Genealogy is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. The field of family history is broader than genealogy, and covers not just lineage but also family and community history and biography.
Michel de Nostredame, usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
Plutarch was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious Greeks and Romans, and Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was possibly named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.
Solon was an archaic Athenian statesman, lawmaker, political philosopher, and poet. He is one of the Seven Sages of Greece and credited with laying the foundations for Athenian democracy. Solon's efforts to legislate against political, economic and moral decline resulted in his constitutional reform overturning most of Draco's laws.
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under study. It serves as an original source of information about the topic. Similar definitions can be used in library science and other areas of scholarship, although different fields have somewhat different definitions.
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
The Historia Augusta is a late Roman collection of biographies, written in Latin, of the Roman emperors, their junior colleagues, designated heirs and usurpers from 117 to 284. Supposedly modeled on the similar work of Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars, it presents itself as a compilation of works by six different authors, collectively known as the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, written during the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine I and addressed to those emperors or other important personages in Ancient Rome. The collection, as extant, comprises thirty biographies, most of which contain the life of a single emperor, but some include a group of two or more, grouped together merely because these emperors were either similar or contemporaneous.
The Peterborough Chronicle is a version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey, now in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information about the history of England and of the English language after the Norman Conquest; according to philologist J. A. W. Bennett, it is the only prose history in English between the Conquest and the later 14th century.
The siege of Jerusalem during the First Crusade lasted for one month and eight days, from 7 June 1099 to 15 July 1099. It was carried out by the Crusader army, which successfully captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate and subsequently founded the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Having returned the city and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to Christian rule, the siege was the final major armed engagement of the First Crusade, which had been proclaimed in 1095 to recover the Holy Land for the Christians in the context of the Muslim conquest. A number of eyewitness accounts of the battle were recorded, with the most quoted events being derived from the anonymous Latin-language chronicle Gesta Francorum.
Feminist history refers to the re-reading of history from a woman's perspective. It is not the same as the history of feminism, which outlines the origins and evolution of the feminist movement. It also differs from women's history, which focuses on the role of women in historical events. The goal of feminist history is to explore and illuminate the female viewpoint of history through rediscovery of female writers, artists, philosophers, etc., in order to recover and demonstrate the significance of women's voices and choices in the past. Feminist History seeks to change the nature of history to include gender into all aspects of historical analysis, while also looking through a critical feminist lens. Jill Matthews states "the purpose of that change is political: to challenge the practices of the historical discipline that have belittled and oppressed women, and to create practices that allow women an autonomy and space for self-definition"
Source criticism is the process of evaluating an information source, i.e.: a document, a person, a speech, a fingerprint, a photo, an observation, or anything used in order to obtain knowledge. In relation to a given purpose, a given information source may be more or less valid, reliable or relevant. Broadly, "source criticism" is the interdisciplinary study of how information sources are evaluated for given tasks.
Recorded history or written history describes the historical events that have been recorded in a written form or other documented communication which are subsequently evaluated by historians using the historical method. For broader world history, recorded history begins with the accounts of the ancient world around the 4th millennium BC, and it coincides with the invention of writing.
Acts of the Martyrs are accounts of the suffering and death of a Christian martyr or group of martyrs. These accounts were collected and used in church liturgies from early times as attested by Saint Augustine.
The traditions of indigenous Mesoamerican literature extend back to the oldest-attested forms of early writing in the Mesoamerican region, which date from around the mid-1st millennium BCE. Many of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica are known to have been literate societies, who produced a number of Mesoamerican writing systems of varying degrees of complexity and completeness. Mesoamerican writing systems arose independently from other writing systems in the world, and their development represents one of the very few such origins in the history of writing.
History is the systematic study and documentation of the human past.
This glossary of history is a list of definitions of terms and concepts relevant to the study of history and its related fields and sub-disciplines, including both prehistory and the period of human history.
In scholarship, a secondary source is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere. A secondary source contrasts with a primary, or original, source of the information being discussed. A primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation or it may be a document created by such a person.
A diary is a written or audiovisual memorabilic record, with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. Diaries have traditionally been handwritten but are now also often digital. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, thoughts, and/or feelings, excluding comments on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone who keeps a diary is known as a diarist. Diaries undertaken for institutional purposes play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including government records, business ledgers, and military records. In British English, the word may also denote a preprinted journal format.
Historians and histories of the Crusades identifies the sets of histories and their authors concerning the Crusades that were conducted from 1095 through the 16th century. Reflecting what Crusader historians have typically considered, works written as early as the 4th century may also be relevant, particularly in the history of the Holy Land and Christian pilgrimages. This discussion is divided into the following eight parts:
