History Terminology

Primary Source   - Period speeches, newspapers, legal documents, letters, diaries, business records, baptism and other church records, photographs, census records, military records, clothing, furniture, music, art work, literature and more.

Secondary Source  - A sourced (has footnotes/endnotes to original sources) history book or article. Daniel Sutherland's Seasons of War is a secondary source.

Historiography  - The "history of the history of..." the overall war, battles, other events, persons, etc.  In other words, how the history of a topic has changed over time.  

Biography - The history of a particular person.

Macro History or Big Man History -  The high level telling of an historical event involving the most famous men (or women) usually told as a grand narrative.

Narrative History - History told as chronological story

Theme-based History -  A telling of an event using several different themes.  Individual chapters often are about different themes.


Micro History or Local History - Maybe sometimes a history of a state, but usually a section of a state or a county or just a town.  Sutherland's Seasons of War is a micro history.

World History -  In its largest sense, world history traces macro level events on a global scale. For example, the spread of animals, plants, diseases across, or exploration of, continents.  Somewhat more restricted is Mediterranean (e.g. the Roman Empire) or Atlantic history (e.g. the Atlantic slave trade).  
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Political History - Histories of governments, laws and (usually, big name) political leaders.

Military History - Histories of military events, military leaders, and more recently, average soldiers.

Social History - Generally, social history is about ordinary people and it is often about once marginalized groups (women, blacks, Indians, the poor).   It can also address topics like farmers, sailors, pioneers, and often grass roots political movements like abolitionism and the early labor, women's suffrage, the Civil Rights movements.

Cultural History - Describes the culture of given a group or groups in an era.   Religion and the arts are two primary themes. Cultural history is often intertwined with intellectual history which describes the rise and effects (and fall?) of great ideas (e.g. the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, American pragmatism, positivism, deconstruction).
 
Environmental History - How the natural world (e.g. mountains, rivers, oceans, deserts, the weather, etc) has shaped historical events and how historical events have reshaped the natural world (i.e. tunnels, canals, bridges, atomic energy, pollution, etc)   

Women's History - (beginning c. 1980) Basically, the social history of an "ordinary" or average group of women.   

Gender History - (beginning c. 1990) gender history details of changing concepts of masculinity/manhood, femininity/womanhood, and homosexuality over time.

Comparative History - History that compares two or more historical events.