1988/01/01 by Manfred Thaller, Thaller, Manfred
Arts and Humanities · #American Sports and Literature #Electronic Data Processing #Historical Social Research #Historische Sozialforschung #Software #Statistical Analysis #Statistische Analyse
paper · doi:10.12759/hsr.13.1988.3.129-139
openalex publication_date 1988/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Historical studies as we know them today, are the result of a long de velopment. Many of the phases of this history of History could have taken place differently, without changing the outcome into something, we would not recognize any more. Indeed, like happiness, history still means very different things to different people what could scarcely be observed better anywhere else than at such a large-scale meeting of historians as the congress at Kalamazoo. Subjects and methods of historians are so diffe rent, that, indeed, some of us may find themselves much more closely related to our colleagues from other departments than to historians from other subdisciplines. What distinguishes history as an academic discipline from purely spe culative writing about the past, is its claim to present the times gone by in a way, which can be criticized not because of a particular literary taste, but because whatsoever has been said about an earlier epoch can be checked with the help of the sources quoted as the firm ground upon which a particular thesis has been built. So almost the only development of the last few hundred years, which could not have been left out, without changing historical studies into something which we would not recognize any more, is the process that let from the criticism applied by L. Valla to the donation of Constantine to the critical editions of today. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine, what medieval history would be like in the United States, if it would not be possible to have significant documents of the transatlantic past on ones' shelves, but one would have to cross the Atlantic every time, when one intends to consult a charter, the only copy still residing in the coffers of some noble household.