In The Houses of History, many different schools of historical thought are presented and light is shed on what exactly it means to be those different types of historians. Not all historians think the same way or approach history from the same perspective, but some similar groups of thought have converged together and formed the various types of historians that will be presented, such as empiricists, psychohistorians, oral historians, and genre historians. All of these groups can approach the same event or concept and look at it in a completely different way simply because of the way the historical approach they are used to sees things. An initial group of historians to take a closer look at are the empiricists. Empiricists have a very strictly factual and logical view of history and how to examine it. They believe that the past is “observable and verifiable” and that through adherence to three rigorous principles, the past can be represented objectively and accurately. (Green, Troup 3) The three principles mentioned above can be summarized as: meticulously examine historical evidence and verify evidence with references, ensure that the research is completely unbiased and free of bias and bias, and use an inductive or observational method of reasoning . (Green, Troup 3) Empiricists seek to find universal historical truths through objective research and sticking to the facts. The next group of historical thinkers are the psychohistorians. Sigmund Freud was the pioneer of psychoanalytic theory and psychohistory interprets history through psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic theory helps explain the protagonists of the story through their behavior and how they operate psychologically. Psychoanalytic theory was... the center of attention... in all different cultures. It's truly fascinating how there are so many different approaches to history, how so many different types of minds and schools of thought can come together to study the events of the world's past. There are so many ways to approach what happened in our past, and the previously mentioned groups of historians are only a fraction of the actual number of different ways of researching and thinking that exist regarding the study of history. History is, in some sense, always a mystery, and all historians, regardless of school, training or prejudice, seek to achieve one goal: to understand what happened before us and why, and to use that knowledge to learn how the world was shaped into the world we live in today. Works Cited Green, Anna and Kathleen Troup. The Houses of History. New York, New York: New York University Press, 1999.