work of J. D. Mansi (d. 1769), the compiler of the fullest collection of the Councils. Spain, stifled by the Inquisition, pro duced no national collection of sources during the 17th and 18th centuries, although Nicolas Antonio (d. 1684) produced a national literary history of the first rank.
England in the 15th century kept pace with Continental his toriography. Henry VIII.'s chaplain, John Leland, is the father of English antiquaries. Three of the most precious collections of mediaeval manuscripts still in existence were then begun by Thomas Bodley (the Bodleian, Oxford), Archbishop Matthew Parker (Corpus Christi, Cambridge), and Robert Cotton (the Cottonian collection, British Museum). In Elizabeth's reign a serious effort was made to arrange the national records, but until the end of the 18th century they were scattered in not less than 15 repositories. In the 17th and 18th centuries English scholar ship was enriched by such monuments of research as William Dugdale's Monasticon, Thomas Madox's History of the Ex chequer, Wilkins's Concilia, and Thomas Rymer's Foedera. But these works, important as they were, gave but little idea of the wealth of historical sources which the 19th century was to reveal in England.
Every science which deals with human phenomena is in a way an implement in this great factory system, in which the past is welded together again. But the real auxiliary sciences to history are those which deal with those traces of the past that still exist, the science of language (philology), of writing (palaeography), of documents (diplomatic), of seals (sphragistics), of coins (numismatics), of weights and measures, and archaeology in the widest sense of the word. These sciences underlie the whole development of scientific history. Dictionaries and manuals are the instruments of this industrial revolution. Without them the literary remains of the race would still be as useless as Egyptian inscriptions to the fellaheen. Archaeology itself remained but a minor branch of art until the machinery was perfected which enabled it to classify and interpret the remains of the "prehis toric" age.
This is the most remarkable chapter in the whole history of history—the recovery of that past which had already been lost when our literary history began. The old "providential" scheme of history disintegrates before a new interest in the "gentile" nations to whose high culture Hebrew sources bore unwilling testimony. Biblical criticism is a part of the historic process. The Jewish texts, once the infallible basis of history, are now tested by the libraries of Babylon, from which they were partly drawn, and Hebrew history sinks into its proper place in the wide horizon of antiquity. The finding of the Rosetta stone left us no longer dependent upon Greek, Latin, or Hebrew sources, and now 5o centuries of Egyptian history lie before us. The scientific historian of antiquity works on the hills of Crete, rather than in the quiet of a library with the classics spread out before him. There he can reconstruct the splendour of that Minoan age to which Homeric poems look back, as the Germanic epics looked back to Rome or Verona. His discoveries, co-ordinated and ar ranged in vast corpora inscriptionum, stand now alongside Herod otus or Livy, furnishing a basis for their criticism.
The immense increase in available sources, archaeological and literary, has remade historical criticism. Ranke's application of the principles of "higher criticism" to works written since the in vention of printing (Kritik neuerer Geschichtsschreiber) was an epoch-making challenge of narrative sources. Now they are every where checked by contemporary evidence, and a clearer sense of what constitutes a primary source has discredited much of what had been currently accepted as true. This is true not only of ancient history, where last year's book may be a thousand years out of date, but of the whole field. Hardly an "old master" re mains an authoritative book of reference. Old landmarks drop out of sight—e.g., the fall of the Western Empire in 476, the coming of the Greeks to Italy in 1450, dates which once enclosed the middle ages. The perspective changes—the Renaissance grows less and the middle ages more ; the Protestant Revolution be comes a complex of economics and politics and religion ; the French Revolution a vast social reform in which the Terror was an incident: The result has been a complete transformation of history since the middle of the 1 gth century.
