User:Phlsph7/Human history - Academic research

Academic research
The field of inquiry studying human history is called world history, but the two terms are also sometimes used as synonyms. While philosophers have engaged in world history for centuries, it only became an active field of academic inquiry in the late 20th century, with most earlier research focusing on the histories of individual communities and societies after the prehistoric period. This transition to a widened perspective was accompanied by questioning the assumptions of the Western-dominated outlook frequently found in earlier scholarship to arrive at a global understanding.

Like in other historical disciplines, the methodology of analyzing textual sources to construct narratives and interpretations of past events plays a central role in world history. The scope of its topic poses the unique challenge of synthesizing a coherent and comprehensive narrative spanning different cultures, regions, and time periods while taking diverse individual perspectives into account. This is also reflected in its interdisciplinary approach by integrating insights from fields such as archaeology, geology, and anthropology, which are of particular importance to discussions of human history before the invention of writing.

In order to provide an accessible overview, world historians divide the field into different periods organized around key themes, events, or developments that have shaped human societies over time. The number of periods and their time frames depend on the chosen topics, and the transitions between periods are often more fluid than static periodization schemes suggest.

A traditionally influential periodization in European scholarship distinguishes between the ancient, medieval, and modern periods organized around historical events responsible for major shifts in political, social, cultural, and economic structures to mark the transitions between the periods: first the fall of the Western Roman Empire and later the emergence of the Renaissance. Another periodization divides human history into three periods based on the way humans engage with nature to produce goods. The first transition happened with the emergence of agriculture and husbandry to replace hunting and gathering as the main means of food production. The Industrial Revolution constitutes the second transition. A further approach uses the relations between societies to divide world history into the periods of Middle Eastern dominance before 500 BCE, Eurasian cultural balance until 1500 CE, and Western dominance afterwards. The invention of writing is often used to demark prehistory from the ancient period while another approach divides early history based on the type of tool used into stone age, bronze age, and iron age. World historians focusing on religion and culture identify the Axial Age as a key turning point that laid the spiritual and philosophical foundations of many of the world's major civilizations. Some historians draw on elements from different approaches to arrive at a more nuanced periodization.