ABSTRACT
The word history and its derivatives, of which the American College Dictionary lists no less than nine, have a fairly wide range of more or less diverse meanings. Transhistorical and historical are the equivalents of the universal and the particular as applied to human society. Subhistorical means no more than that particular events and situations cannot yet be clearly limited in their historical location and duration even when the events and situations in question are quite obviously historically specific with the continuity and duration of their recurrence yet to be determined by future developments. The logical similarity that both true transhistorical generalizations and subhistorical generalizations about contemporary phenomena deal with open classes of events has provided a certain implicit but altogether misleading rationale for classifying sociology with the sciences and history with the humanities. Whole new fields of historical study have come into being as a result.
