Historiography is the study of the way history is and has been written. In a broad sense, historiography refers to the methodology and practices of writing history. In a more specific sense, it can refer to writing about rather than of history. As a meta-level analysis of descriptions of the past, this latter conception can relate to the former in that the analysis usually focuses on the narrative, interpretations, worldview, use of evidence, or method of presentation of other historians. Methodology of epistemology. ... For other senses of this word, see history (disambiguation). ...

The term can also describe a body of historical writing. For example, "medieval historiography during the 1960s" means "medieval history written during the 1960s".

Defining historiography

Conal Furay and Michael J. Salevouris define "historiography" as "the study of the way history has been and is written--the history of historical writing... When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians." (The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide, 1988, p. 223, ISBN 0882959824)

Although questions of method have concerned historians since Thucydides, many trace the modern study of historiography to E. H. Carr's 1961 work What is History? (ISBN 0333977017). Carr challenged to the traditional belief that the study of the methods of historical research and writing were unimportant. His work remains in print to this day, and is common to many postgraduate programs of study in both the United States and in Great Britain. Bust of Thucydides residing in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto Thucydides (between 460 and 455 BC–circa 400 BC, Greek Θουκυδίδης, Thoukudídês) was an ancient Greek historian, and the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War, which recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens. ... Edward Hallett Carr (28 June 1892 – 5 November 1982) was a British historian, international relations theorist, and fierce opponent of empiricism within historiography. ... 1961 (MCMLXI) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1961 calendar). ... What is History? is a 1961 nonfiction book by historian Edward Hallet Carr on historiography. ... The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history. ...

Historiography is often political in nature. For example, much 1960s historiography focused on the exclusion of the roles of women, minorities, and labor from written histories of the USA. According to these historiographers, historians in the 1930s and 1940s had a bias towards well-connected white males. Many historians from that point onward devoted themselves to what they saw as more accurate representations of the past, casting a light on those who had been previously disregarded as non-noteworthy.

The study of historiography demands a critical approach that goes beyond the mere examination of historical fact. Historiographical studies consider the source, often by researching the author, his or her position in society, and the type of history being written at the time.

Basic issues studied in historiography

Some of the common questions of historiography are:

• Who wrote the source (primary or secondary)?
• For primary sources, we look at the person in his or her society, for secondary sources, we consider the theoretical orientation of the approach for example, Marxist or Annales School, ("total history"), political history, etc.
• What is the authenticity, authority, bias/interest, and intelligibility of the source?
• What was the view of history when the source was written?
• Was history supposed to provide moral lessons?
• What or who was the intended audience?
• What sources were privileged or ignored in the narrative?
• By what method was the evidence compiled?
• In what historical context was the work of history itself written?

Issues engaged in so-called critical historiography includes topics such as: Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales dhistoire économique et sociale (later called , then renamed in 1994 as ) where it was first expounded. ... Political history is what most people refer to simply as history. ... method (from Greek methodos, met hodos literally way across). The word entered English in 1541 via French and Latin. ...

• What constitutes an historical "event"?
• In what modes does a historian write and produce statements of "truth" and "fact"?
• How does the medium (novel, textbook, film, theatre, comic) through which historical information is conveyed influence its meaning?
• What inherent epistemological problems does archive-based history contain?
• How does the historian establish their own objectivity or come to terms with their own subjectivity?
• What is the relation of historical theory to historical practice?
• What is the "goal" of history?
• What is history?

Foundation of Important historical Journals (Selection)

• 1859 Historische Zeitschrift (Germany)
• 1876 Revue Historique (France)
• 1895 American Historical Review (USA)
• 1914 Mississippi Valley Historical Review/Journal of American History (Beginning 1964) (USA)
• 1916 The Journal of Negro History
• 1929 Annales. Économies. Sociétés. Civilisations
• 1952 Past & present: a journal of historical studies (Great Britain)

• 1953 Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Germany)

• 1956 Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (Nigeria)

• 1960 Journal of African History (Cambridge)
• 1960 Technology and culture : the international quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology (USA)
• 1975 Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft (Germany)
• 1982 Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press)
• 1986 1999. Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20.und 21. Jahrhunderts, new title since 2003: Sozial.Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. (Germany)
• 1990 L’Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft (Austria)
• 1990 Oesterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Geschichtswissenschaften - OeZG
• 1993 Historische Anthropologie

