![Jacob de Wit - Allegorie op het schrijven van de geschiedenis 1754](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Jacob_de_Wit_-_Allegorie_op_het_schrijven_van_de_geschiedenis_1754.jpg)
Historiography is the study of the methods of
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...
s in developing
history
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbrella term comprising past events as well ...
as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Scholars discuss historiography by topic—such as the
historiography of the United Kingdom
The historiography of the United Kingdom includes the historical and archival research and writing on the history of the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For studies of the overseas empire see historiography ...
,
that of WWII,
the British Empire
The British Empire was composed of the dominions, Crown colony, colonies, protectorates, League of Nations mandate, mandates, and other Dependent territory, territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. I ...
,
early Islam, and
China—and different approaches and genres, such as
political history
Political history is the narrative and survey of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is closely related to other fields of history, including diplomatic history, constitutional history, socia ...
and
social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the development of
academic history
An academic history can be a large, multivolume work such as the '' Cambridge Modern History'', written collaboratively under some central editorial control.
In the 19th century the idea appeared in universities that a definitive history could ...
, there developed a body 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.
In the
ancient world
Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history cov ...
, chronological
annal
Annals ( la, annāles, from , "year") are a concise historical record in which events are arranged chronologically, year by year, although the term is also used loosely for any historical record.
Scope
The nature of the distinction between anna ...
s were produced in civilizations such as
ancient Egypt and
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the ...
. However, the discipline of historiography was first established in the 5th century BC with the ''
Histories'' of
Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer
A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society ...
, the founder of historiography. The
Roman
Roman or Romans most often refers to:
*Rome, the capital city of Italy
*Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD
*Roman people, the people of ancient Rome
*'' Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lette ...
statesman
Cato the Elder
Marcus Porcius Cato (; 234–149 BC), also known as Cato the Censor ( la, Censorius), the Elder and the Wise, was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write his ...
produced the first
history in Latin, the ''
Origines
(, "Origins") is the title of a lost work on Roman and Italian history by Cato the Elder, composed in the early-2nd centuryBC.
Contents
According to Cato's biographer Cornelius Nepos, the ''Origins'' consisted of seven books. Book I was the hi ...
'', in the 2nd century BC. His near contemporaries
Sima Tan
Sima Tan (; 165–110 BCE) was a Chinese astrologer and historian during the Western Han dynasty. His work ''Records of the Grand Historian'' was completed by his son Sima Qian, who is considered the founder of Chinese historiography.
Ed ...
and
Sima Qian in the
Han Empire
The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...
of
China established
Chinese historiography with the compiling of the ''
Shiji
''Records of the Grand Historian'', also known by its Chinese name ''Shiji'', is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The ''Records'' was written in the early 1st century by the ancient Chinese his ...
'' (''Records of the Grand Historian''). During the
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
,
medieval historiography
This is a list of historians only for those with a biographical entry in Wikipedia. Major chroniclers and annalists are included. Names are listed by the person's historical period. The entries continue with the specializations, not nationality.
A ...
included the works of
chronicles in
medieval Europe
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire a ...
,
Islamic histories by
Muslim historians
:''This is a subarticle of Islamic scholars, List of Muslim scholars and List of historians.''
The following is a list of Muslim historians writing in the Islamic historiographical tradition, which developed from hadith literature in the time of ...
, and the
Korean
Korean may refer to:
People and culture
* Koreans, ethnic group originating in the Korean Peninsula
* Korean cuisine
* Korean culture
* Korean language
**Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Chosŏn'gŭl
**Korean dialects and the Jeju language
** ...
and
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
historical writings based on the existing Chinese model. During the 18th-century
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...
, historiography in the Western world was shaped and developed by figures such as
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—es ...
,
David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment phil ...
, and
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 173716 January 1794) was an English historian, writer, and member of parliament. His most important work, '' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is ...
, who among others set the foundations for the modern discipline.
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.
[Diplomatic dropped from 5 to 3 percent, economic history dropped from 7 to 5 percent, and cultural history grew from 14 to 16 percent. Based on the number of full-time professors in U.S. history departments. Stephen H. Haber, David M. Kennedy, and Stephen D. Krasner, "Brothers under the Skin: Diplomatic History and International Relations", ''International Security'', Vol. 22, No. 1 (Summer, 1997), pp. 34–43 at p. 4]
online at JSTOR
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. 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.
Terminology
In the
early modern period, the term ''historiography'' meant "the writing of history", and ''historiographer'' meant "
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the st ...
". In that sense certain
official historians were given the title "
Historiographer Royal Historiographer Royal is the title of an appointment as official chronicler or historian of a court or monarch. It was initially particularly associated with the French monarchy, where the post existed from at least 1550, but in the later 16th and 1 ...
" in
Sweden (from 1618),
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
(from 1660), and
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
(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."
Antiquity
Understanding the past appears to be a universal human need, and the "telling of history" has emerged independently in civilizations around the world.
What constitutes history is a philosophical question (see
philosophy of history).
The earliest
chronologies date back to
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the ...
and
ancient Egypt, in the form of
chronicles and
annal
Annals ( la, annāles, from , "year") are a concise historical record in which events are arranged chronologically, year by year, although the term is also used loosely for any historical record.
Scope
The nature of the distinction between anna ...
s. However, no historical writers in these early civilizations were known by name. By contrast, the term "historiography" is taken to refer to written history recorded in a narrative format for the purpose of informing future generations about events. In this limited sense, "ancient history" begins with the early historiography of
Classical Antiquity
Classical antiquity (also the classical era, classical period or classical age) is the period of cultural history between the 8th century BC and the 5th century AD centred on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of ...
, in about the 5th century BC.
Europe
Greece
![Thucydides Manuscript](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Thucydides_Manuscript.jpg)
The earliest known systematic historical thought emerged in
ancient Greece
Ancient Greece ( el, Ἑλλάς, Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean civilization, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of Classical Antiquity, classical antiquity ( AD 600), th ...
, a development which would be an important influence on the writing of history elsewhere around
the Mediterranean
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the e ...
region. Greek historians greatly contributed to the development of historical methodology. The earliest known critical historical works were ''
The Histories'', composed by
Herodotus of Halicarnassus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria (Italy). He is known for havi ...
(484–425 BC) who became known as the "father of history". Herodotus attempted to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts, and personally conducted research by travelling extensively, giving written accounts of various Mediterranean cultures. Although Herodotus' overall emphasis lay on the actions and characters of men, he also attributed an important role to divinity in the determination of historical events.
![Thucydides-bust-cutout ROM](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/10/Thucydides-bust-cutout_ROM.jpg)
The generation following Herodotus witnessed a spate of local histories of the individual
city-state
A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. They have existed in many parts of the world since the dawn of history, including cities such as ...
s (''
poleis
''Polis'' (, ; grc-gre, πόλις, ), plural ''poleis'' (, , ), literally means "city" in Greek. In Ancient Greece, it originally referred to an administrative and religious city center, as distinct from the rest of the city. Later, it also ...
''), written by the first of the
local historians
Local may refer to:
Geography and transportation
* Local (train), a train serving local traffic demand
* Local, Missouri, a community in the United States
* Local government, a form of public administration, usually the lowest tier of administra ...
who employed the written archives of city and sanctuary.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus characterized these historians as the forerunners of Thucydides, and these local histories continued to be written into
Late Antiquity
Late antiquity is the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages, generally spanning the 3rd–7th century in Europe and adjacent areas bordering the Mediterranean Basin. The popularization of this periodization in English ha ...
, as long as the city-states survived. Two early figures stand out:
Hippias of Elis
Hippias of Elis (; el, Ἱππίας ὁ Ἠλεῖος; late 5th century BC) was a Greek sophist, and a contemporary of Socrates. With an assurance characteristic of the later sophists, he claimed to be regarded as an authority on all subjects, ...
, who produced the lists of winners in the
Olympic Games
The modern Olympic Games or Olympics (french: link=no, Jeux olympiques) are the leading international sporting events featuring summer and winter sports competitions in which thousands of athletes from around the world participate in a vari ...
that provided the basic chronological framework as long as the pagan classical tradition lasted, and
Hellanicus of Lesbos
Hellanicus (or Hellanikos) of Lesbos (Greek: , ''Ἑllánikos ὁ Lésvios''), also called Hellanicus of Mytilene (Greek: , ''Ἑllánikos ὁ Mutilēnaῖos'') was an ancient Greek logographer who flourished during the latter half of the 5th cen ...
, who compiled more than two dozen histories from civic records, all of them now lost.
Thucydides
Thucydides (; grc, , }; BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His '' History of the Peloponnesian War'' recounts the fifth-century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of " scienti ...
largely eliminated divine causality in his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, establishing a rationalistic element which set a precedent for subsequent Western historical writings. He was also the first to distinguish between cause and immediate origins of an event, while his successor
Xenophon
Xenophon of Athens (; grc, Ξενοφῶν ; – probably 355 or 354 BC) was a Greek military leader, philosopher, and historian, born in Athens. At the age of 30, Xenophon was elected commander of one of the biggest Greek mercenary armies o ...
( – 355 BC) introduced autobiographical elements and character studies in his ''
Anabasis
Anabasis (from Greek ''ana'' = "upward", ''bainein'' = "to step or march") is an expedition from a coastline into the interior of a country. Anabase and Anabasis may also refer to:
History
* ''Anabasis Alexandri'' (''Anabasis of Alexander''), a ...
''.
The proverbial
Philippic A philippic ()http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/English/philippic is a fiery, damning speech, or tirade, delivered to condemn a particular political actor. The term is most famously associated with two noted orators of the ancient world: ...
attacks of the
Athenian
Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
orator
Demosthenes
Demosthenes (; el, Δημοσθένης, translit=Dēmosthénēs; ; 384 – 12 October 322 BC) was a Greek statesman and orator in ancient Athens. His orations constitute a significant expression of contemporary Athenian intellectual pr ...
(384–322 BC) on
Philip II of Macedon marked the height of ancient political agitation. The now lost history of
Alexander's
Alexander's is a real estate investment trust that owns 7 properties in New York metropolitan area, including 731 Lexington Avenue, the headquarters of Bloomberg L.P. It is controlled by Vornado Realty Trust. It was founded by George Farkas and ...
campaigns by the
diadoch
The Diadochi (; singular: Diadochus; from grc-gre, Διάδοχοι, Diádochoi, Successors, ) were the rival generals, families, and friends of Alexander the Great who fought for control over his empire after his death in 323 BC. The Wa ...
Ptolemy I (367–283 BC) may represent the first historical work composed by a ruler.
Polybius ( – 120 BC) wrote on the rise of Rome to world prominence, and attempted to harmonize the Greek and Roman points of view.
The
Chaldean priest
Berossus
Berossus () or Berosus (; grc, Βηρωσσος, Bērōssos; possibly derived from akk, , romanized: , "Bel is his shepherd") was a Hellenistic-era Babylonian writer, a priest of Bel Marduk and astronomer who wrote in the Koine Greek language ...
( BC) composed a Greek-language ''History of
Babylonia'' for the
Seleucid
The Seleucid Empire (; grc, Βασιλεία τῶν Σελευκιδῶν, ''Basileía tōn Seleukidōn'') was a Greek state in West Asia that existed during the Hellenistic period from 312 BC to 63 BC. The Seleucid Empire was founded by the ...
king
Antiochus I, combining
Hellenistic
In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...
methods of historiography and
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the ...
n accounts to form a unique composite. Reports exist of other near-eastern histories, such as that of the
Phoenicia
Phoenicia () was an ancient thalassocratic civilization originating in the Levant region of the eastern Mediterranean, primarily located in modern Lebanon. The territory of the Phoenician city-states extended and shrank throughout their histor ...
n historian
Sanchuniathon; but he is considered semi-legendary and writings attributed to him are fragmentary, known only through the later historians
Philo of Byblos and
Eusebius
Eusebius of Caesarea (; grc-gre, Εὐσέβιος ; 260/265 – 30 May 339), also known as Eusebius Pamphilus (from the grc-gre, Εὐσέβιος τοῦ Παμφίλου), was a Greek historian of Christianity, exegete, and Chris ...
, who asserted that he wrote before even the
Trojan war
In Greek mythology, the Trojan War was waged against the city of Troy by the Achaeans (Greeks) after Paris of Troy took Helen from her husband Menelaus, king of Sparta. The war is one of the most important events in Greek mythology and ...
.
Rome
The Romans adopted the Greek tradition, writing at first in Greek, but eventually chronicling their history in a freshly non-Greek language. While early
Roman works were still written in Greek, the ''
Origines
(, "Origins") is the title of a lost work on Roman and Italian history by Cato the Elder, composed in the early-2nd centuryBC.
Contents
According to Cato's biographer Cornelius Nepos, the ''Origins'' consisted of seven books. Book I was the hi ...
'', composed by the Roman statesman
Cato the Elder
Marcus Porcius Cato (; 234–149 BC), also known as Cato the Censor ( la, Censorius), the Elder and the Wise, was a Roman soldier, senator, and historian known for his conservatism and opposition to Hellenization. He was the first to write his ...
(234–149 BC), was written in
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, in a conscious effort to counteract Greek cultural influence. It marked the beginning of Latin historical writings. Hailed for its lucid style,
Julius Caesar
Gaius Julius Caesar (; ; 12 July 100 BC – 15 March 44 BC), was a Roman general and statesman. A member of the First Triumvirate, Caesar led the Roman armies in the Gallic Wars before defeating his political rival Pompey in a civil war, ...
's (103–44 BC) ''
de Bello Gallico
''Commentarii de Bello Gallico'' (; en, Commentaries on the Gallic War, italic=yes), also ''Bellum Gallicum'' ( en, Gallic War, italic=yes), is Julius Caesar's firsthand account of the Gallic Wars, written as a third-person narrative. In it Ca ...
