Historiography

Historiography

Introduction

Historiography is the history of history, the aspect of history and of semiotics that considers how knowledge of the past, either recent or distant, is obtained and transmitted. Formally, historiography examines the writing of history, the use of historical methods, drawing upon authorship, sources, interpretation, style, bias,1 and the reader; moreover, historiography also denotes a body of historical work.

History and Historiography

History is the statement of facts. It records the unfolding of significant events or the event itself. The essence of historiography is in stating the facts as they should be. Historiography, on the other hand, "debates between historians about just what exactly did happen, why it happened, and what would be an adequate account of its significance." According to Jarvie, the essence of historiography leads to an important consideration and that is when and how historians change information about "events" into the "facts." This is the whole essence of historiography and also serves as the point of contention.

Scholars discuss historiography topically, i.e. the “historiography of Catholicism”, the “historiography of China”, etc., and the approaches and genres include oral history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, at the ascent of academic history, a corpus of historiography literature developed, including What is History? (1961), by E. H. Carr, and Metahistory (1973), by Hayden White.2

There are two basic issues involved in historiography. First, the study of the development of history as an academic discipline over time, as well as its development in different cultures and epochs. Second, the study of the academic tools, methods and approaches that have been and are being used, including the historical method.

The term "historiography" can also refer to a specific body of historical writing that was written at a specific time concerning a specific subject. For instance, a statement about "medieval historiography" would refer to some issue in the academic discipline of Medieval History, and not to the actual history of the Middle Ages or to historical works written in that time (e.g., "during the last century, 3medieval historiography changed its focus from the study of political events to that of social and mental structures", or "medieval historiography has largely benefited from the recognition of the importance of parish records": that is, the discipline underwent some change).

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." One should be cautious, however, that in the sense given in the previous paragraph when a historian does historiography they are actually studying "the events of the past directly".4

Understanding the past appears to be a universal human need, and the telling of history has emerged independently in civilisations around the world. What constitutes history is a philosophical question. For the purposes of this article it is taken to mean written history recorded in a narrative ...