Historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topic — the historiography of the United Kingdom, of WWII, of the pre-Columbian Americas, of early Islam, and of China — and different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties — such as to their nation state — remains a debated question.[1][2]
"Study of history" redirects here. For the book by Toynbee, see A Study of History.
In Europe, the academic discipline of historiography was established in the 5th century BC with the Histories, by Herodotus, who thus established Greek historiography. In the 2nd century BC, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder produced the Origines, which is the first Roman historiography. In Asia, the father and son intellectuals Sima Tan and Sima Qian established Chinese historiography with the book Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), in the time of the Han Empire in Ancient China. During the Middle Ages, medieval historiography included the works of chronicles in medieval Europe, the Ethiopian Empire in the Horn of Africa, Islamic histories by Muslim historians, and the Korean and Japanese historical writings based on the existing Chinese model. During the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, historiography in the Western world was shaped and developed by figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, who among others set the foundations for the modern discipline. In the 19th-century historical studies became professionalized at universities and research centers along with a belief that history was like a science.[3] In the 20th-century historians incorporated social science dimensions like politics, economy, and culture in their historiography.[3]
The research interests of historians change over time, and there has been a shift away from traditional diplomatic, economic, and political history toward newer approaches, especially social and cultural studies. From 1975 to 1995 the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history increased from 31 to 41 percent, while the proportion of political historians decreased from 40 to 30 percent.[4] In 2007, of 5,723 faculty in the departments of history at British universities, 1,644 (29 percent) identified themselves with social history and 1,425 (25 percent) identified themselves with political history.[5] Since the 1980s there has been a special interest in the memories and commemoration of past events—the histories as remembered and presented for popular celebration.[6]
Terminology[edit]
In the early modern period, the term historiography meant "the writing of history", and historiographer meant "historian". In that sense certain official historians were given the title "Historiographer Royal" in Sweden (from 1618), England (from 1660), and Scotland (from 1681). The Scottish post is still in existence.
Historiography was more recently defined as "the study of the way history has been and is written—the history of historical writing", which means that, "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."[7]
1839
Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (Brazil)
1840 (Denmark)
Historisk tidsskrift
1866 , later Historiallinen arkisto (Finland, published in Finnish)
Archivum historicum
1867 (Hungary)
Századok
1871
Historisk tidsskrift (Norway)
1876 (France)
Revue Historique
1880 (Sweden)
Historisk tidskrift
1886 (England)
English Historical Review
1892 (US)
William and Mary Quarterly
1894 (Luxembourg)
Ons Hémecht
1914 (renamed in 1964 the Journal of American History) (US)[176]
Mississippi Valley Historical Review
1915 (US)
The Catholic Historical Review
1916 (Finland, published in Swedish)
Historisk Tidskrift för Finland
1918 (US)
Hispanic American Historical Review
1920 (Canada)
Canadian Historical Review
1928 (Sweden)
Scandia
1929 (France)
Annales d'histoire économique et sociale
1941 (US)
The Journal of Economic History
1944 (US)
The Americas
1951 (Mexico)
Historia Mexicana
1952 (England)
Past & present: a journal of historical studies
1953 (Germany)
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
1954 (US)
Ethnohistory
1956 (Nigeria)
Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria
1960 (England)
Journal of African History
1960 (US)
Technology and culture: the international quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology
1960 (US)
History and Theory
1967 (India) (earlier published as the Bulletin of Church History Association of India)[178]
Indian Church History Review
1967 (US)
The Journal of Social History
1969 (US)
Journal of Interdisciplinary History
1969 (UK)
Journal of Latin American Studies
1975 (Germany)
Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft
1975 (US)
Signs
1976 (US)
Journal of Family History
1978 (US)
The Public Historian
1981 (UK)
Bulletin of Latin American Research
1982 – History of Historiography – Histoire de l'Historiographie – Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung[179]
Storia della Storiografia
1986 , new title since 2003: Sozial.Geschichte. Zeitschrift für historische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (Germany)
Zeitschrift für Sozialgeschichte des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts
1990 (US)
Gender and History
1990 (US)
Journal of World History
1992
Women's History Review
1992 (US)
Colonial Latin American Historical Review
1992
Colonial Latin American Review
1996 (US)
Environmental History
2011
International Journal for the Historiography of Education
Narrative[edit]
According to Lawrence Stone, narrative has traditionally been the main rhetorical device used by historians. In 1979, at a time when the new Social History was demanding a social-science model of analysis, Stone detected a move back toward the narrative. Stone defined narrative as follows: it is organized chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative."[182]
Historians committed to a social science approach, however, have criticized the narrowness of narrative and its preference for anecdote over analysis, and its use of clever examples rather than statistically verified empirical regularities.[183]
Reliability of the sources used, in terms of authorship, credibility of the author, and the authenticity or corruption of the text. (See also .)
source criticism
Historiographical tradition or framework. Every historian uses one (or more) historiographical traditions, for example , Annales school, "total history", or political history.
Marxist
issues, guilt assignment, and praise assignment
Moral
Some of the common topics in historiography are:
Big history
Black history
Chronology
Comparative history
Cultural history
Diplomatic history
Decolonization of knowledge
a relatively new field
Environmental history
Ethnohistory
Global studies
History of medicine
Indigenous history
Labor history
– important in pre-modern contexts
Legendary history
Migration studies
including naval and air history
Military history
– history incorporating elements of myth
Mythistory
– comforting myths of individual peoples
National history
Political history
especially museums and historic preservation
Public history
Historiography of science
and people's history; along with the French version the Annales school and the German Bielefeld School
Social history
regarding post-colonial India
Subaltern Studies
Urban history
American urban history
history interpreted as the story of continuous progress
Whig history
World history
Zeitgeist
List of historians by area of study
Historical significance
National memory
Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.
The Historian's Craft (1940)
Marc Bloch
History and Social Theory, Polity Press, Oxford, 1992
Burke, Peter.
(editor), What is History Now, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
David Cannadine
Deluermoz, Quentin, and : A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been ISBN 978-0300227543 ; Yale University Press, 2021
Singaravélou, Pierre
Doran, Robert. ed. Philosophy of History After Hayden White. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought, Harper & Row, 1970
Fischer, David Hackett.
Gardiner, Juliet (ed) What is History Today...? London: MacMillan Education Ltd., 1988.
Harlaftis, Gelina, ed. The New Ways of History: Developments in Historiography (I.B. Tauris, 2010) 260 pp; trends in historiography since 1990
Hewitson, Mark, History and Causality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
Jenkins, Keith ed. The Postmodern History Reader (2006)
The New Nature of History: knowledge, evidence, language, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, ISBN 0-333-96447-0
Arthur Marwick
. The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (2000), an encyclopedia of concepts, methods and historians
Munslow, Alan
Sreedharan, E. (2004). . Orient Blackswan. ISBN 978-8125026570. Archived from the original on 13 January 2023. Retrieved 13 February 2016.
A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000
Sreedharan (2007). . South Indian Studies. ISBN 978-8190592802.
A Manual of Historical Research Methodology
Tucker, Aviezer, ed. A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography Malden: Blackwell, 2009
White, Hayden. The Fiction of Narrative: Essays on History, Literature, and Theory, 1957–2007, Johns Hopkins, 2010. Ed. Robert Doran
International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography
short guide to Historiographical terms
[4]
Basic guide to historiography research for undergraduates
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