1859 is a common year starting on Saturday. ... 1876 (MDCCCLXXVI) is a leap year starting on Saturday. ... 1895 (MDCCCXCV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... 1914 (MCMXIV) was a common year starting on Thursday. ... 1916 (MCMXVI) is a leap year starting on Saturday (link will take you to calendar) // Events January-February January 1 - The Royal Army Medical Corps first successful blood transfusion using blood that had been stored and cooled. ... The Journal of Negro History was founded in 1916. ... 1929 (MCMXXIX) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1952 (MCMLII) was a Leap year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ... 1953 (MCMLIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link is to a full 1953 calendar). ... 1956 (MCMLVI) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... 1960 (MCMLX) was a leap year starting on Friday (the link is to a full 1960 calendar). ... 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... This article is about the year. ... This article is about the year. ... 1993 (MCMXCIII) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar and marked the Beginning of the International Decade to Combat Racism and Racial Discrimination (1993-2003). ...

Styles of History-writing

• Annales School
• Big History
• Deconstruction
• Diplomatic history
• Feminist History
• Gender History
• Great man history
• Historical materialism
• Historiophoty
• Historiosophy
• History from below
• History of ideas
• Hypergraphy
• Marxist analysis
• Metahistory
• Microhistory
• Numismatics
• Oral history
• Paleography
• Political history
• Postmodernism
• Prosopography
• Psychogeography
• Psychohistory
• Revisionism
• Social history
• Universal History
• World History

The Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales dhistoire économique et sociale (later called , then renamed in 1994 as ) where it was first expounded. ... Big History is a discreet field of historical study that arose in the late 1980s. ... The term deconstruction was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s and is used in contemporary humanities and social sciences to denote a philosophy of meaning that deals with the ways that meaning is constructed and understood by writers, texts, and readers. ... Sometimes referred to as Rankian History, diplomatic history focuses on politics, politicians and other high rulers and views them as being the driving force of continuity and change in history. ... Historical materialism (or what Marx himself called the materialist conception of history - materialistische Geschichtsauffassung) is a social theory and an approach to the study of history and sociology, normally considered the intellectual basis of Marxism. ... Historiography and Historiophoty is the name of an essay by historical philosopher Hayden White first published in 1988 in The American Historical Review. ... History from below is a form of historical narrative which was developed as a result of the Annales School and popularised in the 1960s. ... The history of ideas is a field of research in history and in related fields dealing with the expression, preservation, and change of human ideas over time. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Marxist or historical materialist historiography is an influential school of historiography. ... Metahistory is a historiography book by Hayden V. White first published in 1974. ... Microhistory is a branch of the study of history. ... Numismatics (ancient Greek: ) is the scientific study of money and its history in all its varied forms. ... Oral history is an account of something passed down by word of mouth from one generation to another. ... Palaeography, literally old writing, (from the Greek words paleos = old and grapho = write) is the study of script. ... Political history is what most people refer to simply as history. ... Postmodernism is a term describing a wide-ranging change in thinking beginning in the early 20th century. ... Prosopography is an important methodological tool within historical research, its goal being the collection of all known information about individuals within a given period, often in the form of a register or database (frequently also known as a Prosopography, e. ... Psychogeography is The study of specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals, according to the article Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation, in (1958) . // Development Psychogeography was originally developed by the Lettrist International, as a hypergraphics in their system of... For the fictional use of the term psychohistory, see psychohistory (fictional) Psychohistory is the study of the psychological motivations of historical events. ... Revisionism is a word which has several meanings. ... Social history is an area of historical study considered by some to be a social science that attempts to view historical evidence from the point of view of developing social trends. ... Universal history is basic to the Western tradition of historiography, especially the Judeo-Christian wellspring of that tradition. ... World History is a field of historical study that emerged in the 1960s, notably from William McNeills work The Rise of The West. ...

Relevant Literature

Philosophy of history:

• Frank Ankersmit (ed), A New Philosophy of History, 1995, ISBN 0226021009
• E. H. Carr, What is History? 1961, ISBN 039470391X
• R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, 1936, ISBN 0192853066
• Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History, 1969, ISBN 0631229809
• Richard J. Evans In Defence of History, 1997, ISBN 3579108642
• Keith Jenkins, Rethinking History, 1991, ISBN 0415304431
• Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History, 1970, ISBN 0333109414
• John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 2002, ISBN 0582772540
• W.H. Walsh, An Introduction to Philosophy of History, 1951.
• Hayden White, The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1987, ISBN 0801841151
• Tessa Morris-Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, 2005, ISBN 1859845134

Broad histories of historical writing: Edward Hallett Carr (1892–1982) was a British historian and international relations theorist. ... What is History? is a 1961 nonfiction book by historian Edward Hallet Carr on historiography. ... Robin George Collingwood (February 22, 1889 - January 9, 1943), British philosopher and historian. ... This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Professor Richard Evans (born 1947) is a British historian of Germany. ... Keith Jenkins is one of Britains leading dudes of postmodern history. ... Hayden White is a historian in the tradition of literary criticism, perhaps most famous for his work Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (1973). ...

