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The Göttingen School of History was a school of thought established at the University of Göttingen in the late 18th century.
It was the original centre of the "Historical Science" ("Geschichtswissenschaft") academic discipline. The historians sought to write a universal history by combining the critical methods of Jean Mabillon with that of the philosophical historians such as Voltaire and Edward Gibbon.
The group of historians played an important role in creating a "scientific" basis for historical research, and were responsible for coining fundamental terms in scientific racism such as Blumenbach and Meiners's color terminology for race: Caucasian or white race; Mongolian or yellow race; Malayan or brown race; Ethiopian or black race; and American or red race, and Gatterer, Schlözer and Eichhorn's Biblical terminology for race: Semitic, Hamitic and Japhetic.