'' exemplifies autobiographical war coverage. The politician and orator
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( ; ; 3 January 106 BC – 7 December 43 BC) was a Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, and academic skeptic, who tried to uphold optimate principles during the political crises that led to the esta ...
(106–43 BCE) introduced rhetorical elements in his political writings.
Strabo (63 BC – AD) was an important exponent of the
Greco-Roman tradition of combining geography with history, presenting a descriptive history of peoples and places known to his era.
Livy
Titus Livius (; 59 BC – AD 17), known in English as Livy ( ), was a Roman historian. He wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, titled , covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome before the traditional founding in ...
(59 BC – 17 AD) records the rise of
Rome
, established_title = Founded
, established_date = 753 BC
, founder = King Romulus (legendary)
, image_map = Map of comune of Rome (metropolitan city of Capital Rome, region Lazio, Italy).svg
, map_caption ...
from
city-state
A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. They have existed in many parts of the world since the dawn of history, including cities such as ...
to
empire
An empire is a "political unit" made up of several territories and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the empire (sometimes referred to as the metropole) ex ...
. His speculation about what would have happened if
Alexander the Great
Alexander III of Macedon ( grc, Ἀλέξανδρος, Alexandros; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip II to ...
had marched against Rome represents the first known instance of
alternate history.
Biography, although popular throughout antiquity, was introduced as a branch of history by the works of
Plutarch
Plutarch (; grc-gre, Πλούταρχος, ''Ploútarchos''; ; – after AD 119) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for hi ...
( – 125 CE) and
Suetonius ( – after 130 CE) who described the deeds and characters of ancient personalities, stressing their human side.
Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus, known simply as Tacitus ( , ; – ), was a Roman historian and politician. Tacitus is widely regarded as one of the greatest Roman historians by modern scholars.
The surviving portions of his two major works—the ...
( CE) denounces Roman immorality by praising
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
** Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
virtues, elaborating on the
topos
In mathematics, a topos (, ; plural topoi or , or toposes) is a category that behaves like the category of sheaves of sets on a topological space (or more generally: on a site). Topoi behave much like the category of sets and possess a notio ...
of the
Noble savage.
East Asia
China
![Shiji](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d8/Shiji.jpg)
The
Han dynasty
The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a warr ...
eunuch
A eunuch ( ) is a male who has been castrated. Throughout history, castration often served a specific social function.
The earliest records for intentional castration to produce eunuchs are from the Sumerian city of Lagash in the 2nd millenni ...
Sima Qian (around 100 BCE) was the first in China to lay the groundwork for professional historical writing. His work superseded the older style of the ''
Spring and Autumn Annals
The ''Spring and Autumn Annals'' () is an ancient Chinese chronicle that has been one of the core Chinese classics since ancient times. The ''Annals'' is the official chronicle of the State of Lu, and covers a 241-year period from 722 to 48 ...
'', compiled in the 5th century BC, the ''
Bamboo Annals'' and other court and dynastic
annals
Annals ( la, annāles, from , "year") are a concise historical record in which events are arranged chronologically, year by year, although the term is also used loosely for any historical record.
Scope
The nature of the distinction between ann ...
that recorded history in a
chronological
Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , '' -logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. ...
form that abstained from
analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...
. Sima's ''
Shiji
''Records of the Grand Historian'', also known by its Chinese name ''Shiji'', is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The ''Records'' was written in the early 1st century by the ancient Chinese his ...
'' (''
Records of the Grand Historian
''Records of the Grand Historian'', also known by its Chinese name ''Shiji'', is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The ''Records'' was written in the early 1st century by the ancient Chinese his ...
'') pioneered the "Annals-biography" format, which would become the standard for prestige history writing in China. In this genre a history opens with a chronological outline of court affairs, and then continues with detailed biographies of prominent people who lived during the period in question. The scope of his work extended as far back as the 16th century BC, and included many treatises on specific subjects and individual biographies of prominent people. He also explored the lives and deeds of commoners, both contemporary and those of previous eras.
Whereas Sima's had been a universal history from the beginning of time down to the time of writing, his successor
Ban Gu wrote an annals-biography history limiting its coverage to only the
Western Han dynasty
The Han dynasty (, ; ) was an imperial dynasty of China (202 BC – 9 AD, 25–220 AD), established by Liu Bang (Emperor Gao) and ruled by the House of Liu. The dynasty was preceded by the short-lived Qin dynasty (221–207 BC) and a war ...
, the
Book of Han
The ''Book of Han'' or ''History of the Former Han'' (Qián Hàn Shū,《前汉书》) is a history of China finished in 111AD, covering the Western, or Former Han dynasty from the first emperor in 206 BCE to the fall of Wang Mang in 23 CE. ...
(96 AD). This established the notion of using dynastic boundaries as start- and end-points, and most later Chinese histories would focus on a single dynasty or group of dynasties.
The Records of the Grand Historian and Book of Han were eventually joined by the
Book of the Later Han (488 CE) (replacing the earlier, and now only partially extant, Han Records from the Eastern Pavilion) and the
Records of the Three Kingdoms (297 CE) to form the "Four Histories". These became mandatory reading for the
Imperial Examinations and have therefore exerted an influence on Chinese culture comparable to the
Confucian Classics
Chinese classic texts or canonical texts () or simply dianji (典籍) refers to the Chinese texts which originated before the imperial unification by the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, particularly the "Four Books and Five Classics" of the Neo-Confucian ...
. More annals-biography histories were written in subsequent dynasties, eventually bringing the number to between twenty-four and twenty-six, but none ever reached the popularity and impact of the first four.
Traditional Chinese historiography describes history in terms of
dynastic cycle
Dynastic cycle () is an important political theory in Chinese history. According to this theory, each dynasty of China rises to a political, cultural, and economic peak and then, because of moral corruption, declines, loses the Mandate of Heaven, ...
s. In this view, each new dynasty is founded by a morally righteous founder. Over time, the dynasty becomes morally corrupt and dissolute. Eventually, the dynasty becomes so weak as to allow its replacement by a new dynasty.
In 281 AD the tomb of
King Xiang of Wei
King Xiang of Wei () (died 296 BC), personal name Wei Si (), was king of Wei from 318 BC to 296 BC. He was the son of King Hui of Wei. In 318 BC, at the suggestion of the Wei minister, Gongsun Yan, he entered into an alliance against Qin created ...
(d. 296 BC) was opened, inside of which was found a historical text called the
Bamboo Annals, after the writing material. It is similar in style to the Spring and Autumn Annals and covers the time from the
Yellow Emperor
The Yellow Emperor, also known as the Yellow Thearch or by his Chinese name Huangdi (), is a deity ('' shen'') in Chinese religion, one of the legendary Chinese sovereigns and culture heroes included among the mytho-historical Three Soverei ...
to 299 BC. Opinions on the authenticity of the text has varied throughout the centuries, and in any event it was re-discovered too late to gain anything like the same status as the Spring and Autumn.
Middle Ages to Renaissance
Christendom
Christian historical writing arguably begins with the narrative sections of the New Testament, particularly
Luke-Acts, which is the
primary source
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...
for the
Apostolic Age
Christianity in the 1st century covers the formative history of Christianity from the start of the ministry of Jesus (–29 AD) to the death of the last of the Twelve Apostles () and is thus also known as the Apostolic Age. Early Christianity ...
, though its
historical reliability is disputed. The first tentative beginnings of a specifically Christian historiography can be seen in
Clement of Alexandria
Titus Flavius Clemens, also known as Clement of Alexandria ( grc , Κλήμης ὁ Ἀλεξανδρεύς; – ), was a Christian theologian and philosopher who taught at the Catechetical School of Alexandria. Among his pupils were Origen an ...
in the second century.
The
growth of Christianity and its enhanced status in the Roman Empire after
Constantine I (see
State church of the Roman Empire) led to the development of a distinct Christian historiography, influenced by both
Christian theology and the nature of the
Christian Bible
The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
, encompassing new areas of study and views of history. The central role of the Bible in Christianity is reflected in the preference of Christian historians for written sources, compared to the classical historians' preference for oral sources and is also reflected in the inclusion of politically unimportant people. Christian historians also focused on development of religion and society. This can be seen in the extensive inclusion of written sources in the ''
Ecclesiastical History
__NOTOC__
Church history or ecclesiastical history as an academic discipline studies the history of Christianity and the way the Christian Church has developed since its inception.
Henry Melvill Gwatkin defined church history as "the spiritua ...
'' of
Eusebius of Caesarea around 324 and in the subjects it covers.
[''Historiography''](_blank)
, Concordia University Wisconsin, retrieved on 2 November 2007 Christian theology considered time as linear, progressing according to divine plan. As God's plan encompassed everyone, Christian histories in this period had a universal approach. For example, Christian writers often included summaries of important historical events prior to the period covered by the work.
Writing history was popular among Christian monks and clergy in the
Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
. They wrote about the history of Jesus Christ, that of the Church and that of their patrons, the dynastic history of the local rulers. In the
Early Middle Ages
The Early Middle Ages (or early medieval period), sometimes controversially referred to as the Dark Ages, is typically regarded by historians as lasting from the late 5th or early 6th century to the 10th century. They marked the start of the Mi ...
historical writing often took the form of
annals
Annals ( la, annāles, from , "year") are a concise historical record in which events are arranged chronologically, year by year, although the term is also used loosely for any historical record.
Scope
The nature of the distinction between ann ...
or
chronicles recording events year by year, but this style tended to hamper the analysis of events and causes. An example of this type of writing is the ''
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'', which was the work of several different writers: it was started during the reign of
Alfred the Great in the late 9th century, but one copy was still being updated in 1154. Some writers in the period did construct a more
narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional ( fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc. ...
form of history. These included
Gregory of Tours and more successfully
Bede, who wrote both
secular
Secularity, also the secular or secularness (from Latin ''saeculum'', "worldly" or "of a generation"), is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Anything that does not have an explicit reference to religion, either negativ ...
and
ecclesiastical history and who is known for writing the ''
Ecclesiastical History of the English People
The ''Ecclesiastical History of the English People'' ( la, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum), written by Bede in about AD 731, is a history of the Christian Churches in England, and of England generally; its main focus is on the conflict b ...
''.
During the
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
, history was written about states or nations. The study of history changed during the
Enlightenment and
Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
.
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—es ...
described the history of certain ages that he considered important, rather than describing events in chronological order. History became an independent discipline. It was not called ''philosophia historiae'' anymore, but merely history (''historia'').
Islamic world
Muslim historical writings first began to develop in the 7th century, with the reconstruction of the Prophet
Muhammad
Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the mo ...
's life in the centuries following his death. With numerous conflicting narratives regarding Muhammad and his
companions from various sources, it was necessary to verify which sources were more reliable. In order to evaluate these sources, various methodologies were developed, such as the "
science of biography", "
science of hadith
Hadith studies ( ar, علم الحديث ''ʻilm al-ḥadīth'' "science of hadith", also science of hadith, or science of hadith criticism or hadith criticism)
consists of several religious scholarly disciplines used by Muslim scholars in th ...
" and "
Isnad
Hadith studies ( ar, علم الحديث ''ʻilm al-ḥadīth'' "science of hadith", also science of hadith, or science of hadith criticism or hadith criticism)
consists of several religious scholarly disciplines used by Muslim scholars in th ...
" (chain of transmission). These methodologies were later applied to other historical figures in the
Islamic civilization. Famous historians in this tradition include
Urwah (d. 712),
Wahb ibn Munabbih
Wahb ibn Munabbih ( ar, وهب بن منبه) was a Yemenite Muslim traditionist of Dhimar (two days' journey from Sana'a) in Yemen; died at the age of ninety, in a year variously given by Arabic authorities as 725, 728, 732, and 737 C.E. He was ...
(d. 728),
Ibn Ishaq (d. 761),
al-Waqidi
Abu `Abdullah Muhammad Ibn ‘Omar Ibn Waqid al-Aslami (Arabic ) (c. 130 – 207 AH; c. 747 – 823 AD) was a historian commonly referred to as al-Waqidi (Arabic: ). His surname is derived from his grandfather's name Waqid and thus he became fa ...
(745–822),
Ibn Hisham (d. 834),
Muhammad al-Bukhari
Muhammad ( ar, مُحَمَّد; 570 – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social, and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet divinely inspired to preach and confirm the monoth ...
(810–870) and
Ibn Hajar (1372–1449). Historians of the
medieval Islamic world also developed an interest in world history. Islamic historical writing eventually culminated in the works of the Arab Muslim historian
Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), who published his historiographical studies in the ''
Muqaddimah
The ''Muqaddimah'', also known as the ''Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun'' ( ar, مقدّمة ابن خلدون) or ''Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena'' ( grc, Προλεγόμενα), is a book written by the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which records ...
'' (translated as ''Prolegomena'') and ''Kitab al-I'bar'' (''Book of Advice''). His work was forgotten until it was rediscovered in the late 19th century.
East Asia
Japan
The earliest works of history produced in Japan were the ''
Rikkokushi
is a general term for Japan's Six National Histories chronicling the mythology and history of Japan from the earliest times to 887. The six histories were written at the imperial court during the 8th and 9th centuries, under order of the Emperors. ...
'' (Six National Histories), a corpus of six national histories covering the history of Japan from its mythological beginnings until the 9th century. The first of these works were the ''
Nihon Shoki'', compiled by
Prince Toneri
(January 28, 676 – December 6, 735) was a Japanese imperial prince in the Nara period. He was a son of Emperor Tenmu. He was given the posthumous name, , as the father of Emperor Junnin. In the beginning of the Nara period, he gained politic ...
in 720.
