A term of some ambiguity, meaning as it does both the past and the study of the past. This unfortunate conjunction has occasioned a good deal of confusion, historically. As a disciplinary formation within the modern landscape of research and teaching in institutions of post-secondary learning, history is sometimes classified with the social sciences and at other times with the HUMANITIES. This taxonomic ambivalence reflects multiple genealogies for the enterprise as a whole, which are themselves reflected in divergences of practice among professional historians: on the one hand, a preponderance of such practitioners understand their primary OBJECTS to be persons (their collective and individual experiences, conditions, and activities); on the other hand, a smaller but still significant community prefer to focus their energies on larger structures or dynamics (e.g., the state, the economy). The latter tend to do work that is more easily assimilable to the enterprises of economists and political scientists; the former tend to do work that feels more germane to students of literature and culture. That said, there is, in practice, a fair bit of overlap (and some back-and-forth) across these domains, and even those scholars working at the extreme antipodal verges of this distribution can recognize each other as historians. The explanation for this has less to do with a shared theory of historical knowledge as such, or a shared account of the proper object of historical inquiry, or even with a shared conception of the proper BIBLIOGRAPHY for training historians, and more to do, it would seem, with a pervasive and robustly conserved notion of what historical labor looks like (see INTELLECTUAL LABOR). Which is to say, historians recognize what counts as the work of a historian. Essential to this shared formation: the archive. Broadly speaking, and with almost no exceptions, historians, to be historians, must spend some time recovering stuff about the past from collations of documentary source material that hails from the past-period in question. The exceptions here (e.g., classical historians) tend to prove the rule, in that such marginal cases (historians of the classical period tend not to have access to archives, and must work from established texts) tend to be found with much reduced frequency within history departments themselves (a classical historian will be more likely found in a department of classics). The same dynamic can be identified among “ethnohistorians” and those historically concerned with non-literate peoples: neither group is well represented in actual departments of history. When it comes to distribution requirements for undergraduates, a number of colleges and universities require some exposure to “Historical Analysis” or the equivalent. Interestingly, the determination of which undergraduate courses ought to be designated as fulfilling such requirements can become a bone of contention for scholars with appointments in history departments, in that university deans and administrators (not to mention students and parents) frequently believe that many courses in many departments review a great deal of material from the past, and therefore merit to be designated as bearing history-credit for bureaucratic purposes. Professional historians will often dissent from this view, and a close, participatory ethnography of their community discussions on this apparently marginal matter would offer rich (if oblique) insight into just what historians think history actually is at any given time. Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this keyword definition, but it is notable (if confusing, given what has been said above) that work with archival sources is seldom, in fact, a component of undergraduate courses in history. Be that as it may, there is a broader fact about disciplinary history that merits particular attention in the context of reflections on inter-, trans-, and anti-disciplinarity; to wit, historians tend not only to adhere to (and practice) an extremely exacting and austere form of historicism (meaning here, that orientation to the stuff of the world that privileges the temporal address—or “place in time”—of a given person, idea, phenomenon, artifact, etc. over all other features), but also to act, within learned settings, as something like the arbiters or even the police-enforcers of historicism. In much the same way that philosophers might be accused of perpetually endeavoring to extend their commitment to ubiquitous non-contradiction into and even under adjacent university activities (despite conceptual contradiction being effectively constitutive of human endeavor as such), historians can be thought of as sensing themselves in possession of a comparably ineluctable and primary intellectual enterprise: putting things where they belong in time. And this despite there being a good deal of philosophical evidence that time itself does not even exist (as well as the broad anecdotal evidence that human beings live only in the present). It is not merely that historians tend to consider violations of historicist thinking “wrong”; it is also that they tend to consider considerations of things other than historicist thinking substantially misguided. Interdisciplinary encounters with historians therefore often involve the historian pointing out that what the non-historical colleague is doing should be historicized (see CROSS-DISCIPLINARY STERILITY). In this way, disciplinary history seems particularly subject to “mission creep” when permitted cosmopolitan peregrinations within a university setting. In view of what can be descried as the fundamental limitations of historicism as an activity of mind, this kudzu-like characteristic of professional historical thought merits close scrutiny.