Historiography

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Historiography is writing about rather than of history. Historiography is a meta-level analysis of descriptions of the past. The analysis usually focuses on the narrative, interpretations, worldview, use of evidence, or method of presentation of other historians. The term can also be used of a body of historical writing, e.g. "medieval historiography."

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 always concerned historians, the modern study of historiography can be said to have its beginnings with Edward Hallett Carr's 1961 work What is History? (ISBN 0333977017) and his challenge 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.

Much critical historiography in the 1960s focused, for example, on the exclusion of the roles of women, minorities, and labor from written histories of the USA. According to these historiographers, because historians in the 1930s and 1940s were themselves products of their times, their models of who was "important" to history reflected the cultural attitudes of that period, i.e. 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. Historiography that is considered controversial or extreme is often pejoratively labeled as historical revisionism.

An example

A primary source is an artifact of a particular point in time. In the 1850s, for example, many slaveowners in the United States kept diary|diaries and journals about their day-to-day activity. The historian Kenneth Stampp looked at these documents for information about the life of a slaveowner in the 1850s, and also derived information from them on the life of the slaves on the plantation. He used the documents as primary sources. The book he created, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, is a secondary source, a work produced through the analysis of primary sources. If another historian argues that Stampp's history ignores the economic history of slavery, or that Stampp's work overly emphasizes one aspect of slave life, then this historian is using Stampp's book — originally produced as a secondary source — as a primary source, an artifact of study. This new work which criticizes a secondary source, is a work of historiography.

Basic issues studied in historiography

Some of the basic questions considered in 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 (see below).
  • 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?

Some recent controversies

The use of particular styles of historiography has a great impact on the conclusions of historians and much controversial history stems from this problem. In recent American history writing, some controversies based on disputed historiography include whether dynastic Egypt was a black, African civilization; whether the Olmec civilization was founded by black Africans; the periodization of European history; rate of exploitation of African-Americans during and after slavery; the role of whiteness in U.S. labor struggles; and the attitude of "good Germans" toward the Holocaust. In 1989, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama wrote an article in the National Interest called 'The End of History'. He meant that a consensus had emerged in the world community that liberal democracy was the legitimate and final form of government. In his view, the ideal of democracy could not be improved on. Thus, humanity's ideological evolution had reached its end point and in that sense, history also ended. He was misunderstood to mean that history as a continuation of events had ended, and, as events continued to occur, he was said to be wrong.

Insider-Outsider Problem

Critics of how Western scholars have constructed histories or anthropological accounts of non-Western societies highlights the relationship between such scholarship and colonial attitudes of superiority. Such criticism includes novels written by outsiders about other people's cultures and societies. Within anthropology, for example, there has been talk of an epistemological hypochondria' concerning, as Clifford Geertz put it, 'how one can know that anything one says about other life forms is as a matter of fact so' (1988: 71). The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, referring to Jospeh Conrad's classic Heart of Darkness (1899) described it as reducing 'Africa to the role of props for the breakup of one petty European mind' which was 'a 'preposterous and perverse arragance' (1988: 257). In reaction to this problem, one response is to say that people should only write about themselves, that is, they should write their own histories. This has been called nativism. The problem with this is that it is is extremely pessimistic about people's ability to understand other societies, or to develop genuine cross-cultural understanding. Another response is to say that any history or account of another society written by an outsider should be subject to insiders' approval. Another response is to say that accounts are best written collabaritively, by insiders and outsiders together. This recognizes that insiders have unique insight into their own cultures but that outsiders somteimes shed light on aspects of a culture or tradition that insiders take for granted.

Foundation of important historical Journals (Selection)

  • 1859 Historische Zeitschrift (Germany)
  • 1876 Revue Historique (France)
  • 1895 American Historical Review (USA)
  • 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)