Korea
The tradition of Korean historiography was established with the ''
Samguk Sagi
''Samguk Sagi'' (, ''History of the Three Kingdoms'') is a historical record of the Three Kingdoms of Korea: Goguryeo, Baekje and Silla. The ''Samguk Sagi'' is written in Classical Chinese, the written language of the literati of ancient Korea, ...
'', a history of Korea from its allegedly earliest times. It was compiled by
Goryeo
Goryeo (; ) was a Korean kingdom founded in 918, during a time of national division called the Later Three Kingdoms period, that unified and ruled the Korean Peninsula until 1392. Goryeo achieved what has been called a "true national unificat ...
court historian
Kim Busik
Kim Bu-sik, or Gim Busik (; 1075–1151) was a statesman, general, Confucian scholar and writer during Korea's Goryeo period. He was a scion of the Silla royalty and a member of the Gyeongju Kim clan. Later he was the supreme chancellor from 1136 ...
after its commission by King
Injong of Goryeo
Injong of Goryeo (29 October 1109 – 10 April 1146) (r. 1122–1146) was the 17th monarch of the Korean Goryeo dynasty. He was the eldest son of King Yejong and Queen Sundeok, the daughter of Yi Ja-gyeom. His reign saw two major internal crise ...
(r. 1122–1146). It was completed in 1145 and relied not only on earlier Chinese histories for source material, but also on the ''
Hwarang Segi
Hwarang segi (lit. ''Annals of Hwarang'' or ''Generations of the Hwarang'') was a historical record of the Hwarang (lit. flower boys but referring to an elite warrior group of male youth) of the Silla kingdom in ancient Korea. It is said to have be ...
'' written by the
Silla
Silla or Shilla (57 BCE – 935 CE) ( , Old Korean: Syera, Old Japanese: Siraki2) was a Korean kingdom located on the southern and central parts of the Korean Peninsula. Silla, along with Baekje and Goguryeo, formed the Three Kingdoms ...
historian
Kim Daemun in the 8th century. The latter work is now lost.
China
In 1084 the
Song dynasty
The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...
official
Sima Guang
Sima Guang (17 November 1019 – 11 October 1086), courtesy name Junshi, was a Chinese historian, politician, and writer. He was a high-ranking Song dynasty scholar-official who authored the monumental history book ''Zizhi Tongjian''. Sima was ...
completed the ''
Zizhi Tongjian
''Zizhi Tongjian'' () is a pioneering reference work in Chinese historiography, published in 1084 AD during the Northern Song (960–1127), Northern Song dynasty in the form of a chronicle recording Chinese history from 403 BC to 959&n ...
'' (Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government), which laid out the entire history of China from the beginning of the
Warring States period
The Warring States period () was an era in ancient Chinese history characterized by warfare, as well as bureaucratic and military reforms and consolidation. It followed the Spring and Autumn period and concluded with the Qin wars of conquest ...
(403 BCE) to the end of the
Five Dynasties period (959 CE) in chronological annals form, rather than in the traditional annals-biography form. This work is considered much more accessible than the "Official Histories" for the
Six dynasties
Six Dynasties (; 220–589 or 222–589) is a collective term for six Han-ruled Chinese dynasties that existed from the early 3rd century AD to the late 6th century AD. The Six Dynasties period overlapped with the era of the Sixteen Kingdoms ...
,
Tang dynasty
The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdom ...
, and
Five Dynasties
The Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (), from 907 to 979, was an era of political upheaval and division in 10th-century History of China#Imperial China, Imperial China. Five Dynasties in Chinese history, dynastic states quickly succeeded ...
, and in practice superseded those works in the mind of the general reader.
The great Song Neo-Confucian
Zhu Xi
Zhu Xi (; ; October 18, 1130 – April 23, 1200), formerly romanized Chu Hsi, was a Chinese calligrapher, historian, philosopher, poet, and politician during the Song dynasty. Zhu was influential in the development of Neo-Confucianism. He con ...
found the Mirror to be overly long for the average reader, as well as too morally nihilist, and therefore prepared a didactic summary of it called the ''
Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu The ''Zizhi Tongjian Gangmu'' (資治通鑑綱目, "Outline and Details of the '' Comprehensive Mirror in Aid of Government''"), also known as the ''Tongjian Gangmu'' or ''Gangmu'', is an 1172 Chinese history book based on Sima Guang's 1084 book '' ...
'' (Digest of the Comprehensive Mirror to Aid in Government), posthumously published in 1219. It reduced the original's 249 chapters to just 59, and for the rest of imperial Chinese history would be the first history book most people ever read.
South East Asia
Philippines
Historiography of the Philippines refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the
Philippines
The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no),
* bik, Republika kan Filipinas
* ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas
* cbk, República de Filipinas
* hil, Republ ...
. It includes historical and archival research and writing on the history of the Philippine archipelago including the islands of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. The Philippine archipelago was part of many empires before the Spanish Empire arrived in the 16th century.
Before the arrival of Spanish colonial powers, the Philippines did not actually exist. Southeast Asia is classified as part of the
Indosphere
Indosphere is a term coined by the linguist James Matisoff for areas of Indian linguistic and cultural influence in South Asia and Southeast Asia. It is commonly used in areal linguistics in contrast with Sinosphere.
Influence
The Tibeto-Burma ...
and the
Sinosphere
The East Asian cultural sphere, also known as the Sinosphere, the Sinic world, the Sinitic world, the Chinese cultural sphere, the Chinese character sphere encompasses multiple countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia that were historically ...
. The archipelago had direct contact with
China during the
Song dynasty
The Song dynasty (; ; 960–1279) was an imperial dynasty of China that began in 960 and lasted until 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song following his usurpation of the throne of the Later Zhou. The Song conquered the rest ...
(960-1279), and was a part of the
Srivijaya and
Majapahit empires.
The pre-colonial Philippines widely used the
Abugida
An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel n ...
system in writing and seals on documents, though it was for communication and no recorded writings of early literature or history. Ancient Filipinos usually wrote documents on bamboo, bark, and leaves, which did not survive, unlike inscriptions on clay, metal, and ivory did, such as the
Laguna Copperplate Inscription
The Laguna copperplate inscription ( tl, Inskripsyon sa binatbat na tanso ng Laguna, literal translation: ''Inscription on flattened copper of Laguna'') is an official acquittance inscribed onto a copper plate in the Shaka year 822 (Gregorian ...
and
Butuan Ivory Seal. The discovery of the
Butuan Ivory Seal also proves the use of paper documents in ancient Philippines.
The arrival of the Spanish colonizers, pre-colonial Filipino manuscripts and documents were gathered and burned to eliminate pagan beliefs. This has been the burden of historians in the accumulation of data and the development of theories that gave historians many aspects of Philippine history that were left unexplained. The interplay of pre-colonial events and the use of secondary sources written by historians to evaluate the primary sources, do not provide a critical examination of the methodology of the early Philippine historical study.
Enlightenment
![Buste de Voltaire](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/de/Buste_de_Voltaire.jpg)
During the
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...
, the modern development of historiography through the application of scrupulous methods began. Among the many Italians who contributed to this were
Leonardo Bruni
Leonardo Bruni (or Leonardo Aretino; c. 1370 – March 9, 1444) was an Italian humanist, historian and statesman, often recognized as the most important humanist historian of the early Renaissance. He has been called the first modern historian. ...
(c. 1370–1444),
Francesco Guicciardini
Francesco Guicciardini (; 6 March 1483 – 22 May 1540) was an Italian historian and statesman. A friend and critic of Niccolò Machiavelli, he is considered one of the major political writers of the Italian Renaissance. In his masterpiece, ''Th ...
(1483–1540), and
Cesare Baronio
Cesare Baronio (as an author also known as Caesar Baronius; 30 August 1538 – 30 June 1607) was an Italian cardinal and historian of the Catholic Church. His best-known works are his ''Annales Ecclesiastici'' ("Ecclesiastical Annals"), whi ...
(1538–1607).
Voltaire
French ''
philosophe
The ''philosophes'' () were the intellectuals of the 18th-century Enlightenment.Kishlansky, Mark, ''et al.'' ''A Brief History of Western Civilization: The Unfinished Legacy, volume II: Since 1555.'' (5th ed. 2007). Few were primarily philosophe ...
''
Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet (; 21 November 169430 May 1778) was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher. Known by his ''nom de plume'' M. de Voltaire (; also ; ), he was famous for his wit, and his criticism of Christianity—es ...
(1694–1778) had an enormous influence on the development of historiography during the Age of Enlightenment through his demonstration of fresh new ways to look at the past. Guillaume de Syon argues:
Voltaire's best-known histories are ''
The Age of Louis XIV
''The Age of Louis XIV'' (''Le Siècle de Louis XIV'', also translated ''The Century of Louis XIV'') is a historical work by the French historian, philosopher, and writer Voltaire, first published in 1751. Through it, the French 17th century becam ...
'' (1751), and his ''
Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations'' (1756). He broke from the tradition of narrating diplomatic and military events, and emphasized customs, social history and achievements in the arts and sciences. He was the first scholar to make a serious attempt to write the history of the world, eliminating theological frameworks, and emphasizing economics, culture and political history. Although he repeatedly warned against political bias on the part of the historian, he did not miss many opportunities to expose the intolerance and frauds of the church over the ages. Voltaire advised scholars that anything contradicting the normal course of nature was not to be believed. Although he found evil in the historical record, he fervently believed reason and educating the illiterate masses would lead to progress.
Voltaire explains his view of historiography in his article on "History" in Diderot's ''
Encyclopédie
''Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers'' (English: ''Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts''), better known as ''Encyclopédie'', was a general encyclopedia publis ...
'': "One demands of modern historians more details, better ascertained facts, precise dates, more attention to customs, laws, mores, commerce, finance, agriculture, population." Already in 1739 he had written: "My chief object is not political or military history, it is the history of the arts, of commerce, of civilization – in a word, – of the human mind."
Voltaire's histories used the values of the Enlightenment to evaluate the past. He helped free historiography from antiquarianism,
Eurocentrism
Eurocentrism (also Eurocentricity or Western-centrism)
is a worldview that is centered on Western civilization or a biased view that favors it over non-Western civilizations. The exact scope of Eurocentrism varies from the entire Western worl ...
, religious intolerance and a concentration on great men, diplomacy, and warfare.
Peter Gay says Voltaire wrote "very good history", citing his "scrupulous concern for truths", "careful sifting of evidence", "intelligent selection of what is important", "keen sense of drama", and "grasp of the fact that a whole civilization is a unit of study".
David Hume
At the same time, philosopher
David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment phil ...
was having a similar effect on the study of history in
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It i ...
. In 1754 he published ''
The History of England'', a 6-volume work which extended "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688". Hume adopted a similar scope to Voltaire in his history; as well as the history of Kings, Parliaments, and armies, he examined the history of culture, including literature and science, as well. His short biographies of leading scientists explored the process of scientific change and he developed new ways of seeing scientists in the context of their times by looking at how they interacted with society and each other – he paid special attention to
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban (; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626), also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Bacon led the advancement of both ...
,
Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle (; 25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was an Anglo-Irish natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, alchemist and inventor. Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of ...
,
Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1726/27) was an English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian, and author (described in his time as a " natural philosopher"), widely recognised as one of the grea ...
and
William Harvey
William Harvey (1 April 1578 – 3 June 1657) was an English physician who made influential contributions in anatomy and physiology. He was the first known physician to describe completely, and in detail, the systemic circulation and propert ...
.
He also argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past, and concluded that after considerable fluctuation, England at the time of his writing had achieved "the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind".
Edward Gibbon
![Edward Gibbon by Henry Walton cleaned](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Edward_Gibbon_by_Henry_Walton_cleaned.jpg)
The apex of Enlightenment history was reached with
Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon (; 8 May 173716 January 1794) was an English historian, writer, and member of parliament. His most important work, '' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'', published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, is ...
's monumental six-volume work, ''
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'' is a six-volume work by the English historian Edward Gibbon. It traces Western civilization (as well as the Islamic and Mongolian conquests) from the height of the Roman Empire to th ...
'', published on 17 February 1776. Because of its relative objectivity and heavy use of
primary source
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...
s, its methodology became a model for later historians. This has led to Gibbon being called the first "modern historian". The book sold impressively, earning its author a total of about £9000. Biographer
Leslie Stephen
Sir Leslie Stephen (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English author, critic, historian, biographer, and mountaineer, and the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Life
Sir Leslie Stephen came from a distinguished intellect ...
wrote that thereafter, "His fame was as rapid as it has been lasting."
Gibbon's work has been praised for its style, its piquant epigrams and its effective irony.
Winston Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 187424 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War, and again from ...
memorably noted, "I set out upon ... Gibbon's ''Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire''
ndwas immediately dominated both by the story and the style. ... I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all." Gibbon was pivotal in the secularizing and 'desanctifying' of history, remarking, for example, on the "want of truth and common sense" of biographies composed by
Saint Jerome
Jerome (; la, Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus; grc-gre, Εὐσέβιος Σωφρόνιος Ἱερώνυμος; – 30 September 420), also known as Jerome of Stridon, was a Christian priest, confessor, theologian, and historian; he is co ...
. Unusually for an 18th-century historian, Gibbon was never content with secondhand accounts when the primary sources were accessible (though most of these were drawn from well-known printed editions). He said, "I have always endeavoured to draw from the fountain-head; that my curiosity, as well as a sense of duty, has always urged me to study the originals; and that, if they have sometimes eluded my search, I have carefully marked the secondary evidence, on whose faith a passage or a fact were reduced to depend." In this insistence upon the importance of primary sources, Gibbon broke new ground in the methodical study of history:
In accuracy, thoroughness, lucidity, and comprehensive grasp of a vast subject, the 'History' is unsurpassable. It is the one English history which may be regarded as definitive. ... Whatever its shortcomings the book is artistically imposing as well as historically unimpeachable as a vast panorama of a great period.
