Coverage of the past requires, first of all, researcher’s understanding of the essence of the historical knowledge, skills on the principles of epistemology and historical science, using necessary scientific methods, objective reconstruction of the course of events. That is, he must know the ways of research and the ways of learning the past, in other words, he must be knowledgeable about the methodology of the historical science. The modern methodology of history is characterized by diverse, sometimes opposite approaches to the study of the historical past due to, first of all, differences in historians’ worldview and their understanding of a historical reality. All this leads to the formation of a polyvariant, pluralistic, nonlinear methodology. Starting a research, a historian must understand what theoretical principles he will rely on, from which point of view he will consider events and phenomena. At the same time, each researcher has the right to choose his own methodological foundations for comprehension of historical existence, to use logical constructions, principles and methods which, in his opinion, are most optimal for solving a specific scientific problem. Investigating the development of shipbuilding in the South of Ukraine in 1945–1991, the author supports the dialectical understanding of history, believing that dialectics captures (reflects) the most characteristic features of the development. Choosing dialectics and the theory of modernization as the main philosophical approaches, the principles of objectivity, historicism, systematicity, pluralism and modern methodological tools makes it possible to solve the tasks and achieve the goal of a concrete historical research of the development of shipbuilding in the South of Ukraine in 1945–1991.