The British Museum , one of the largest and most important museums in the history of the world, was founded in 1753 by Sir Hans Sloane , a doctor and scientist who has collected a literary and artistic heritage in its original nucleus: the Montague House library in London , later purchased by the British state for twenty thousand pounds and opened to the public on January 15, 1759 .
In 1797 Jonh Frere he wrote to the Secretary of the Society of Antiquares of London underlining the need to go “beyond the present world”.
The university lectures, often also attended by an audience of non-university auditors, belonging to the educated city bourgeoisie, are accompanied by the most typical professional training moment of the historian:the SEMINAR , that is the periodic meeting of the teacher-researcher with a small group of students intent on examining historical sources and texts, analyzing and commenting on them in turn as part of a guided, but apparently peer-to-peer discussion .
This is the practice inaugurated by Ranke at the University of Berlin in 1825 and revived a few years later by Heinrich von Sybel at the University of Munich .
Even today, this is the basis of every serious didactic in history.
In 1836 at the Danish National Museum Christian Jurgensen Thomsen puts order in the various collections and classifies the eras in: Stone, Bronze, Iron.
In his “Guide to the Museum” translated into English in 1848 introduces the 3 Ages system , then resumed by the whole scientific community of the time.
In 1847 Jacques Boucher (flint collector) questions the Great Flood .
After the publication of the " Origin of the Species ”By Charles Darwin in 1859 , the term Prehistory is consolidated , which establishes the antiquity of man (Although the term Prehistory was coined in 1851 by Daniel Wilson ).
These are the publications “ Prehistoric Times "( 1865 ) by Lubbock which spread the term Prehistory .
In universities, the technical and scientific character of the discipline is strengthened above all which is also formalized thanks to the publication of numerous manuals of historical method (the best known of which will be l’Istorica by Droysen ). The training model (based on history, law, statistics and economics) tested in Göttingen becomes common to the great continental universities.
Universities consequently become the privileged and exclusive place for training, assessment and exercise of historical professionalism.