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The Development of History as an Academic Discipline

History became an academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century. History was often a part of literature, and information was left unrecorded. People had not defined specific study patterns, making storing historical data irrelevant. However, changes in the social and economic statuses led to redefining the need for historical recording information.
The main concern of history as a discipline is the change and the intertwinement of historical issues. History is written and defined by individual groups who may misrepresent facts and provide misinformation. For instance, wars are written by the victors and not the losers. For example, the truths of the Numberg trials limit the facts that even the allies committed crimes against humanity.
History is considered a discipline because it involves gaining knowledge of and interpreting the past. Historians are also involved in the recording of the past. History consists of the study of prehistoric and historical information.

The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources, and other evidence, to research and write history.

Herodotus, from the 5th-century BC, has been acclaimed as the "father of history", after he wrote the Histories – a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars. However, his contemporary, Thucydides is credited with having first approached history with a well-developed historical method in the History of the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides, unlike Herodotus, regarded history as the product of the choices and actions of humans, and looked at cause and effect, rather than the result of divine intervention (though Herodotus was not wholly committed to this idea himself). In his historical method, Thucydides emphasized chronology, a nominally neutral point of view, and that the human world was the result of human actions. Greek historians viewed history as cyclical, with events regularly recurring.
There was sophisticated use of historical method in ancient and medieval China. The groundwork for professional historiography in East Asia was established by court historian Sima Qian (145–90 BC), the author of the Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji) and posthumously known as the Father of Chinese historiography.
Saint Augustine of Hippo was influential in Christian and Western thought at the beginning of the medieval period. Through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, history was often studied through a sacred or religious perspective. Around 1800, German philosopher and historian Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel brought philosophy and a more secular approach in historical study.
In the preface to his book, the Muqaddimah (1377), the Arab historian and early sociologist, Ibn Khaldun, warned of 7 mistakes he thought historians committed. In this criticism, he approached the past as strange and in need of interpretation. The originality of Ibn Khaldun was to claim that the cultural difference of another age must govern the evaluation of relevant historical material, to distinguish the principles according to which it might be possible to attempt the evaluation, and to feel the need for experience, in addition to rational principles, in order to assess a culture of the past. Ibn Khaldun criticized "idle superstition and uncritical acceptance of historical data". He introduced a scientific method to the study of history, and referred to it as his "new science".  His method laid the groundwork for the observation of the role of state, communication, propaganda and systematic bias in history, and so is considered to be the "father of historiography"  or the "father of the philosophy of history".
In the West, historians developed modern methods of historiography in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and Germany. In 1851, Herbert Spencer summarized these methods:"From the successive strata of our historical deposits, they [historians] diligently gather all the highly colored fragments, pounce upon everything that is curious and sparkling and chuckle like children over their glittering acquisitions; meanwhile the rich veins of wisdom that ramify amidst this worthless debris, lie utterly neglected. Cumbrous volumes of rubbish are greedily accumulated, while those masses of rich ore, that should have been dug out, and from which golden truths might have been smelted, are left untaught and unsought." By the "rich ore" Spencer meant scientific theory of history.

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