Development of History as an Academic Discipline

Abstract

History plays a vital function in human thinking, and it implores thoughts and modification, the role of material circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. History as a discipline lacks a universal definition of the term. However, elements of the field include a community of scholars, research traditions, research methods that define how data are collected and interpreted, definitions of the requirements that constitute new knowledge, and communication networks. The primary focus of historians is to conceptualise, describe, contextualise, explain, and interpret events and circumstances of the past. The research paper examined the development of History as a discipline tracing its origin from the 19th century. The development of History as an academic discipline is traceable to Germany in the late Enlightenment Era, marked out by the Enlightenment values and the aftermath of the mid-19th century when History ceased to be a branch of literature. It was decoupled from literature as historians in Germany, impressed by the gains of the natural sciences, asserted that their craft had to become a science too and established elaborate scholarship machinery. However, before these events that led to the development of social sciences in the attempt to make History an academic discipline, the inaugural Head of the Department was established in 1804. It was in the early-19th century that History professionalisation began, and in the 1850s, nineteen (19) universities offered the subject, and by 1931, the number had reached a peak of two hundred and thirty-eight (238). These professors gradually developed rules and rituals for admission. Admissions required postgraduate students to submit two doctoral theses. With the inception of a professoriate in History, a guild, a fictional society of schools developed developing rules and admission formalities. When students successfully defended both theses, it qualified them for an academic career. German historian, Leopold von Ranke, is deemed the ‘father of empirical History. Leopold von Ranke was the first to establish a historical basis, and his academic methods and teachings greatly impacted Western historiography. Dedicated to the study of philology and the translation and interpretation of texts, he has greatly influenced the development of highly influential techniques of philology and historical text criticism. Ranke was concerned with the question of universality and exploring specific temporal limits. To Ranke, the fundamental duty of History is the critical inquiry of tradition. Ranke argued that History unfolds in the separate development of individual people, peoples, and nations that collectively constitute a cultural process and reject universal principles. For Ranke, the most historically critical individual beings were states, spiritual beings, the primordial creations.

Keywords: History, Academic Discipline, Leopold von Ranke, German, African History

JEL Classification: I20, I23, I29