19th century
The tumultuous events surrounding the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
inspired much of the historiography and analysis of the early 19th century. Interest in the 1688
Glorious Revolution was also rekindled by the
Great Reform Act
The Representation of the People Act 1832 (also known as the 1832 Reform Act, Great Reform Act or First Reform Act) was an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom (indexed as 2 & 3 Will. IV c. 45) that introduced major changes to the electo ...
of 1832 in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
. Nineteenth century historiography, especially among American historians, featured conflicting viewpoints that represented the times. According to 20th-century historian Richard Hofstadter:
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas Carlyle (4 December 17955 February 1881) was a Scottish essayist, historian and philosopher. A leading writer of the Victorian era, he exerted a profound influence on 19th-century art, literature and philosophy.
Born in Ecclefechan, Dum ...
published his three-volume ''
The French Revolution: A History'', in 1837. The first volume was accidentally burned by
John Stuart Mill's maid. Carlyle rewrote it from scratch. Carlyle's style of historical writing stressed the immediacy of action, often using the present tense. He emphasised the role of forces of the spirit in history and thought that chaotic events demanded what he called 'heroes' to take control over the competing forces erupting within society. He considered the dynamic forces of history as being the hopes and aspirations of people that took the form of ideas, and were often ossified into ideologies. Carlyle's ''The French Revolution'' was written in a highly unorthodox style, far removed from the neutral and detached tone of the tradition of Gibbon. Carlyle presented the history as dramatic events unfolding in the present as though he and the reader were participants on the streets of Paris at the famous events. Carlyle's invented style was epic poetry combined with philosophical treatise. It is rarely read or cited in the last century.
French historians: Michelet and Taine
![Hippolyte taine](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Hippolyte_taine.jpg)
In his main work ''Histoire de France'' (1855), French historian
Jules Michelet (1798–1874) coined the term
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
(meaning "rebirth" in
French), as a period in Europe's cultural history that represented a break from the Middle Ages, creating a modern understanding of humanity and its place in the world. The 19-volume work covered French history from
Charlemagne
Charlemagne ( , ) or Charles the Great ( la, Carolus Magnus; german: Karl der Große; 2 April 747 – 28 January 814), a member of the Carolingian dynasty, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first ...
to the outbreak of the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
. His inquiry into manuscript and printed authorities was most laborious, but his lively imagination, and his strong religious and political prejudices, made him regard all things from a singularly personal point of view.
Michelet was one of the first historians to shift the emphasis of history to the common people, rather than the leaders and institutions of the country. He had a decisive impact on scholars. Gayana Jurkevich argues that led by Michelet:
Hippolyte Taine
Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (, 21 April 1828 – 5 March 1893) was a French historian, critic and philosopher. He was the chief theoretical influence on French naturalism, a major proponent of sociological positivism and one of the first practition ...
(1828–1893), although unable to secure an academic position, was the chief theoretical influence of French
naturalism, a major proponent of
sociological positivism
Positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning ''a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. G ...
, and one of the first practitioners of
historicist
Historicism is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices (including ideas and beliefs), by studying their history, that is, by studying the process by which they came about. The term is widely u ...
criticism. He pioneered the idea of "the milieu" as an active historical force which amalgamated geographical, psychological, and social factors. Historical writing for him was a search for general laws. His brilliant style kept his writing in circulation long after his theoretical approaches were passé.
Cultural and constitutional history
One of the major progenitors of the history of
culture
Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups ...
and
art
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
, was the Swiss historian
Jacob Burckhardt.
Siegfried Giedion
Sigfried Giedion (sometimes misspelled Siegfried Giedion; 14 April 1888, Prague – 10 April 1968, Zürich) was a Bohemian-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture. His ideas and books, ''Space, Time and Architecture'', and ''Mechaniza ...
described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the
Renaissance
The Renaissance ( , ) , from , with the same meanings. is a period in European history
The history of Europe is traditionally divided into four time periods: prehistoric Europe (prior to about 800 BC), classical antiquity (800 BC to AD ...
, he first showed how a period should be treated in its entirety, with regard not only for its painting, sculpture and architecture, but for the social institutions of its daily life as well."
His most famous work was ''The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy'', published in 1860; it was the most influential interpretation of the Italian Renaissance in the nineteenth century and is still widely read. According to
John Lukacs
John Adalbert Lukacs (; Hungarian: ''Lukács János Albert''; 31 January 1924 – 6 May 2019) was a Hungarian-born American historian and author of more than thirty books. Lukacs was Roman Catholic. Lukacs described himself as a reactionary.
L ...
, he was the first master of cultural history, which seeks to describe the spirit and the forms of expression of a particular age, a particular people, or a particular place. His innovative approach to historical research stressed the importance of art and its inestimable value as a primary source for the study of history. He was one of the first historians to rise above the narrow nineteenth-century notion that "history is past politics and politics current history.
By the mid-19th century, scholars were beginning to analyse the history of institutional change, particularly the development of constitutional government.
William Stubbs
William Stubbs (21 June 182522 April 1901) was an English historian and Anglican bishop. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford between 1866 and 1884. He was Bishop of Chester from 1884 to 1889 and Bishop of O ...
's ''Constitutional History of England'' (3 vols., 1874–1878) was an important influence on this developing field. The work traced the development of the English constitution from the Teutonic invasions of Britain until 1485, and marked a distinct step in the advance of English historical learning. He argued that the theory of the unity and continuity of history should not remove distinctions between ancient and modern history. He believed that, though work on ancient history is a useful preparation for the study of modern history, either may advantageously be studied apart. He was a good
palaeographer
Palaeography ( UK) or paleography ( US; ultimately from grc-gre, , ''palaiós'', "old", and , ''gráphein'', "to write") is the study of historic writing systems and the deciphering and dating of historical manuscripts, including the analysi ...
, and excelled in textual criticism, in examination of authorship, and other such matters, while his vast erudition and retentive memory made him second to none in interpretation and exposition.
Von Ranke and professionalization in Germany
![Leopold Von Ranke 1877](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2a/Leopold_Von_Ranke_1877.jpg)
The modern academic study of history and methods of historiography were pioneered in 19th-century German universities, especially the
University of Göttingen
The University of Göttingen, officially the Georg August University of Göttingen, (german: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, known informally as Georgia Augusta) is a public research university in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Founded ...
.
Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke (; 21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history. He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of ...
(1795–1886) at Berlin was a pivotal influence in this regard, and was the founder of modern source-based history. According to Caroline Hoefferle, "Ranke was probably the most important historian to shape historical profession as it emerged in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century."
Specifically, he implemented the seminar teaching method in his classroom, and focused on archival research and analysis of historical documents. Beginning with his first book in 1824, the ''History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514'', Ranke used an unusually wide variety of sources for a historian of the age, including "memoirs, diaries, personal and formal missives, government documents, diplomatic dispatches and first-hand accounts of eye-witnesses". Over a career that spanned much of the century, Ranke set the standards for much of later historical writing, introducing such ideas as reliance on
primary source
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...
s, an emphasis on
narrative history
Narrative history is the practice of writing history in a story-based form. It tends to entail history-writing based on reconstructing series of short-term events, and ever since the influential work of Leopold von Ranke on professionalising histo ...
and especially international politics (). Sources had to be solid, not speculations and rationalizations. His credo was to write history the way it was. He insisted on primary sources with proven authenticity.
Ranke also rejected the 'teleological approach' to history, which traditionally viewed each period as inferior to the period which follows. In Ranke's view, the historian had to understand a period on its own terms, and seek to find only the general ideas which animated every period of history. In 1831 and at the behest of the
Prussia
Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an ...
n government, Ranke founded and edited the first historical journal in the world, called .
Another important German thinker was
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (; ; 27 August 1770 – 14 November 1831) was a German philosopher. He is one of the most important figures in German idealism and one of the founding figures of modern Western philosophy. His influence extends ...
, whose theory of historical progress ran counter to Ranke's approach. In Hegel's own words, his philosophical theory of "World history ... represents the development of the spirit's consciousness of its own
freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom." This realization is seen by studying the various cultures that have developed over the millennia, and trying to understand the way that freedom has worked itself out through them:
World history is the record of the spirit's efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself. The Orientals do not know that the spirit or man as such are free in themselves. And because they do not know that, they are not themselves free. They only know that One is free. ... The consciousness of freedom first awoke among the Greeks
The Greeks or Hellenes (; el, Έλληνες, ''Éllines'' ) are an ethnic group and nation indigenous to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea regions, namely Greece, Cyprus, Albania, Italy, Turkey, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, oth ...
, and they were accordingly free; but, like the Romans, they only knew that Some, and not all men as such, are free. ... The Germanic nations, with the rise of Christianity
Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...
, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...
introduced the concept of
historical materialism
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborat ...
into the study of world historical development. In his conception, the economic conditions and dominant modes of production determined the structure of society at that point. In his view five successive stages in the development of material conditions would occur in
Western Europe
Western Europe is the western region of Europe. The region's countries and territories vary depending on context.
The concept of "the West" appeared in Europe in juxtaposition to "the East" and originally applied to the ancient Mediterranean ...
. The first stage was
primitive communism where property was shared and there was no concept of "leadership". This progressed to a
slave society where the idea of
class
Class or The Class may refer to:
Common uses not otherwise categorized
* Class (biology), a taxonomic rank
* Class (knowledge representation), a collection of individuals or objects
* Class (philosophy), an analytical concept used differentl ...
emerged and the
State
State may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media Literature
* ''State Magazine'', a monthly magazine published by the U.S. Department of State
* ''The State'' (newspaper), a daily newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, United States
* ''Our S ...
developed.
Feudalism
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was the combination of the legal, economic, military, cultural and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe between the 9th and 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structur ...
was characterized by an
aristocracy working in partnership with a
theocracy
Theocracy is a form of government in which one or more deities are recognized as supreme ruling authorities, giving divine guidance to human intermediaries who manage the government's daily affairs.
Etymology
The word theocracy originates fr ...
and the emergence of the
nation-state.
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include capital accumulation, competitive markets, price system, priva ...
appeared after the bourgeois revolution when the capitalists (or their merchant predecessors) overthrew the feudal system and established a
market economy, with
private property and
parliamentary democracy
A parliamentary system, or parliamentarian democracy, is a system of democratic governance of a state (or subordinate entity) where the executive derives its democratic legitimacy from its ability to command the support ("confidence") of the ...
. Marx then predicted the eventual proletarian revolution that would result in the attainment of
socialism
Socialism is a left-wing Economic ideology, economic philosophy and Political movement, movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to Private prop ...
, followed by
communism
Communism (from Latin la, communis, lit=common, universal, label=none) is a far-left sociopolitical, philosophical, and economic ideology and current within the socialist movement whose goal is the establishment of a communist society, a ...
, where property would be communally owned.
Previous historians had focused on cyclical events of the rise and decline of rulers and nations. Process of
nationalization of history, as part of
national revivals in the 19th century, resulted with separation of "one's own" history from common
universal history
A universal history is a work aiming at the presentation of a history of all of mankind as a whole, coherent unit. A universal chronicle or world chronicle typically traces history from the beginning of written information about the past up to t ...
by such way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that constructed history as history of a nation.
A new discipline,
sociology
Sociology is a social science that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. It uses various methods of empirical investigation an ...
, emerged in the late 19th century and analyzed and compared these perspectives on a larger scale.
Macaulay and Whig history
![Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron Macaulay](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Thomas_Babington_Macaulay%2C_Baron_Macaulay.jpg)
The term "
Whig history
Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present". The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy ...
", coined by
Herbert Butterfield
Sir Herbert Butterfield (7 October 1900 – 20 July 1979) was an English historian and philosopher of history, who was Regius Professor of Modern History and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge. He is remembered chiefly for a shor ...
in his short book ''The Whig Interpretation of History'' in 1931, means the approach to historiography which presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of
liberal democracy
Liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under an indirect democratic form of government. It is characterized by elections between multiple distinct political parties, a separation of powers into ...
and
constitutional monarchy
A constitutional monarchy, parliamentary monarchy, or democratic monarchy is a form of monarchy in which the monarch exercises their authority in accordance with a constitution and is not alone in decision making. Constitutional monarchies dif ...
. In general, Whig historians emphasized the rise of
constitutional government
A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed.
When these princip ...
,
personal freedom
Civil liberties are guarantees and freedoms that governments commit not to abridge, either by constitution, legislation, or judicial interpretation, without due process. Though the scope of the term differs between countries, civil liberties ma ...
s and
scientific progress
Progress is the movement towards a refined, improved, or otherwise desired state. In the context of progressivism, it refers to the proposition that advancements in technology, science, and social organization have resulted, and by extension wi ...
. The term has been also applied widely in historical disciplines outside of
British history
The British Isles have witnessed intermittent periods of competition and cooperation between the people that occupy the various parts of Great Britain, the Isle of Man, Ireland, the Bailiwick of Guernsey, the Bailiwick of Jersey and ...
(the
history of science, for example) to criticize any
teleological
Teleology (from and )Partridge, Eric. 1977''Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English'' London: Routledge, p. 4187. or finalityDubray, Charles. 2020 912Teleology" In ''The Catholic Encyclopedia'' 14. New York: Robert Appleton ...
(or goal-directed), hero-based, and
transhistorical
Transhistoricity is the quality of holding throughout human history, not merely within the frame of reference of a particular form of society at a particular stage of historical development. An entity or concept that has transhistoricity is said to ...
narrative.
