Bill's Chaos asked Ada Palmer:

I am thinking that modern historians tend to be more scientific in there investigations than historians have been in the past. Is history now a science?

Ada Palmer It's generally considered to be on the cusp of the humanities and social sciences depending on what kind of history someone is doing. Someone doing a deep textual analysis of what a set of letters or an epic poem tells us about the culture that created it is using methods of humanities, someone doing statistical analysis of what we learn from baptismal records & comparing them with soil chemistry samples from the village graveyard is doing science; most historians draw on both palettes of analysis combining many kinds of sources hence the cusp being appropriate. For a great example of a huge range of methods used together, including literary analysis and high-tech experiments, see Michael McCormick's, "The Origins of the European Economy."

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