In the middle of the century two men sought to incorporate in their philosophy the physical basis which Hegel had ignored in his spiritism—recognizing that life is conditioned by an en vironment and not an abstraction for metaphysics. H. T. Buckle, in his History of Civilization in England (1857), was the first to work out the influences of the material world upon history, de veloping through a wealth of illustration the importance of food, soil, and the general aspect of nature upon the formation of society. Buckle did not, as is generally believed, make these three factors dominate all history. He distinctly stated that "the advance of European civilization is characterized by a diminish ing influence of physical laws and an increasing influence of mental laws," and "the measure of civilization is the triumph of mind over external agents." Yet his challenge, not only to the theologian, but also to those "historians whose indolence of thought" or "natural incapacity" prevented them from attempt ing more than the annalistic record of events, called out a storm of protest from almost every side. Meanwhile the economists had themselves taken up the problem, and it was from them that the historians of to-day have learned it. Ten years before Buckle published his history, Karl Marx had already formulated the "materialist conception of history." Accepting with reservation Feuerbach's attack on the Hegelian "absolute idea," based on materialistic grounds (Der Mensche ist, was er isst), Marx was led to the conclusion that the evolution of society is conditioned by the economic circumstances of its existence. From this he went on to socialism, which bases its militant philosophy upon this interpretation of history. But the truth or falseness of Socialism does not affect the theory of history. In 1845 Marx wrote of the Young-Hegelians that to separate history from natural science and industry was like separating the soul from the body, and "finding the birthplace of history, not in the gross material production on earth, but in the misty cloud formation of heaven" (Die heilige Familie, p. 238). In his Misere de la phil osophic (1847) he lays down the principle that social relation ships largely depend upon modes of production, and therefore the principles, ideas, and categories which are thus evolved are no more eternal than the relations they express, but are historical and transitory products. In the famous Manifesto of the Com munist Party (1848) the theory was applied to show how the industrial revolution had replaced feudal with modern conditions. But it had little vogue, except among Socialists, until the third volume of Das Kapital was published in 1894, when its impor tance was borne in upon Continental scholars. Since then the controversy has been almost as heated as in the days of the Reformation. It is an exaggeration of the theory which makes it an explanation of all human life, but the whole science of dynamic sociology rests upon the postulate of Marx.
The content of history always reflects the interests of the age in which it is written. Modern historians began with politics; but as the complex nature of society became more evident in the age of democracy they gradually realized that no one branch of history is more than a single glimpse at a vast complex of phenomena, most of which lie for ever beyond our ken.
This expansion of interest has intensified specialization. Each historian chooses his own epoch or century and his own subject, and spends his life mastering such traces of it as he can find. His work there enables him to judge of the methods of his fellows, but his own remains restricted by the very wealth of material which has been accumulated on the single subject before him. Thus the great enterprises of to-day are co-operative—the Cambridge Modern History, Lavisse and Rambaud's Histoire generale, Lavisse's Histoire de France, Hunt and Poole's Political History of England, and Oncken's Allgemeine Geschichte in Einzeldarstellungen. But even these vast sets cover but the merest fraction of their subjects. This limitation of the professed historian is made up for by the growingly historical treatment of all the sciences and arts. Indeed, for a definition of that limitless subject which includes all the phenomena that stand the stress. of change, one might adapt a famous epitaph—si leistoriam requiris, circumspice.
For ancient history in general an old but important manual is that of C. Wachsmuth, Einleitung in das Studium der alten Geschichte (1895) . For mediaeval historiography such works as W. Watten bach's Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter (6th ed., 1893 94) or A. Molinier's Les sources de l'histoire de France (19o1-06), are adequate in their respective fields. No similar survey exists of English mediaeval historians. For the modern field E. Fueter's Geschichte der neueren Historiographic (1911 ; Fr. ed., 1914) covers the ground from Machiaevelli to about 187o, while such works as G. P. Gooch's History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913), or A. Guilland's Modern Germany and Her Historians (1915 ; Fr. ed., x900), deal with important topics. For French history the series Les sources de l'histoire de France, referred to above, is continued in the modern field by H. Hauser, and E. Bourgeois (1906-24) .
For a philosophical survey see R. Flint's History of the Philosophy History, Historical Philosophy in France and French Belgium and witzerland (1894) , which is preceded by a short general sketch. See also B. Croce's Theory and History of Historiography (trans., 1921), and F. J. Teggart, The Theory of History (1925). For more specific references see various historical articles. The output of historical literature is enormous, and the only way to follow it critically is by the aid of the great historical reviews, especially the English Historical Review, the American Historical Review, La Revue historique, and the most comprehensive and authoritative survey of all historical literature in the Jahresberichte der Geschichtswissenschaf t, which has become an international undertaking in connection with the Inter national Congress of Historical Sciences. (J. T. S.)