Paul Rapin de Thoyras's history of England, published in 1723, became "the classic Whig history" for the first half of the 18th century. It was later supplanted by the immensely popular ''
The History of England'' by
David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment phil ...
. Whig historians emphasized the achievements of the
Glorious Revolution of 1688. This included
James Mackintosh
Sir James Mackintosh FRS FRSE (24 October 1765 – 30 May 1832) was a Scottish jurist, Whig politician and Whig historian. His studies and sympathies embraced many interests. He was trained as a doctor and barrister, and worked also as a jo ...
's ''History of the Revolution in England in 1688'',
William Blackstone
Sir William Blackstone (10 July 1723 – 14 February 1780) was an English jurist, judge and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the ''Commentaries on the Laws of England''. Born into a middle-class family ...
's ''
Commentaries on the Laws of England'', and
Henry Hallam
Henry Hallam (9 July 1777 – 21 January 1859) was an English historian. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he practised as a barrister on the Oxford circuit for some years before turning to history. His major works were ''View of t ...
's ''Constitutional History of England''.
The most famous exponent of 'Whiggery' was
Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, (; 25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician, who served as the Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841, and as the Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1 ...
. His writings are famous for their ringing prose and for their confident, sometimes dogmatic, emphasis on a progressive model of British history, according to which the country threw off superstition, autocracy and confusion to create a balanced constitution and a forward-looking culture combined with freedom of belief and expression. This model of human progress has been called the
Whig interpretation of history. He published the first volumes of his most famous work of history, ''
The History of England from the Accession of James II
''The History of England from the Accession of James the Second'' (1848) is the full title of the five-volume work by Lord Macaulay (1800–1859) more generally known as ''The History of England''. It covers the 17-year period from 1685 to 1702, en ...
'', in 1848. It proved an immediate success and replaced Hume's history to become the new orthodoxy. His 'Whiggish convictions' are spelled out in his first chapter:
His legacy continues to be controversial;
Gertrude Himmelfarb
Gertrude Himmelfarb (August 8, 1922 – December 30, 2019), also known as Bea Kristol, was an American historian. She was a leader of conservative interpretations of history and historiography. She wrote extensively on intellectual history, ...
wrote that "most professional historians have long since given up reading Macaulay, as they have given up writing the kind of history he wrote and thinking about history as he did." However, J. R. Western wrote that: "Despite its age and blemishes, Macaulay's ''History of England'' has still to be superseded by a full-scale modern history of the period".
The Whig consensus was steadily undermined during the post-
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...
re-evaluation of European history, and Butterfield's critique exemplified this trend. Intellectuals no longer believed the world was automatically getting better and better. Subsequent generations of academic historians have similarly rejected Whig history because of its
presentist and teleological assumption that history is driving toward some sort of goal. Other criticized 'Whig' assumptions included viewing the British system as the apex of human political development, assuming that political figures in the past held current political beliefs (
anachronism), considering British history as a march of progress with inevitable outcomes and presenting political figures of the past as heroes, who advanced the cause of this political progress, or villains, who sought to hinder its inevitable triumph. J. Hart says "a Whig interpretation requires human heroes and villains in the story."
20th century
20th-century historiography in major countries is characterized by a move to universities and academic research centers. Popular history continued to be written by self-educated amateurs, but scholarly history increasingly became the province of PhD's trained in research seminars at a university. The training emphasized working with primary sources in archives. Seminars taught graduate students how to review the historiography of the topics, so that they could understand the conceptual frameworks currently in use, and the criticisms regarding their strengths and weaknesses. Western Europe and the United States took leading roles in this development. The emergence of
area studies
Area studies (also known as regional studies) are interdisciplinary fields of research and scholarship pertaining to particular geographical, national/ federal, or cultural regions. The term exists primarily as a general description for what ...
of other regions also developed historiographical practices.
France: ''Annales'' school
![Marc Bloch](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Marc_Bloch.jpg)
The French
''Annales'' school radically changed the focus of historical research in France during the 20th century by stressing long-term social history, rather than political or diplomatic themes. The school emphasized the use of quantification and the paying of special attention to geography.
The ''Annales d'histoire économique et sociale'' journal was founded in 1929 in
Strasbourg by
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (; ; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France ov ...
and
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Paul Victor Febvre (, ; 22 July 1878 – 11 September 1956) was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He was the initial editor of the '' Encyclopédie française'' together wi ...
. These authors, the former a medieval historian and the latter an early modernist, quickly became associated with the distinctive ''Annales'' approach, which combined geography, history, and the sociological approaches of the
Année Sociologique (many members of which were their colleagues at Strasbourg) to produce an approach which rejected the predominant emphasis on politics, diplomacy and war of many 19th and early 20th-century historians as spearheaded by historians whom Febvre called Les Sorbonnistes. Instead, they pioneered an approach to a study of long-term historical structures (''la
longue durée
The ''longue durée'' (; en, the long term) is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called ''histoire événementielle'' ("evental history", ...
'') over events and political transformations. Geography, material culture, and what later Annalistes called ''mentalités'', or the psychology of the epoch, are also characteristic areas of study. The goal of the ''Annales'' was to undo the work of the ''Sorbonnistes'', to turn French historians away from the narrowly political and diplomatic toward the new vistas in social and economic history. For early modern Mexican history, the work of
Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (; ; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France ov ...
's student
François Chevalier François Chevalier may refer to:
* François Chevalier (cyclist) (1893–1983), a French cyclist
* François Chevalier (historian) (1914–2012), a French historian
*François Chevalier, a pseudonym of the composer Lee Orean Smith (1874–194 ...
on the formation of landed estates (
haciendas
An ''hacienda'' ( or ; or ) is an estate (or ''finca''), similar to a Roman ''latifundium'', in Spain and the former Spanish Empire. With origins in Andalusia, ''haciendas'' were variously plantations (perhaps including animals or orchards), ...
) from the sixteenth century to the seventeenth had a major impact on Mexican history and historiography, setting off an important debate about whether landed estates were basically feudal or capitalistic.
An eminent member of this school,
Georges Duby
Georges Duby (7 October 1919 – 3 December 1996) was a French historian who specialised in the social and economic history of the Middle Ages. He ranks among the most influential medieval historians of the twentieth century and was one of Franc ...
, described his approach to history as one that
relegated the sensational to the sidelines and was reluctant to give a simple accounting of events, but strived on the contrary to pose and solve problems and, neglecting surface disturbances, to observe the long and medium-term evolution of economy, society and civilisation.
The Annalistes, especially
Lucien Febvre
Lucien Paul Victor Febvre (, ; 22 July 1878 – 11 September 1956) was a French historian best known for the role he played in establishing the Annales School of history. He was the initial editor of the '' Encyclopédie française'' together wi ...
, advocated a ''histoire totale'', or ''histoire tout court'', a complete study of a historical problem.
The second era of the school was led by
Fernand Braudel
Fernand Braudel (; 24 August 1902 – 27 November 1985) was a French historian and leader of the Annales School. His scholarship focused on three main projects: ''The Mediterranean'' (1923–49, then 1949–66), ''Civilization and Capitalism'' ...
and was very influential throughout the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean region in the era of
Philip II of Spain. Braudel developed the idea, often associated with Annalistes, of different modes of historical time: ''l'histoire quasi immobile'' (motionless history) of historical geography, the history of social, political and economic structures (''la
longue durée
The ''longue durée'' (; en, the long term) is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called ''histoire événementielle'' ("evental history", ...
''), and the history of men and events, in the context of their structures. His 'longue durée' approach stressed slow, and often imperceptible effects of space, climate and technology on the actions of human beings in the past. The ''Annales'' historians, after living through two world wars and major political upheavals in France, were deeply uncomfortable with the notion that multiple ruptures and discontinuities created history. They preferred to stress slow change and the longue durée. They paid special attention to geography, climate, and demography as long-term factors. They considered the continuities of the deepest structures were central to history, beside which upheavals in institutions or the superstructure of social life were of little significance, for history lies beyond the reach of conscious actors, especially the will of revolutionaries.
Noting the political upheavals in Europe and especially in France in 1968,
Eric Hobsbawm argued that "in France the virtual hegemony of Braudelian history and the ''Annales'' came to an end after 1968, and the international influence of the journal dropped steeply." Multiple responses were attempted by the school. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe. By the time of crisis the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world. Influence indeed spread out from Paris, but few new ideas came in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history. However, the ''Annales'' ignored the developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political and demographic research.
Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided soci ...
developed as a school of historiography influenced by the chief tenets of
Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
, including the centrality of
social class and
economic
An economy is an area of the production, distribution and trade, as well as consumption of goods and services. In general, it is defined as a social domain that emphasize the practices, discourses, and material expressions associated with the ...
constraints in determining historical outcomes (
historical materialism
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborat ...
).
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ,["Engels"](_blank)
'' The Peasant War in Germany
''The Peasant War in Germany'' (German: ''Der deutsche Bauernkrieg'') by Friedrich Engels is a short account of the early-16th-century uprisings known as the German Peasants' War (1524–1525). It was written by Engels in London during the sum ...
'', which analysed social warfare in early Protestant Germany in terms of emerging capitalist classes. Although it lacked a rigorous engagement with archival sources, it indicated an early interest in
history from below
A people's history, or history from below, is a type of historical narrative which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective of common people rather than leaders. There is an emphasis on disenfranchised, the oppressed, the p ...
and class analysis, and it attempts a dialectical analysis. Another treatise of Engels, ''
The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844
''The Condition of the Working Class in England'' (german: Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England) is an 1845 book by the German philosopher Friedrich Engels, a study of the industrial working class in Victorian England. Engels' first book, ...
'', was salient in creating the
socialist
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the ...
impetus in British politics from then on, e.g. the
Fabian Society
The Fabian Society is a British socialist organisation whose purpose is to advance the principles of social democracy and democratic socialism via gradualist and reformist effort in democracies, rather than by revolutionary overthrow. T ...
.
R. H. Tawney
Richard Henry Tawney (30 November 1880 – 16 January 1962) was an English economic historian, social critic, ethical socialist,Noel W. Thompson. ''Political economy and the Labour Party: the economics of democratic socialism, 1884-2005''. 2nd ...
was an early historian working in this tradition. ''The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century'' (1912) and ''Religion and the Rise of Capitalism'' (1926), reflected his ethical concerns and preoccupations in economic history. He was profoundly interested in the issue of the enclosure of land in the English countryside in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in
Max Weber's thesis on the connection between the appearance of
Protestantism
Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that follows the theological tenets of the Protestant Reformation, a movement that began seeking to reform the Catholic Church from within in the 16th century against what its followers perceived to b ...
and the rise of capitalism. His belief in the rise of the gentry in the century before the outbreak of the Civil War in England provoked the 'Storm over the Gentry' in which his methods were subjected to severe criticisms by
Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of ...
and John Cooper.
Historiography in the Soviet Union
Soviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union (USSR). In the USSR, the study of history was marked by restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet historiography i ...
was greatly influenced by Marxist historiography, as
historical materialism
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborat ...
was extended into the Soviet version of
dialectical materialism.
A circle of historians inside the
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) formed in 1946 and became a highly influential cluster of
British
British may refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* British people, nationals or natives of the United Kingdom, British Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies.
** Britishness, the British identity and common culture
* British English, ...
Marxist historians
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided so ...
, who contributed to
history from below
A people's history, or history from below, is a type of historical narrative which attempts to account for historical events from the perspective of common people rather than leaders. There is an emphasis on disenfranchised, the oppressed, the p ...
and class structure in early capitalist society. While some members of the group (most notably
Christopher Hill and
E. P. Thompson) left the CPGB after the
1956 Hungarian Revolution
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (23 October – 10 November 1956; hu, 1956-os forradalom), also known as the Hungarian Uprising, was a countrywide revolution against the government of the Hungarian People's Republic (1949–1989) and the Hung ...
, the common points of British Marxist historiography continued in their works. They placed a great emphasis on the subjective determination of history.
Christopher Hill's studies on 17th-century English history were widely acknowledged and recognised as representative of this school.
His books include ''Puritanism and Revolution'' (1958), ''Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution'' (1965 and revised in 1996), ''The Century of Revolution'' (1961), ''AntiChrist in 17th-century England'' (1971), ''The World Turned Upside Down'' (1972) and many others.
E. P. Thompson pioneered the study of history from below in his work, ''
The Making of the English Working Class
''The Making of the English Working Class'' is a work of English social history written by E. P. Thompson, a New Left historian. It was first published in 1963 by Victor Gollancz Ltd, and republished in revised form in 1968 by Pelican, after ...
'', published in 1963. It focused on the forgotten history of the first working-class political left in the world in the late-18th and early-19th centuries. In his preface to this book, Thompson set out his approach to writing history from below:
Thompson's work was also significant because of the way he defined "class". He argued that class was not a structure, but a relationship that changed over time. He opened the gates for a generation of labor historians, such as
David Montgomery and
Herbert Gutman
Herbert George Gutman (1928–1985) was an American professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he wrote on slavery and labor history.
Early life and education
Gutman was born in 1928 to Jewish immigra ...
, who made similar studies of the American working classes.
Other important Marxist historians included
Eric Hobsbawm,
C. L. R. James
Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 31 May 1989),Fraser, C. Gerald, '' The New York Times'', 2 June 1989. who sometimes wrote under the pen-name J. R. Johnson, was a Trinidadian historian, journalist and Marxist. His works are i ...
,
Raphael Samuel
Raphael Elkan Samuel (26 December 19349 December 1996) was a British Marxist historian, described by Stuart Hall as "one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation". He was professor of history at the University of East L ...
