Is History a Science?

To begin with, what is history defined as? History can be defined in two ways: first being the study of past events, particularly on human affairs and the second being whole series of past events connected with a particular person or thing. Now what is science defined as? It is defined as the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observations and experiment. Based on these definitions one might think that there is a common element in both. If science is known through observation and experiment, so wouldn't history be a subset of science? To most it might make sense, but in my personal opinion I believe that history is not a science.

When scientist conduct their research, they are guided by the laws of science and scientific methods. Yes, these methods and laws have come to be improved several times such as the theory of Dark matter and the Universe but nothing has significantly changed. Historians contrarily are constantly dealing with lacking information and this becomes an increasing problem as time progresses and as more raw material is lost, unable to be supporting evidence. Even if these materials or sources are found they are most certainly interpreted differently by different historians meaning the outcome of the written history is always unreliable to a certain extent as each can possibly take opposing sides.  This entails that there is no clear historical method that will result the same answer every time while in science there is the scientific method that will most certainly result in the same conclusion time after time. This I believe is one of the most major indicators that history is not a science but more of storytelling. However it is to be noted that historians are not to be taken as storytellers but they can only go a certain extent to prove their conclusions based on these varying, incomplete sources. Much like history, I believe the opinion of history being science is a matter of personal interpretation but in my opinion, as I have outlined above, I believe that history is not a science.