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The Historical Development of History
--Gingerisadog3025 (discuss • contribs) 18:41, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Emergence of the discipline
There are multiple debates surrounding the emergence of the discipline History, one could argue that the discipline emerged from the processes that Herodotus authored his work, The Histories, from. While there was evidence of historical records predating this period, the methods used by the historian, such as "distinguishing between more or less reliable accounts", were the first recorded time the skill of analysis and evaluation, integral concepts within the methodology of contemporary historical thought. This claim is further substantiated by the term that Munslow defines in his book, What History Is, which is essentially a discipline that utilises a narrative form of writing to challenge, analyse and recount a series of past events.

On the other hand however, some would argue that by this point the discipline had not become an actual discipline and instead just a form of narrative literature. Some would argue that the creation of contemporary historical thought only emerged from the works of Leopold Von Ranke in the 1830s through his book Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 (Histories of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514) where he argues that history should be “collected carefully, examined objectively and put together with critical rigor” ; essentially pioneering the methodology of critical historiography. Historians such as Fritz Stern argue that the creation of the discipline occurred in the "mid nineteenth century" where "history had ceased to be a branch of literature and had become an academic discipline" through the creation of academic journals such as the Historiche Zeitschrift in 1859 and the Revue Historique in 1876 who argued to approach history objectively - as Ranke did. The ‘Historiche Zeritschrift’ in particular, emphasises the significance of objectivity in the study of the discipline with its preface detailing that the “periodical should, above all, be a scientific one”.

Rather than arguing which one is more suited as the emergence of the discipline, I suggest that these two events serve as the introduction of two different concepts within historiography; the emergence of the historical method and the creation of modern historical thought.

The Paradigm Shift in Historical Approaches in the 20th Century
In 1961, E.H. Carr released What is History? whose theories were antithetical to the mainstream empiricist historiography that dominated the 19th and early 20th century. As a result, the theory of historiography in Britain, in particular, shifted towards a new equilibrium that pivoted from the preexisting epistemological certainty as delineated by Keith Windschuttle who writes how Carr's work was "one of the most influential books written about historiography, and that very few historians working in the English language since the 1960s had not read it". In response to Carr’s attack on the objectivist historical thought, G.C. Elton released the Practice of History in 1967 in defense of the Victorian style of writing which scathingly criticized how Carr's work embodied "an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it” .While one may argue that debate serves to show the prevailing tensions between the new and radical historical thought and the existing pillar of empiricism, it was one of the many examples that delineated a paradigm shift in the approaches of historical thought. R.G. Collingwood, whose works heavily influenced Carr’s book, was one of the many historians who spearheaded the emergence of relativist ideas into the conscious historical thought that appeared in the early 20th century . Carr's radical work served as just one example of how the predominant influence of empirical thought in history had already eroded. Today, historians have opted to adopt a middle-ground approach that maintains the skeletal form of appropriate analysis and evaluation but not to the extreme extent of extreme empiricism. This development that spanned for a whole century presents the idea that unlike the more quantitative disciplines, there isn't a specific event in history that could be pinpointed as a "turning point" that instantly shifted the approaches and methodology applied in history but rather a gradual development that caused a shift in the then-existing hegemony of logical positivism.