,
A. L. Morton
Arthur Leslie Morton (4 July 1903 – 23 October 1987) was an English Marxist historian. He worked as an independent scholar; from 1946 onwards he was the Chair of the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). He is b ...
and
Brian Pearce
Brian Leonard Pearce (8 May 1915 – 25 November 2008) was a British Marxist political activist, historian, and translator. Adept and prolific in Russian-to-English translation, Pearce was regarded at the time of his death as "one of the most ...
.
Biography
Biography has been a major form of historiography since the days when
Plutarch
Plutarch (; grc-gre, Πλούταρχος, ''Ploútarchos''; ; – after AD 119) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, historian, biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. He is known primarily for hi ...
wrote the parallel lives of great Roman and Greek leaders. It is a field especially attractive to nonacademic historians, and often to the spouses or children of famous people, who have access to the trove of letters and documents. Academic historians tend to downplay biography because it pays too little attention to broad social, cultural, political and economic forces, and perhaps too much attention to popular psychology. The "
Great Man" tradition in Britain originated in the multi-volume ''
Dictionary of National Biography'' (which originated in 1882 and issued updates into the 1970s); it continues to this day in the new ''
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September ...
''. In the United States, the ''
Dictionary of American Biography
The ''Dictionary of American Biography'' was published in New York City by Charles Scribner's Sons under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
History
The dictionary was first proposed to the Council in 1920 by hi ...
'' was planned in the late 1920s and appeared with numerous supplements into the 1980s. It has now been displaced by the ''
American National Biography
The ''American National Biography'' (ANB) is a 24-volume biographical encyclopedia set that contains about 17,400 entries and 20 million words, first published in 1999 by Oxford University Press under the auspices of the American Council of Le ...
'' as well as numerous smaller historical encyclopedias that give thorough coverage to Great Persons. Bookstores do a thriving business in biographies, which sell far more copies than the esoteric monographs based on post-structuralism, cultural, racial or gender history.
Michael Holroyd says the last forty years "may be seen as a golden age of biography", but nevertheless calls it the "shallow end of history". Nicolas Barker argues that "more and more biographies command an ever larger readership", as he speculates that biography has come "to express the spirit of our age".
Daniel R. Meister argues that:
British debates
Marxist historian
E. H. Carr
Edward Hallett Carr (28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a British historian, diplomat, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography. Carr was best known for '' A History of Soviet Rus ...
developed a controversial theory of history in his 1961 book ''
What Is History?
''What Is History?'' is a 1961 non-fiction book by historian E. H. Carr on historiography. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history.
The book originated in a ...
'', which proved to be one of the most influential books ever written on the subject.
He presented a middle-of-the-road position between the empirical or (Rankean) view of history and
R. G. Collingwood's idealism, and rejected the empirical view of the historian's work being an accretion of "facts" that they have at their disposal as nonsense. He maintained that there is such a vast quantity of information that the historian always chooses the "facts" they decide to make use of. In Carr's famous example, he claimed that millions had crossed the Rubicon, but only Julius Caesar's crossing in 49 BC is declared noteworthy by historians.
[Huges-Warrington, p. 26] For this reason, Carr argued that
Leopold von Ranke
Leopold von Ranke (; 21 December 1795 – 23 May 1886) was a German historian and a founder of modern source-based history. He was able to implement the seminar teaching method in his classroom and focused on archival research and the analysis of ...
's famous dictum ''wie es eigentlich gewesen'' (show what actually happened) was wrong because it presumed that the "facts" influenced what the historian wrote, rather than the historian choosing what "facts of the past" they intended to turn into "historical facts". At the same time, Carr argued that the study of the facts may lead the historian to change his or her views. In this way, Carr argued that history was "an unending dialogue between the past and present".
Carr is held by some critics to have had a deterministic outlook in history.
[Huges-Warrington, p. 27. One of his first and most influential critics was the British philosopher, Michael Oakeshott, 'What is History?' (1961), in idem, ''What is History and Other Essays'' (Exeter, 2004), 325.] Others have modified or rejected this use of the label "determinist". He took a hostile view of those historians who stress the workings of chance and contingency in the workings of history. In Carr's view, no individual is truly free of the social environment in which they live, but contended that within those limitations, there was room, albeit very narrow room for people to make decisions that affect history. Carr emphatically contended that history was a
social science
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...
, not an
art
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
,
[Huges-Warrington, p. 28] because historians like scientists seek generalizations that helped to broaden the understanding of one's subject.
[
One of Carr's most forthright critics was ]Hugh Trevor-Roper
Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton (15 January 1914 – 26 January 2003) was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Trevor-Roper was a polemicist and essayist on a range of ...
, who argued that Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation. Trevor-Roper asserted that examining possible alternative outcomes of history was far from being a "parlour-game" was rather an essential part of the historians' work,[Trevor-Roper, p. 73] as only by considering all possible outcomes of a given situation could a historian properly understand the period.
The controversy inspired Sir Geoffrey Elton
Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and w ...
to write his 1967 book ''The Practice of History''. Elton criticized Carr for his "whimsical" distinction between the "historical facts" and the "facts of the past", arguing that it reflected "...an extraordinarily arrogant attitude both to the past and to the place of the historian studying it". Elton, instead, strongly defended the traditional methods of history and was also appalled by the inroads made by postmodernism. Elton saw the duty of historians as empirically gathering evidence and objectively analyzing what the evidence has to say. As a traditionalist, he placed great emphasis on the role of individuals in history instead of abstract, impersonal forces. Elton saw political history as the highest kind of history. Elton had no use for those who seek history to make myths, to create laws to explain the past, or to produce theories such as Marxism
Marxism is a left-wing to far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict and a dialectical ...
.
U.S. approaches
Classical and European history was part of the 19th-century grammar curriculum. American history became a topic later in the 19th century.
In the historiography of the United States, there were a series of major approaches in the 20th century. In 2009–2012, there were an average of 16,000 new academic history books published in the U.S. every year.
Progressive historians
From 1910 to the 1940s, "Progressive" historiography was dominant, especially in political studies. It stressed the central importance of class conflict in American history. Important leaders included Vernon L. Parrington, Carl L. Becker
Carl Lotus Becker (September 7, 1873 – April 10, 1945) was an American historian of the Age of Enlightenment in America and Europe.
Life
He was born in Waterloo, Iowa. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1893 as an undergraduate, an ...
, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., John Hicks, and C. Vann Woodward. The movement established a strong base at the History Department at the University of Wisconsin with Curtis Nettels, William Hesseltine, Merle Curti
Merle Eugene Curti (September 15, 1897 – March 9, 1996) was a leading American historian, who taught many graduate students at Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin, and was a leader in developing the fields of social history and ...
, Howard K. Beale, Merrill Jensen, Fred Harvey Harrington (who became the university president), William Appleman Williams
William Appleman Williams (June 12, 1921 – March 5, 1990) was one of the 20th century's most prominent revisionist historians of American diplomacy. He achieved the height of his influence while on the faculty of the department of history at th ...
, and a host of graduate students. Charles A. Beard was the most prominent representative with his "Beardian" approach that reached both scholars and the general public.
In covering the Civil War, Charles and Mary Beard did not find it useful to examine nationalism, unionism, states' rights, slavery, abolition or the motivations of soldiers in battle. Instead, they proclaimed it was a:
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote the ''Age of Jackson'' (1945), one of the last major books from this viewpoint. Schlesinger made Jackson a hero for his successful attacks on the Second Bank of the United States
The Second Bank of the United States was the second federally authorized Hamiltonian national bank in the United States. Located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the bank was chartered from February 1816 to January 1836.. The Bank's formal name, ...
. His own views were clear enough: "Moved typically by personal and class, rarely by public, considerations, the business community has invariably brought national affairs to a state of crisis and exasperated the rest of society into dissatisfaction bordering on revolt."
Consensus history
Consensus history emphasizes the basic unity of American values and downplays conflict as superficial. It was especially attractive in the 1950s and 1960s. Prominent leaders included Richard Hofstadter
Richard Hofstadter (August 6, 1916October 24, 1970) was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century.
Hofstadter was the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University. Rejecting his earlier historic ...
, Louis Hartz Louis Hartz (April 8, 1919 – January 20, 1986) was an American political scientist, historian, and a professor at Harvard, where he taught from 1942 until 1974. Hartz’s teaching and various writings —books and articles— have had an importan ...
, Daniel Boorstin
Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was an American historian at the University of Chicago who wrote on many topics in American and world history. He was appointed the twelfth Librarian of the United States Congress in ...
, Allan Nevins
Joseph Allan Nevins (May 20, 1890 – March 5, 1971) was an American historian and journalist, known for his extensive work on the history of the Civil War and his biographies of such figures as Grover Cleveland, Hamilton Fish, Henry Ford, and J ...
, Clinton Rossiter
Clinton Lawrence Rossiter III (September 18, 1917 – July 11, 1970) was an American historian and political scientist at Cornell University (1947-1970) who wrote ''The American Presidency'', among 20 other books, and won both the Bancroft Prize a ...
, Edmund Morgan, and David M. Potter. In 1948 Hofstadter made a compelling statement of the consensus model of the U.S. political tradition:
New Left history
Consensus history was rejected by New Left viewpoints that attracted a younger generation of radical historians in the 1960s. These viewpoints stress conflict and emphasize the central roles of class, race and gender. The history of dissent, and the experiences of racial minorities and disadvantaged classes was central to the narratives produced by New Left historians.
Quantification and new approaches to history
Social history, sometimes called the "new social history", is a broad branch that studies the experiences of ordinary people in the past. It had major growth as a field in the 1960s and 1970s, and still is well represented in history departments. However, after 1980 the "cultural turn" directed the next generation to new topics. In the two decades from 1975 to 1995, the proportion of professors of history in U.S. universities identifying with social history rose from 31 to 41 percent, while the proportion of political historians fell from 40 to 30 percent.
The growth was enabled by the social sciences, computers, statistics, new data sources such as individual census information, and summer training programs at the Newberry Library and the University of Michigan
, mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth"
, former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821)
, budget = $10.3 billion (2021)
, endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...
. The New Political History saw the application of social history methods to politics, as the focus shifted from politicians and legislation to voters and elections.
The Social Science History Association
The Social Science History Association, formed in 1976, brings together scholars from numerous disciplines interested in social history.
: Its statement of purpose is: "To bring together members of various disciplines (including economics, sociol ...
was formed in 1976 as an interdisciplinary group with a journal ''Social Science History
''Social Science History'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal. It is the official journal of the Social Science History Association. Its articles bring an analytic, theoretical, and often quantitative approach to historical evidence. I ...
'' and an annual convention. The goal was to incorporate in historical studies perspectives from all the social sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics. The pioneers shared a commitment to quantification. However, by the 1980s the first blush of quantification had worn off, as traditional historians counterattacked. Harvey J. Graff says:
Meanwhile, quantitative history became well-established in other disciplines, especially economics (where they called it "cliometrics"), as well as in political science. In history, however, quantification remained central to demographic studies, but slipped behind in political and social history as traditional narrative approaches made a comeback.
Latin America
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...
is the former Spanish American empire in the Western Hemisphere plus Portuguese Brazil. Professional historians pioneered the creation of this field, starting in the late nineteenth century. The term “Latin America” did not come into general usage until the twentieth century and in some cases it was rejected. The historiography of the field has been more fragmented than unified, with historians of Spanish America and Brazil generally remaining in separate spheres. Another standard division within the historiography is the temporal factor, with works falling into either the early modern period (or “colonial era”) or the post-independence (or “national”) period, from the early nineteenth onward. Relatively few works span the two eras and few works except textbooks unite Spanish America and Brazil. There is a tendency to focus on histories of particular countries or regions (the Andes, the Southern Cone, the Caribbean) with relatively little comparative work.
Historians of Latin America have contributed to various types of historical writing, but one major, innovative development in Spanish American history is the emergence of ethnohistory
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may n ...
, the history of indigenous peoples, especially in Mexico based on alphabetic sources in Spanish or in indigenous languages
An indigenous language, or autochthonous language, is a language that is native to a region and spoken by indigenous peoples. This language is from a linguistically distinct community that originated in the area. Indigenous languages are not neces ...
.
For the early modern period, the emergence of Atlantic history
Atlantic history is a specialty field in history that studies the Atlantic World in the early modern period. The Atlantic World was created by the discovery of a new land by Europeans, and Atlantic History is the study of that world. It is p ...
, based on comparisons and linkages of Europe, the Americas, and Africa from 1450 to 1850 that developed as a field in its own right has integrated early modern Latin American history into a larger framework. For all periods, global or world history have focused on the connections between areas, likewise integrating Latin America into a larger perspective. Latin America's importance to world history is notable but often overlooked. "Latin America’s central, and sometimes pioneering, role in the development of globalization and modernity did not cease with the end of colonial rule and the early modern period. Indeed, the region’s political independence places it at the forefront of two trends that are regularly considered thresholds of the modern world. The first is the so-called liberal revolution, the shift from monarchies of the ancien régime, where inheritance legitimated political power, to constitutional republics... The second, and related, trend consistently considered a threshold of modern history that saw Latin America in the forefront is the development of nation-states."
Historical research appears in a number of specialized journals. These include ''Hispanic American Historical Review
''The Hispanic American Historical Review'' is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal of Latin American history, the official publication of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historia ...
'' (est. 1918), published by the Conference on Latin American History
Conference on Latin American History, (CLAH), founded in 1926, is the professional organization of Latin American historians affiliated with the American Historical Association. It publishes the journal ''The Hispanic American Historical Review''. ...
; ''The Americas'', (est. 1944); ''Journal of Latin American Studies
The ''Journal of Latin American Studies'', established in 1969, is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of London houses the journal's editorial and ad ...
