History

History (from Greek ἱστορία, historia, meaning "inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation") is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written record are considered prehistory.

Primary Source

In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called original source or evidence) is an artifact, a document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, a recording, or other source of information that was created at the time under study. Although many primary sources remain in private hands or first hand information, others are located in archives, libraries, museums, historical societies, and special collections. These can be public or private. Some are affiliated with universities and colleges, while others are government entities. Materials relating to one area might be spread over a large number of different institutions. History as an academic discipline is based on primary sources, as evaluated by the community of scholars, who report their findings in books, articles and papers.

Secondary Source

A secondary source is a document or recording that relates or discusses information originally presented elsewhere. A secondary source contrasts with a primary source, which is an original source of the information being discussed; a primary source can be a person with direct knowledge of a situation, or a document created by such a person. However, as discussed in detail in the section below on classification, how to classify a source is not always an obvious decision.Secondary sources involve generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation of the original information. Primary and secondary are relative terms, and some sources may be classified as primary or secondary, depending on how they are used.

Herodotus

"Father of History"

A Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus in the Persian Empire (modern-day Bodrum, Turkey) and lived in the fifth century BC (c. 484–c. 425 BC). He was the first historian known to have broken from Homeric tradition to treat historical subjects as a method of investigation—specifically, by collecting his materials systematically and critically, and then arranging them into a historiographic narrative. 

The Histories is the only work which he is known to have produced, a record of his "inquiry" (or historía) on the origins of the Greco-Persian Wars, including a wealth of geographical and ethnographical information.