What is Historiography?
Historiography is a word that shows up in history classes and especially on the AP exams. But what is historiography? Read more below to find out!
Definition
The word ‘historiography,’ as you will most likely encounter it in your history classes, means the collections of historical writings on a given topic. In other words, historiography is the same as all of the history books that have been written on a specific topic.
For instance, we could talk about the historiography of the US Civil War to mean the collection of books that historians have written about the conflict. Or we could talk about recent developments in the historiography of the Cold War, which would mean new opinions that historians have developed about that time period.
Historiography always refers to secondary sources, meaning that historiography never refers to primary documents written during the historical period of interest. Historiography consists of the collections of writings that have come after the event that try to understand the event and to place it within its wider historical context.
Uses
Historiography is actually quite a useful term. It is especially useful because history is constantly changing. That might at first seem contradictory—surely the events in the past are one of the things that can never be changed (science fiction time-travel notwithstanding). However, while the events of the past might not change, historians are continually discovering new information about the past, understanding new motivations, and seeing different bigger pictures that these smaller events fit into. Historians, therefore, are constantly revisiting and revising their interpretations of the past. As time goes on, the historiography is updated to reflect these new ideas.
Since history is often-changing, you need to tell your readers what the current state of scholarship is because they likely will not know. Historiography is a useful term, then, because you can use it as a blanket term to let your reader know that you are about to explain the general contours of recent books on a subject. The term historiography gives you a succinct way to let the reader know the material you are talking about. You can write topic sentences like, ‘In recent historiography on the First World War, historians have debated the short- and long-term causes of the conflict.’ In just a few words, your readers will understand that you are summarizing several books on the topic.
Secondly, by summarizing what the historiography currently says, you can then put your own ideas into dialogue with other scholars. This is how historical scholarship works: historians uncover new material and then say how this new material reshapes the ways that other historians have understood the past. By summarizing the material in the current historiography, you can quickly say how your argument relates to current ideas in print.
Ways It Might Appear
Historiography might appear most likely in one of two ways.
First, historiography is often a feature of good historical essays. History essays need to summarize the current literature and state their relationship to it. Historiography, then, offers a quick way to talk about all of the material on a subject.
Second, you might see this term on the AP history exams. These exams include excerpts from professional historians—the test might directly refer to this historiography.