'' (1969); ''Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies'',(est.1976) ''Bulletin of Latin American Research
''Bulletin of Latin American Research'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on Latin American studies, including Latin America, the Caribbean, inter-American relations, and the Latin American diaspora. It is publishe ...
'', (est. 1981); ''Colonial Latin American Review'' (1992); and ''Colonial Latin American Historical Review'' (est. 1992). ''Latin American Research Review
The ''Latin American Research Review'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on Latin America and the Caribbean. It was established in 1965 by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and is published by LASA's publis ...
'' (est. 1969), published by the Latin American Studies Association
The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest association for scholars of Latin American studies. Founded in 1966, it has over 12,000 members, 45 percent of whom reside outside the United States (36 percent in Latin America and the C ...
, does not focus primarily on history, but it has often published historiographical essays on particular topics.
General works on Latin American history have appeared since the 1950s, when the teaching of Latin American history expanded in U.S. universities and colleges. Most attempt full coverage of Spanish America and Brazil from the conquest to the modern era, focusing on institutional, political, social and economic history. An important, eleven volume treatment of Latin American history is ''The Cambridge History of Latin America'', with separate volumes on the colonial era, nineteenth century, and the twentieth century. There is a small number of general works that have gone through multiple editions. Major trade publishers have also issued edited volumes on Latin American history and historiography. Reference works include the Handbook of Latin American Studies
''Handbook of Latin American Studies'' is an annotated guide to publications in Latin American studies by topic and region, published since 1936. Its editorial offices are in the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. According to a Seminar ...
, which publishes articles by area experts, with annotated bibliographic entries, and the ''Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture''.
World history
World history
World history may refer to:
* Human history, the history of human beings
* History of Earth, the history of planet Earth
* World history (field), a field of historical study that takes a global perspective
* ''World History'' (album), a 1998 albu ...
, as a distinct field of historical study, emerged as an independent academic field in the 1980s. It focused on the examination of history from a global perspective and looked for common patterns that emerged across all cultures. The basic thematic approach of this field was to analyse two major focal points: integration – (how processes of world history have drawn people of the world together), and difference – (how patterns of world history reveal the diversity of the human experience).
Arnold J. Toynbee's ten-volume ''A Study of History
''A Study of History'' is a 12-volume universal history by the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, published from 1934 to 1961. It received enormous popular attention but according to historian Richard J. Evans, "enjoyed only a brief vogue befo ...
'', took an approach that was widely discussed in the 1930s and 1940s. By the 1960s his work was virtually ignored by scholars and the general public. He compared 26 independent civilizations and argued that they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. He proposed a universal model to each of these civilizations, detailing the stages through which they all pass: genesis, growth, time of troubles, universal state, and disintegration. The later volumes gave too much emphasis on spirituality to satisfy critics.
Chicago historian William H. McNeill wrote ''The Rise of the West
''The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community'' is a book by University of Chicago historian William H. McNeill, first published in 1963 and enlarged with a retrospective preface in 1991. It explores world history in terms of the eff ...
'' (1965) to show how the separate civilizations of Eurasia interacted from the very beginning of their history, borrowing critical skills from one another, and thus precipitating still further change as adjustment between traditional old and borrowed new knowledge and practice became necessary. He then discusses the dramatic effect of Western civilization
Leonardo da Vinci's ''Vitruvian Man''. Based on the correlations of ideal Body proportions">human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius in Book III of his treatise ''De architectura''.
image:Plato Pio-Cle ...
on others in the past 500 years of history. McNeill took a broad approach organized around the interactions of peoples across the globe. Such interactions have become both more numerous and more continual and substantial in recent times. Before about 1500, the network of communication between cultures was that of Eurasia. The term for these areas of interaction differ from one world historian to another and include ''world-system'' and ''ecumene.'' His emphasis on cultural fusions influenced historical theory significantly.
The cultural turn
The "cultural turn" of the 1980s and 1990s affected scholars in most areas of history. Inspired largely by anthropology, it turned away from leaders, ordinary people and famous events to look at the use of language and cultural symbols to represent the changing values of society.
The British historian Peter Burke finds that cultural studies has numerous spinoffs, or topical themes it has strongly influenced. The most important include gender studies
Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. Gender studies originated in the field of women's studies, concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics. The field ...
and postcolonial studies
Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic legacy of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and exploitation of colonized people and their lands. More specifically, it is ...
, as well as memory studies, and film studies
Film studies is an academic discipline that deals with various theoretical, historical, and critical approaches to cinema as an art form and a medium. It is sometimes subsumed within media studies and is often compared to television studies.
...
.
Diplomatic historian Melvyn P. Leffler
Melvyn Paul Leffler (born May 31, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American historian and educator, currently Edward Stettinius Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the winner of numerous awards, including the Bancroft Prize ...
finds that the problem with the "cultural turn" is that the culture concept is imprecise, and may produce excessively broad interpretations, because it:
Memory studies
Memory studies is a new field, focused on how nations and groups (and historians) construct and select their memories of the past in order to celebrate (or denounce) key features, thus making a statement of their current values and beliefs. Historians have played a central role in shaping the memories of the past as their work is diffused through popular history books and school textbooks. French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs
Maurice Halbwachs (; 11 March 1877 – 16 March 1945) was a French philosopher and sociologist known for developing the concept of collective memory. Halbwachs also contributed to the sociology of knowledge with his ''La Topographie Legendaire de ...
, opened the field with ''La mémoire collective'' (Paris: 1950).
Many historians examine how the memory of the past has been constructed, memorialized or distorted. Historians examine how legends are invented. For example, there are numerous studies of the memory of atrocities from World War II, notably the Holocaust
The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered some six million Jews across German-occupied Europe; ...
in Europe and Japanese war crimes in Asia. British historian Heather Jones argues that the historiography of the First World War in recent years has been reinvigorated by the cultural turn. Scholars have raised entirely new questions regarding military occupation, radicalization of politics, race, and the male body.
Representative of recent scholarship is a collection of studies on the "Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe". SAGE
Sage or SAGE may refer to:
Plants
* ''Salvia officinalis'', common sage, a small evergreen subshrub used as a culinary herb
** Lamiaceae, a family of flowering plants commonly known as the mint or deadnettle or sage family
** ''Salvia'', a large ...
has published the scholarly journal ''Memory Studies'' since 2008, and the book series "Memory Studies" was launched by Palgrave Macmillan
Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains off ...
in 2010 with 5–10 titles a year.
Scholarly journals
The historical journal, a forum where academic historians could exchange ideas and publish newly discovered information, came into being in the 19th century. The early journals were similar to those for the physical sciences, and were seen as a means for history to become more professional. Journals also helped historians to establish various historiographical approaches, the most notable example of which was '' Annales. Économies, sociétés, civilisations'', a publication of the ''Annales'' school in France. Journals now typically have one or more editors and associate editors, an editorial board, and a pool of scholars to whom articles that are submitted are sent for confidential evaluation. The editors will send out new books to recognized scholars for reviews that usually run 500 to 1000 words. The vetting and publication process often takes months or longer. Publication in a prestigious journal (which accept 10 percent or fewer of the articles submitted) is an asset in the academic hiring and promotion process. Publication demonstrates that the author is conversant with the scholarly field. Page charges and fees for publication are uncommon in history. Journals are subsidized by universities or historical societies, scholarly associations, and subscription fees from libraries and scholars. Increasingly they are available through library pools that allow many academic institutions to pool subscriptions to online versions. Most libraries have a system for obtaining specific articles through inter-library loan.
Some major historical journals
* 1840 '' Historisk tidsskrift'' (Denmark)
* 1859 ''Historische Zeitschrift
''Historische Zeitschrift'', founded in 1859 by Heinrich von Sybel is considered to be the first and for a time the foremost historical journal. The creation of this journal inspired Gabriel Monod to found the French ''Revue historique'' in 1876 ...
'' (Germany)
* 1866 '' Archivum historicum'', later ''Historiallinen arkisto'' (Finland, published in Finnish)
* 1867 '' Századok'' (Hungary)
* 1869 '' Časopis Matice moravské'' (Czech republic – then part of Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...
)
* 1871 ''Historisk tidsskrift (Norway)
''Historisk Tidsskrift'' is a Norwegian history journal. It was established in 1870 by Ludvig Ludvigsen Daae and Michael Birkeland. It is published quarterly by the Norwegian Historical Association
The Norwegian Historical Association ( no, Den ...
''
* 1876 '' Revue Historique'' (France)
* 1880 '' Historisk tidskrift'' (Sweden)
* 1886 ''English Historical Review
''The English Historical Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1886 and published by Oxford University Press (formerly Longman). It publishes articles on all aspects of history – British, European, and ...
'' (England)
* 1887 ''Kwartalnik Historyczny
''Kwartalnik Historyczny'' is a Polish history journal. It was established in 1887 in Lwów and is the oldest extant national journal for history. The founder of ''Kwartalnik Historyczny'' was Ksawery Liske.''Encyklopedia Krakowa'', Warszawa-Krak ...
'' (Poland;– then part of Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...
)
* 1892 ''William and Mary Quarterly
William is a male given name of Germanic origin.Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges, ''Oxford Dictionary of First Names'', Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, , p. 276. It became very popular in the English language after the Norman conquest of Engl ...
'' (US)
* 1894 '' Ons Hémecht'' (Luxembourg)
* 1895 ''American Historical Review
''The American Historical Review'' is a quarterly academic history journal and the official publication of the American Historical Association. It targets readers interested in all periods and facets of history and has often been described as the ...
'' (US)
* 1895 '' Český časopis historický'' (Czech republic – then part of Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary, often referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire,, the Dual Monarchy, or Austria, was a constitutional monarchy and great power in Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. It was formed with the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of ...
)
* 1914 ''Mississippi Valley Historical Review
''The Journal of American History'' is the official academic journal of the Organization of American Historians. It covers the field of American history and was established in 1914 as the ''Mississippi Valley Historical Review'', the official jo ...
'' (renamed in 1964 the ''Journal of American History
''The Journal of American History'' is the official academic journal of the Organization of American Historians. It covers the field of American history and was established in 1914 as the ''Mississippi Valley Historical Review'', the official j ...
'') (US)[Stieg, ''The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals'' (1986) ch 4]
* 1915 ''The Catholic Historical Review
''The Catholic Historical Review'' (CHR) is the official organ of the American Catholic Historical Association. It was established at The Catholic University of America in 1915 by Thomas Joseph Shahan and Peter Guilday and is published quarterly b ...
'' (US)
* 1916 ''The Journal of Negro History
''The Journal of African American History'', formerly ''The Journal of Negro History'' (1916–2001), is a quarterly academic journal covering African-American life and history. It was founded in 1916 by Carter G. Woodson. The journal is owned and ...
'' (US)
* 1916 '' Historisk Tidskrift för Finland'' (Finland, published in Swedish)
* 1918 ''Hispanic American Historical Review
''The Hispanic American Historical Review'' is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, scholarly journal of Latin American history, the official publication of the Conference on Latin American History, the professional organization of Latin American historia ...
'' (US)
* 1920 ''Canadian Historical Review
The ''Canadian Historical Review'' (''CHR'') is a scholarly journal in Canada, founded in 1920 and published by the University of Toronto Press. '' (Canada)
* 1922 ''Slavonic and East European Review
''The Slavonic and East European Review'', the journal of the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (University College London), is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering Slavonic and East European Studies. It was establ ...
'' (SEER), (England)[Stieg, ''The Origin and Development of Scholarly Historical Periodicals'' (1986) pp. 127–47]
* 1928 ''Scandia
Scandza was described as a "great island" by Gothic-Byzantine historian Jordanes in his work ''Getica''. The island was located in the Arctic regions of the sea that surrounded the world. The location is usually identified with Scandinavia.
Jor ...
'' (Sweden)
* 1929 ''Annales d'histoire économique et sociale
''Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales'' is a French academic journal covering social history that was established in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. The journal gave rise to an approach to history known as the ''Annales'' School. The journ ...
'' (France)
* 1935 ''Journal of Southern History
The Southern Historical Association is a professional academic organization of historians focusing on the history of the Southern United States. It was organized on November 2, 1934. Its objectives are the promotion of interest and research in Sout ...
'' (USA)
* 1941 ''The Journal of Economic History
''The Journal of Economic History'' is an academic journal of economic history which has been published since 1941. Many of its articles are quantitative, often following the formal approaches that have been called cliometrics or the new economi ...
'' (US)
* 1944 ''The Americas
The Americas, which are sometimes collectively called America, are a landmass comprising the totality of North and South America. The Americas make up most of the land in Earth's Western Hemisphere and comprise the New World.
Along with th ...
'' (US)
* 1951 '' Historia Mexicana'' (Mexico)
* 1952 '' Past & present: a journal of historical studies'' (England)
* 1953 '' Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte'' (Germany)
* 1954 ''Ethnohistory
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may n ...
'' (US)
* 1956 ''Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria
A journal, from the Old French ''journal'' (meaning "daily"), may refer to:
*Bullet journal, a method of personal organization
*Diary, a record of what happened over the course of a day or other period
*Daybook, also known as a general journal, a ...
'' (Nigeria)
* 1957 ''Victorian Studies
''Victorian Studies'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Indiana University Press. It covers research on nineteenth-century Britain during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901) and publishes essays, forums, and review ...
'' (US)
* 1960 ''Journal of African History
''The Journal of African History'' (JAH) is a triannual peer-reviewed academic journal. It was established in 1960 and is published by Cambridge University Press. It was among the first specialist journals to be devoted to African history and ar ...
'' (England)
* 1960 '' Technology and culture: the international quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology'' (US)
* 1960 ''History and Theory
''History and Theory'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of Wesleyan University. The journal was established in 1960 by George H Nadel. Its current editor-in-chief is Ethan Kleinberg (Wesleyan Univ ...