• Michael Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography, Routledge, 1997, ISBN 0415285577
• Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction, 1999 ISBN 0415202671
• Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 1994, ISBN 0226072789
• Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, Polity Press, Oxford, 1992
• Mark T. Gilderhus, History and Historiographical Introduction, 2002, ISBN 0130448249
• Susan Kinnell, Historiography: An Annotated Bibliography of Journal Article, Books and Dissertations, 1987, ISBN 0874361680
• Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundation of Modern Historiography, 1990, ISBN 0520078705

Feminist historiography

• Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History, New York: Oxford University Press 1979
• Bonnie G. Smith, The gender of history : men, women, and historical practice, Cambridge, Mass. [etc.] : Harvard Univ. Press, 1998
• Mary Spongberg, Writing women's history since the Renaissance , Basingstoke [etc.] : Palgrave Macmillan, 2002

Regional or thematic: Gerda Lerner, (*1920), Austrian refugess, emerita professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, is a pioneer of womens history. ...

• John Ernest. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004
• Marc Ferro, Cinema and History, Wayne State University Press, 1988
• Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Harvard UP 1998
• M. Ismail Marcinkowski, Persian Historiography and Geography: Bertold Spuler on Major Works Produced in Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, India and Early Ottoman Turkey, Singapore: Pustaka Nasional, 2003.
• Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession 1988, ISBN 0521343283
• Roland Oliver, In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History, University of Wisconsin Press 1997
• Christopher Saunders, The making of the South African past : major historians on race and class, Totowa, N.J. : Barnes & Noble, 1988
• Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice, Harvard UP 2000

Teaching History Marc Ferro is a French historian specialised in the history of Russia, the USSR and cinema. ... Ranajit Guha is a historian of South Asia who was greatly influential in the Subalterns Studies group, and edited several early numbers of the groups anthologies. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Christoph Marcinkowski. ...

• James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Touchstone Books 1996
• David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought, Harper & Row, 1970.

Journals

• Cromohs - cyber review of modern historiography
• History and Theory
• History of Historiography

See also

• Chinese historiography
• Marxist historiography
• Microhistory
• Historiography and nationalism
• Historiography of science
• Historical method
• List of historians
• List of historians by area of study
• Medieval Chronicle Society
• Philosophy of history
• Plot
• Primary source - documents, correspondence, diaries
• Secondary source - interpretations, written history
• Tertiary source - encyclopedias, almanacs

Chinese historiography refers to the study of methods and assumptions made in studying Chinese history. ... Marxist or historical materialist historiography is an influential school of historiography. ... Microhistory is a branch of the study of history. ... Historiography is the study of how history is written. ... The historiography of science is the study of the history of science (often overlapping with the history of technology, history of medicine, and history of mathematics), generally in an academic context as part of the discipline of the history of science and technology (HST), history and philosophy of science (HPS... The historical method comprises the techniques and guidelines by which historians use primary sources and other evidence to research and then to write history. ... This is a list of historians. ... This is a list of historians categorized by their area of study. ... The philosophy of history asks at least these questions: what is the proper unit for the study of the human past? the individual, the city or sovereign territory, the civilization, or nothing less than the whole of the species?; what broad patterns can we discern through the study of the... // Plot in literature, theater, movies According to Aristotles Poetics, a plot in literature is the arrangement of incidents that (ideally) each follow plausibly from the other. ... A primary source is any piece of information that is used for constructing history as an artifact of its times. ... Secondary sources are texts based on primary sources, and involve generalization, analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation. ... Where a primary source presents material from a first-hand witness to a phenomenon, and a secondary source provides commentary, analysis and criticism of primary sources, a tertiary source is a selection and compilation of primary and secondary sources. ... Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 1902 An encyclopedia or encyclopaedia, also (rarely) encyclopædia,[1] is a written compendium of knowledge. ... An almanac (also spelled almanack, especially in Commonwealth English) is an annual publication containing tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar. ...

External links

• Feminist historiography 1968-1993 a bibliography
• Philosophy of History introduced at The Galilean Library
• Scientific Historiography, explained in an interview with Aviezer Tucker at the Galilean Library
• The Negro Digs Up His Past (1925) by Arturo Alfonso Schomburg
• W Notes and Historiography Bibliography
• The History Journals Guide