History has always been my favorite subject in school and so were my history teachers. I had made it a point to gather in and out knowledge about the subject. In fact, back in my high school, I had joined Arts stream because I wanted to go deeper in History and wanted to carry my further studies in the same subject. I’m not underestimating any other subject but there is a lot to know in history. One can go as far as possible in the subject. Finally, I accomplished my aim to study the subject from its core and I got to know many interesting facts. A few of them are as follows:
History is the study of past. The subject consists of topics related to collection, discovery and presentation of facts about the past events. The scholars who study about past and write about them are called historians. Events that occurred in the past but before it were written are called prehistory.
Among the famous historians of the world are Sima Qian from China, Saint Augustine, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel from Greece, Ibn Khaldun from Arab, Lawrence Stone, Robert Fogel, etc. History has been tried to dragged into social sciences by many scholars but after many arguments by Donald Creighton, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Gerhard Ritter, John Lukas and Gertrude it has been decided that history is arts. The concept of quantitative history was introduced by French historians by associating Annales School. They were prominent in the founding of cultural history by using raw data to track the lives of typical individuals. Herbert Butterfield, George Mosse and Ernst Nolte are considered to be the intellectual historians who have argued for the importance of ideas in history. Scholars like Detlev Peukert, Ian Kershaw and Martin Broszat studied and found out how the ordinary people of the 20th century, especially of the Nazi period used to spend their everyday life. Even Karl Marx’s theories have been authenticated by examining the history from a Marxist angle by Marxist historians like C. L. R. James, E. P. Thompson, Eugene D. Genovese, Arno J. Mayer, Rodney Hilton, etc. Though, anti-Marxist explanation of history has also been done by scholars like Roland Mousnier, François Furet, J. C. D. Clark, Robert Conquest, etc. Even feminist historians did not stay behind. They argued about importance of studying about the women and their struggle in the history. Some of the feminist historians are Natalie Zemon Davis, Claudia Koonz, Gerda Lerner, Sheila Rowbotham, Lynn Hunt, Gisela Bock and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese.
History can be further sub-divided into Military history, History of religion, Social history, Cultural history, Diplomatic history, Economic history, Environmental history, World history, People's history, Historiometry, Gender history, Public history, Pseudo history, etc.
The subject has always been given importance and is still given equal importance as other subjects. A student of Arts stream has to opt for the subject as it is one of the compulsory subjects of the stream. The subject is compulsory for all the students of primary and secondary level in schools.