Probably the closest idea to what you're saying is seeing history as a true science in which certain laws of historical progression can be discovered that are similar to the laws governing the physical world. As you can see in chewylettuce's answer, Hegel and Marx roughly fit this conception - the Hegelian dialectic or Marx's projected progression of history are the products of certain 'laws' of historical progression that don't depend on the specific events of the time.

This is broadly what we call 'Positivism', the idea of the French sociologist August Comte from the 19th century that society operates according to general laws that can be discovered by empirical evidence and a systematic review of everything - 'sociology'. This is then closely allied to the idea of social progress as based on such scientific discoveries.

The idea was popular in much of the 19th century and as chewylettuce says, still has resonance in general views of history that see a march to progress - such as 'Whiggish' history or Francis Fukuyama's possible 'End of History' with universal Western liberal democracy. These are what the late 20th-century postmodernist Jean-Francois Lyotard called 'metanarratives' which narrate history through a single idea or endpoint / 'teleological history'. His response was that we should concentrate on small local narratives, that disrupt such grand narratives. That doesn't mean that all history that does that is 'postmodern' (which has a much larger and more controversial meaning) - it's 'non-teleological'.

However this is slightly complicated by the other possible interpretation of seeing history as the 'truth' which is the much less ambitious idea that when we do history, we are seeking empirical evidence of what actually happened - not to use it as a basis of a grand theory, just to say that this happened, at this time, and in this way. This is the whole idea of doing source-based history, but has its own opponents, who are confusingly also postmodernists.

That is generally seen to begin with Leopold von Ranke, the 19th century German political historian. Ranke actually strongly opposed the idea of laws of historical progress, arguing that each period had its own characteristics and leading tendencies which could be discovered by examination of the sources - so it's not been a straightforward progression of one idea of history 'back then' and another now, actually during the 19th century these ideas were competing. That idea has then set the basis for almost the entirety of the modern historical profession.

However that idea eventually came in for criticism itself. R.G Collingwood opposed that kind of empiricism with 'Idealism', arguing that since empirical evidence of a similar type to scientific experimentation was impossible to obtain, we should try and recreate the internal elements of a historical figure's thinking (in the posthumous 1946 'The Idea of History'). Other major criticisms include E.H Carr who in 1961 wrote 'What is History?' noting that the vast amount of evidence available means that the historian inevitably chooses facts to omit, arguing historians generally choose their facts to fit their narrative. All our histories are in fact comments on our present time.

This has been taken further by current postmodernists who argue that the narratives historians impose on history are essentially false - there is no such thing as empirical evidence, only written sources which are themselves only texts, with no real connection to an empirical event (Hayden White is the most famous theorist on this) and history is ultimately much more similar to literature.

So as a brief summary you have:

• Positivist views of history which see history as governed by true laws of progression discovered by evidence (Comte, Hegel, Marx)

• Empiricist based views of history which see true events but not laws of progression (Ranke, the majority of historical writing)

• Idealist views of history, which reject empiricism as the basis and instead strive for imaginative recollection of the internal thoughts of historical figures (R.G Collingwood)

• Postmodernism, which rejects both grand narratives and even the idea of empirical evidence which tells us about the past (Lyotard, White - though really the movement is so vague that its hard to group people)

None of these move in straightforward progressions and before that you have different conceptions of history (religious truth is a major influence before all these relatively secular thinkers). Nowadays the majority of professional historians reject grand narratives of progress and of greater 'truths' in historical writing but still embrace small-scale truths as discovered by source based historical research (it's difficult to see how or why we would write history without this). However ideas of an inevitable 'progress' in history are remarkably strong, even when only vaguely defined and almost any popular history book will have traces of it. The major accepted labels are that we should avoid 'teleological' history and do source-based history but beyond that, there's a bewildering variety of approaches.

To refine this question, you may want to specify what you mean by "back then," because "back then" includes some wildly different epistemes, all of which have their own particular way of looking at the past.

I'll offer one such way of reading history -- that of Hegel and a positivistic approach to history (that is to say, a 19th century European reading of history). If you need to know anything about Hegel, it is the Hegelian dialectic -- which says that, throughout crucial points of history there is thesis, antithesis, and consensus. For example, between 1640-1660, the British went from a monarchy (thesis), to a parliamentary government (antithesis), to a constitutional monarchy (synthesis).

Positivism posits that not only does synthesis indicate a progression, but that this progression is necessary and BETTER than what preceded it. So, history is a series of necessary progressions leading to a more perfect, ideal system (in fact, Hegel felt that his generation had achieved that state, and that they were living at the END of history). Marx and Darwin accept this interpretation of history, too. In Marx, capitalism is just shown as a progression from feudalism which will ultimately lead to communism. He felt communism was purely inevitable and that those who disagreed with it were simply at the losing side of history. Similarly, Darwin argues that evolution "survival of the fittest" only leads to BETTER models of species.

In some sense, this does not disagree with a popular understanding of history. Many in our time believe that things keep getting better and better (I've heard many engineers and scientists argue as such). Postcolonialism, for example, offers a more pluralistic look at history, while others, such as Foucault, talk about history as an interconnected web of stimuli and response that don't necessarily lead to anything better, but to more stimuli and response.

Read the "Muqaddimah" by Ibn Khaldun, written in 1377. His historical methods provided the basic framework for modern history, as he was the first to demand a rigorous, methodological way of study in opposition to the old legend-telling of previous books. He even says this:

Little effort is being made to get at the truth. The critical eye, as a rule, is not sharp. Errors and unfounded assump­tions are closely allied and familiar elements in historical in­formation. Blind trust in tradition is an inherited trait in human beings. Occupation with the (scholarly) disciplines on the part of those who have no right is widespread. But the pasture of stupidity is unwholesome for mankind. No one can stand up against the authority of truth, and the evil of falsehood is to be fought with enlightening speculation. The reporter merely dictates and passes on (the material). It takes critical insight to sort out the hidden truth; it takes knowledge to lay truth bare and polish it so that critical in­sight may be applied to it.

Source: The Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun