Broadening History; The Use of Psychohistory in Attempt to Provide Historical Explanation

Abstract

For decades, historians have been divided and stood on different polarities of history. Half of them described history as it consists of facts and a series of scientifically proven events and some were insisting that history has a special relationship with human life that could be explained from various perspectives. Ranke emphasized the importance of preventing historians from including their prevailing theories and relying on primary sources. Meanwhile, Robinson and Annales historians were against the dominance. They proposed the use of social science and other points of view to define histories differently from what Ranke did (which mostly is dominated by political factors). This paper aims to explain historiography’s development and to introduce the psychological factor as one of the aspects of historical explanation. The research is a kind of qualitative research that uses the literature study. The research found that historiography has been developed from a single-factor style to multi-view historiography. Psychohistory is one of the rising fields to be studied.