Historiography as science

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Two Historiographic Roads to Nomad history
By Tom Verso, H-History-and-Theory, 30 May 2006. Causality is the point where the historiographic road forks into the ‘narrative’ and the ‘social scientific’ branches. 40 years before David Landes and Charles Tilly stipulated “the three salient characteristics of social scientific history: aggregation, theory & empiricism, and systematic comparison”, Toynbee was writing history as such.
History as science
A discussion on the H-History-and-theory list, May 2006. A rather basic question about the nature and defining characteristics of science—beyond its predictive accuracy. We may be under the burden of a late 19th-century (positivist) conception of natural science. Why history could not be just area of knowledge and/or attempt to explain the human past? Is something which is not called “science” or “scientific” any less valauble?
Ebb Tide—Social Science History
By Tom Verso, H-History-and-Theory, 8 August 2006. By refusing to accept even the possibility of social laws, generalizations or even classifications, historians (generally) have ceded the most significant social behaviors (e.g. economic, political, demographic, etc.) to the social sciences. In turn, they redefined the essence of their craft as narrative writing placing great emphasis on the unique (individuals and events) and writing style.