Professional and amateur historians discover, collect, organize, and present information about past events. They discover this information through archaeological evidence, written primary sources, verbal stories or oral histories, and other archival material. In lists of historians, historians can be grouped by order of the historical period in which they were writing, which is not necessarily the same as the period in which they specialized. Chroniclers and annalists, though they are not historians in the true sense, are also frequently included.
These are approaches to history; not listed are histories of other fields, such as history of science, history of mathematics and history of philosophy.
Military History
Military history concerns warfare, strategies, battles, weapons, and the psychology of combat.
Religion History
The history of religion has been a main theme for both secular and religious historians for centuries, and continues to be taught in seminaries and academe. Leading journals include Church History, The Catholic Historical Review, and History of Religions. Topics range widely from political and cultural and artistic dimensions, to theology and liturgy.
Cultural History
Cultural history replaced social history as the dominant form in the 1980s and 1990s. It typically combines the approaches of anthropology and history to look at language, popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past knowledge, customs, and arts of a group of people. How peoples constructed their memory of the past is a major topic.
Cultural history includes the study of art in society as well is the study of images and human visual production (iconography).
Economic History
Although economic history has been well established since the late 19th century, in recent years academic studies have shifted more and more toward economics departments and away from traditional history departments.
Environmental History
Environmental history is a new field that emerged in the 1980s to look at the history of the environment, especially in the long run, and the impact of human activities upon it. It is an offshoot of the environmental movement, which was kickstarted by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in the 1960s.
World History
World history is the study of major civilizations over the last 3000 years or so. World history is primarily a teaching field, rather than a research field. It gained popularity in the United States, and other countries after the 1980s with the realization that students need a broader exposure to the world as globalization proceeds.
The World History Association publishes the Journal of World History every quarter since 1990. serves as a network of communication among practitioners of world history, with discussions among scholars, announcements, syllabi, bibliographies and book reviews.
Intelectual History
Intellectual history and the history of ideas emerged in the mid-20th century, with the focus on the intellectuals and their books on the one hand, and on the other the study of ideas as disembodied objects with a career of their own.