Styles of Historiography

  • Annales School: named after the French journal, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale founded in 1929. The focus was less on the great politicians and military leaders and diplomatic developmemts, more on what constituted the psychology of a period. The underlying 'mentalities' of an prominent promient member was Fernand Braudel (1902 - 1985.
  • Big History: began in the 1980's and attempts to identify large or big themes or patters that stretch across traditional periods of history. This approach draws on a range of disciplines: see David Christian (2004). Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. ISBN 0520235002
  • Deconstruction: derived from the approach of Jacques Derrida, deconstruction posits that texts seek to impose 'ideas' on their readers, thus attempting to control how people see the world. Deconstruction seeks to identify within its sources internal contradictions, suppressed information, questionable assumptions about the world and society, and other examples of what they regard as the text's illegitimate attempt to compel attention, compliance, or belief.
  • Diplomatic history: associated with the German historian, Leopold von Ranke,(1795 - 1886. Rankin did not believe that general theories could cut across time and space (geography) and wanted to construct history from the documents and sources available from each particular time and place. He was especially interested in international relations (Aussenpolitik, hence diplomat history) and made much use of narrative and diaries, aiming thus to write as it actually was" (wie es eigentlich gewesen ist).
  • historiophoty: a term developed by Haydon White to describe the representation of history has been represented in film and visual images. See White, Hayden. "Historiography and Historiophoty". The American Historical Review, Vol. 93, No. 5. (Dec., 1988), pp. 1193-1199. Available online through JSTOR.
  • History from below: most history has been written from the above, that is, by members of a social or academic elite. History from below gives priority to voices that are often silent - those of women, the poor, dissidents, non-Europeans. This is a development of the Annales appoach.
  • Marxist historiography: from Karl Marx (1818 - 1883) sees history in terms of a dialectic that will eventually result in the creation of a class-less society. Like history from below, Marxists are intersted in the conditions of the poor and working classes, and in how the owners of capital control the masses. The aim is to enable the oppressed to become conscious of their oppression, and to rise up against their oppressors.
  • Metahistory: see Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1974 ISBN 0801817617. Metahistory questions the objectivity of historical writings, arguing that writers including journalists bring theories (or archytypes) to bear on their sourcesthat shapes what they write.
  • Microhistory: developed in the 1970s. The focus is history of a small, clearly defined area such as a village, a work of art or a person of local significance.
  • Numismatics: is the scientific study of money (coins, banknotes).
  • Oral history: In the US, the Libray of Congress started an oral history project in the 1930's. Oral history has been widely used to construct histories of non-literate peoples and societies. It is often used to access the views of ordinary people who witnessed an event. It can also be a form of history from below.
  • Paleography: study of ancient manuscripts or texts engraved on monuments.
  • Political history: this is what most people think of as history - an account of the rule and achievements of Kings, Presidents, accounts of battles, often with a focus on nation states.
  • Postmodernism: can be characterised as a general distrust of any 'grand-narratives'. It rejects supposedly universal stories and paradigms such as religion, conventional philosophy, capitalism and gender that have defined culture and behavior in the past, and instead looks to a variety of more local and subcultural ideologies, myths and stories. Postmodernism asks questions such as 'who wrote a text, for whom did they write, whose voices are silent?' of its sources, and like history from below identifies alternative voices, or discourses, from the official and elite ones. A leading exponent of postmodernism was the French scholar, Michel Foucault (1926 - 1984) (see The Archaelogy of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Pantheon, 1992 ISBN 0394711068)
  • Prosopography: aims to collect all known information about an individual in the form of a data base.
  • Psychohistory: focues on the psychological motivations behind the actions that imapct on history.
  • Revisionism: refers to the projecting back of theories or ideas into history or attempts to re-write history, such as denying that the Holocaust took place or reading Marxist dialectic into historical happenings.
  • Social history: focuses on developing social trends rather than political developments.
  • Universal History: Simply stated, universal history is the presentation of the history of mankind as a whole, as a coherent unit. The first five books of the Bible is a primary example of such a history. To the extent that the Pentateuch presents itself as an account of mankind as a whole, from creation to the death of Moses, it is universal history. In the nineteenth century, universal histories proliferated. Philosophers such as Hegel, and political philosophers such as Marx, presented general theories of history that shared essential characteristics with the Biblical account: they conceived of history as a coherent whole, governed by certain basic characteristics or immutable principles.
  • World History: the world history movement sees much written history as too Euro or North America-centered. World History is a discrete field of historical study that originated in the 1980s when the World History Association was formed. It examines history from a global perspective. Unlike history of the 19th and early 20th century which primarily focused on national and ethnic perspectives, World History looks for common patterns that emerge across all global cultures. Historians use a thematic approach, with two major broad themes: integration (how the processes of World History have drawn peoples of the world together) and difference (how the patterns of World History reveal the diversity of the human experience).
  • Providential History: this is a theological or religious appoach to history that sees God's activity behind historical events. In this understanding, God's plan for the salvation of the world unfolds through human history. History is not to be seen as random, although human rebellion against God means that history is a struggle between good and evil. See also a Unification View of History.

Literature

Philosophy of history:

Broad histories of historical writing:

  • 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

Regional or thematic:

  • Marc Ferro, Cinema and History, Wayne State University Press, 1988
  • Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India, Harvard UP 1998
  • Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History, New York: Oxford University Press 1979
  • Clifford Geertz Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author, Palo Alto, CA, Stanford University Press ISBN 0804717478
  • Roland Oliver, In the Realms of Gold: Pioneering in African History, University of Wisconsin Press 1997
  • Peter Novick, The Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession, 1988
  • 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
  • Achebe, Chinua. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Heart of

Darkness A Norton Critical Edition. Ed Robert Kimbrough. New York: Norton, 1988: 251-262. Teaching History

  • James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Touchstone Books 1996

Journals


External links

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