Recognition of human actions form videos has been an active area of research because it has applications in various domains. The results of work in this field are used in video surveillance, automatic video labeling and human-computer interaction, among others. Any advancements in this field are tied to advances in the interrelated fields of object recognition, spatio- temporal video analysis and semantic segmentation. Activity recognition is a challenging task since it faces many problems such as occlusion, view point variation, background differences and clutter and illumination variations. Scientific achievements in the field have been numerous and rapid as the applications are far reaching. In this survey, we cover the growth of the field from the earliest solutions, where handcrafted features were used, to later deep learning approaches that use millions of images and videos to learn features automatically. By this discussion, we intend to highlight the major breakthroughs and the directions the future research might take while benefiting from the state-of-the-art methods.