The information approach allows us to distinguish two principal stages in the his-tory of mankind, the stage of oral culture, covering the entire non-written period of his-tory, and the stage of written culture. The latter, in turn, can be divided into three periods: 1) the period of manuscript culture (from the emergence of writing to the invention of printing press); 2) the period of print culture (from the invention of printing press until the advent of the computer); 3) the period of electronic / digital / information culture, which began in the second half of the 20th century and was marked by the revolutionary changes in computer and electronic technologies and the invention of the Internet.The period of the manuscript culture is characterized by the handwritten history records or annales (annalistic tradition); handwritten texts is a subject of the source study of history. The print culture is associated with the formation of the historical science in proper sense; the works of historians are the subject of historiography. Finally, electronic / digital / informa-tion culture is correlated with an emerging academic discipline known as the “digital history”