'' (US)
* 1967 '' Indian Church History Review'' (India) (earlier published as the Bulletin of Church History Association of India)
* 1967 ''The Journal of Social History
''The Journal of Social History'' was founded in 1967 and has been edited since then by Peter Stearns. The journal covers social history in all regions and time periods.
Articles in the journal frequently combine sociohistorical analysis between ...
'' (US)
* 1969 ''Journal of Interdisciplinary History
The ''Journal of Interdisciplinary History'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the MIT Press. It covers a broad range of historical themes and periods, linking history to other academic fields.
Contents
The journal featur ...
'' (US)
* 1969 ''Journal of Latin American Studies
The ''Journal of Latin American Studies'', established in 1969, is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Cambridge University Press. The Institute of Latin American Studies of the University of London houses the journal's editorial and ad ...
'' (UK)
* 1975 '' Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft'' (Germany)
* 1975 '' Signs'' (US)
* 1976 ''Journal of Family History
''Journal of Family History'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes papers in the fields of History and Anthropology. The journal's editor is Roderick Phillips (Carleton University). It is currently published by SAGE Publications.
Hi ...
'' (US)
* 1978 ''The Public Historian
''The Public Historian'' is the official publication of the National Council on Public History. It is a quarterly academic journal published by University of California Press, with the journal's editorial offices housed in the History Department, ...
'' (US)
* 1981 ''Bulletin of Latin American Research
''Bulletin of Latin American Research'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on Latin American studies, including Latin America, the Caribbean, inter-American relations, and the Latin American diaspora. It is publishe ...
'' (UK)
* 1982 ''Storia della Storiografia Storia (Italian: "history") or La storia may refer to:
* "Storia" (song), a 2009 single performed by Japanese girl group Kalafina
* "La Storia", single and lead track from Francesco De Gregori's 1985 studio album '' Scacchi e tarocchi'' ("Chess an ...
– History of Historiography – Histoire de l'Historiographie – Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung''
* 1982 ''Subaltern Studies
The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) or Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies. The term ''Subaltern Studies'' is sometimes also applied more broadly to others who sh ...
'' (Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
)
* 1986 '' 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 ''Gender and History
''Gender & History'' is an international academic journal. It is an important academic journal for articles relating to the history of femininity, masculinity, and gender relations. The current editors are Rosemary Elliot, Maud Bracke, James Simps ...
'' (US)
* 1990 ''Journal of World History
The ''Journal of World History'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that presents historical analysis from a global point of view, focusing especially on forces that cross the boundaries of cultures and civilizations, including large-scale populat ...
'' (US)
* 1990 '' L'Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft'' (Austria)
* 1990 '' Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften'' (ÖZG)
* 1992 ''Women's History Review
''Women's History Review'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal of women's history published by Routledge. The editor-in-chief is June Purvis (University of Portsmouth) and Sharon Crozier-De Rosa is deputy editor.
Abstracting and indexin ...
''
* 1992 ''Colonial Latin American Historical Review
Colonial or The Colonial may refer to:
* Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony or colony (biology)
Architecture
* American colonial architecture
* French Colonial
* Spanish Colonial architecture
Automobiles
* Colonial (1920 ...
'' (US)
* 1992 ''Colonial Latin American Review
Colonial or The Colonial may refer to:
* Colonial, of, relating to, or characteristic of a colony or colony (biology)
Architecture
* American colonial architecture
* French Colonial
* Spanish Colonial architecture
Automobiles
* Colonial (1920 au ...
''
* 1996 ''Environmental History
Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa.
Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of th ...
'' (US)
* 2011 ''International Journal for the Historiography of Education
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* ''International'' (New Order album), 2002
* ''International'' (The T ...
''
Narrative
According to Lawrence Stone
Lawrence Stone (4 December 1919 – 16 June 1999) was an English historian of early modern Britain, after a start to his career as an art historian of English medieval art. He is noted for his work on the English Civil War and the history of marr ...
, narrative
A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travelogue, etc.) or fictional ( fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller, novel, etc. ...
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 chronological
Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , '' -logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. ...
ly; 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."
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.
Topics studied
Some of the common topics in historiography are:
* 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 Marxist, ''Annales'' school, "total history", or political history
Political history is the narrative and survey of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is closely related to other fields of history, including diplomatic history, constitutional history, socia ...
.
* Moral issues, guilt assignment, and praise assignment
* Revisionism versus orthodox
Orthodox, Orthodoxy, or Orthodoxism may refer to:
Religion
* Orthodoxy, adherence to accepted norms, more specifically adherence to creeds, especially within Christianity and Judaism, but also less commonly in non-Abrahamic religions like Neo-pa ...
interpretations
* Historical metanarratives
A metanarrative (also meta-narrative and grand narrative; french: métarécit) is a narrative ''about'' narratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimation through the anticipated completion of a (as yet ...
and metahistory.
Approaches
How a historian approaches historical events is one of the most important decisions within historiography. Historians commonly recognise that individual historical facts - dealing with names, dates and places - are not particularly meaningful in themselves. Such facts only become useful/informative when assembled with other historical evidence, and the process of assembling this evidence is understood as a particular historiographical approach.
Some of the most influential historiographical approaches include:
* Big history
Big History is an academic discipline which examines history from the Big Bang to the present. Big History resists specialization, and searches for universal patterns or trends. It examines long time frames using a multidisciplinary approac ...
* Black history
* Business history
* Chronology
Chronology (from Latin ''chronologia'', from Ancient Greek , ''chrónos'', "time"; and , ''-logia'') is the science of arranging events in their order of occurrence in time. Consider, for example, the use of a timeline or sequence of events. I ...
* Comparative history
Comparative history is the comparison of different societies which existed during the same time period or shared similar cultural conditions.
The comparative history of societies emerged as an important specialty among intellectuals in the Enlight ...
* Cultural history
Cultural history combines the approaches of anthropology and history to examine popular cultural traditions and cultural interpretations of historical experience. It examines the records and narrative descriptions of past matter, encompassing the ...
* Diplomatic history
Diplomatic history deals with the history of international relations between states. Diplomatic history can be different from international relations in that the former can concern itself with the foreign policy of one state while the latter deals ...
* Economic history
Economic history is the academic learning of economies or economic events of the past. Research is conducted using a combination of historical methods, statistical methods and the application of economic theory to historical situations and i ...
(history of capitalism
The history of capitalism is diverse and the concept of capitalism has many debated roots. The history of the past 500 years is concerned with the development of capitalism in its various forms. Capital accumulated by a variety of methods, at a v ...
), (cliometrics
Cliometrics (, also ), sometimes called new economic history or econometric history, is the systematic application of economic theory, econometric techniques, and other formal or mathematical methods to the study of history (especially social and e ...
)
* Environmental history
Environmental history is the study of human interaction with the natural world over time, emphasising the active role nature plays in influencing human affairs and vice versa.
Environmental history first emerged in the United States out of th ...
, a relatively new field
* Ethnohistory
Ethnohistory is the study of cultures and indigenous peoples customs by examining historical records as well as other sources of information on their lives and history. It is also the study of the history of various ethnic groups that may or may n ...
* Gender history including women's history
Women's history is the study of the role that women have played in history and the methods required to do so. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman's rights throughout recorded history, personal achievement over a period of ...
, family history
Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kin ...
, feminist history
Feminist history refers to the re-reading of history from a woman’s perspective. It is not the same as the history of feminism, which outlines the origins and evolution of the feminist movement. It also differs from women's history, which ...
* History of medicine
The history of medicine is both a study of medicine throughout history as well as a multidisciplinary field of study that seeks to explore and understand medical practices, both past and present, throughout human societies.
More than just histo ...
* History of religion
The history of religion refers to the written record of human religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing about 5,200 years ago (3200 BC). The prehistory of religion involves t ...
and church history
__NOTOC__
Church history or ecclesiastical history as an academic discipline studies the history of Christianity and the way the Christian Church has developed since its inception.
Henry Melvill Gwatkin defined church history as "the spiritua ...
; the history of theology is usually handled under theology
Theology is the systematic study of the nature of the divine and, more broadly, of religious belief. It is taught as an academic discipline, typically in universities and seminaries. It occupies itself with the unique content of analyzing the ...
* Indigenous history
* Industrial history
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going fr ...
and the history of technology
Technology is the application of knowledge to reach practical goals in a specifiable and Reproducibility, reproducible way. The word ''technology'' may also mean the product of such an endeavor. The use of technology is widely prevalent in me ...
* Intellectual history and the history of ideas
Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual his ...
* Labor history
Labor history or labour history is a sub-discipline of social history which specialises on the history of the working classes and the labor movement. Labor historians may concern themselves with issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and other fac ...
* Legendary history - important in pre-modern contexts
* Local history
Local history is the study of history in a geographically local context, often concentrating on a relatively small local community. It incorporates cultural and social aspects of history. Local history is not merely national history writ small ...
and microhistory Microhistory is a genre of history that focuses on small units of research, such as an event, community, individual or a settlement. In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires ...
* Marxist historiography
Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided soci ...
and historical materialism
Historical materialism is the term used to describe Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx locates historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. For Marx and his lifetime collaborat ...
* Military history, including naval and air history
* Mythistory - history incorporating elements of myth
* National history
Historiography is the study of how history is written. One pervasive influence upon the writing of history has been nationalism, a set of beliefs about political legitimacy and cultural identity. Nationalism has provided a significant framework ...
- comforting myths of individual peoples
* Oral history
* Political history
Political history is the narrative and survey of political events, ideas, movements, organs of government, voters, parties and leaders. It is closely related to other fields of history, including diplomatic history, constitutional history, socia ...
* Public history, especially museums and historic preservation
* Quantitative history ( prosopography using statistics to study biographies)
* History of religions
The history of religion refers to the written record of human religious feelings, thoughts, and ideas. This period of religious history begins with the invention of writing about 5,200 years ago (3200 BC). The prehistory of religion involves th ...
* Historiography of science
The historiography of science or the historiography of the history of science is the study of the history and methodology of the sub-discipline of history, known as the history of science, including its disciplinary aspects and practices (methods ...
* Social history and people's history; along with the French version the ''Annales'' school and the German Bielefeld School
The Bielefeld School is a group of German historians based originally at Bielefeld University who promote social history and political history using quantification and the methods of political science and sociology.Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ul ...
* Subaltern Studies
The Subaltern Studies Group (SSG) or Subaltern Studies Collective is a group of South Asian scholars interested in the postcolonial and post-imperial societies. The term ''Subaltern Studies'' is sometimes also applied more broadly to others who sh ...
, regarding post-colonial India
* Urban history
Urban history is a field of history that examines the historical nature of cities and towns, and the process of urbanization. The approach is often multidisciplinary, crossing boundaries into fields like social history, architectural history, urb ...
** American urban history
American urban history is the study of cities of the United States. Local historians have always written about their own cities. Starting in the 1920s, and led by Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. at Harvard, professional historians began comparative analys ...
* Whig history
Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents history as a journey from an oppressive and benighted past to a "glorious present". The present described is generally one with modern forms of liberal democracy ...
, history interpreted as the story of continuous progress
* World history
World history may refer to:
* Human history, the history of human beings
* History of Earth, the history of planet Earth
* World history (field), a field of historical study that takes a global perspective
* ''World History'' (album), a 1998 albu ...
Related fields
Important related fields include:
* Antiquarianism
* Genealogy
Genealogy () is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kin ...
* Intellectual history
* Numismatics
Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, medals and related objects.
Specialists, known as numismatists, are often characterized as students or collectors of coins, but the discipline also includ ...
* Paleography
* Philosophy of history
* Pseudohistory
Pseudohistory is a form of pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, often by employing methods resembling those used in scholarly historical research. The related term cryptohistory is applied to pseudohi ...
See also
* List of historians by area of study
This is a list of historians categorized by their area of study. See also List of historians.
By time period
Ancient history
* Sedat Alp (1913, Veroia, The Ottoman Empire - 2006, Ankara, Türkiye) Hittitolog- Historian, Ancient Anatolian
* E ...
* Historical significance
Historical significance is a historiographical key concept that explores and seeks to explain the selection of particular social and cultural past events for remembrance by human societies. This element of selection involved in both ascribing and ...
* National memory
National memory is a form of collective memory defined by shared experiences and culture. It is an integral part to national identity.
It represents one specific form of cultural memory, which makes an essential contribution to national group coh ...
Methods
* Archival research
Archival research is a type of research which involves seeking out and extracting evidence from archival records. These records may be held either in collecting institutions, such as libraries and museums, or in the custody of the organization ( ...
* Auxiliary sciences of history
Auxiliary (or ancillary) sciences of history are scholarly disciplines which help evaluate and use historical sources and are seen as auxiliary for historical research. Many of these areas of study, classification and analysis were originally deve ...
* Historical method
Historical method is the collection of techniques and guidelines that historians use to research and write histories of the past. Secondary sources, primary sources and material evidence such as that derived from archaeology may all be drawn ...
* List of historians
This is a list of historians only for those with a biographical entry in Wikipedia. Major chroniclers and annalists are included. Names are listed by the person's historical period. The entries continue with the specializations, not nationality.
...
, inclusive of most major historians
** List of historians by area of study
This is a list of historians categorized by their area of study. See also List of historians.
By time period
Ancient history
* Sedat Alp (1913, Veroia, The Ottoman Empire - 2006, Ankara, Türkiye) Hittitolog- Historian, Ancient Anatolian
* E ...
* List of history journals
This list of history journals presents representative notable academic journals pertaining to the field of history and historiography. It includes scholarly journals listed by journal databases and professional associations such as: JSTOR, Projec ...
* Philosophy of history
* Popular history
Popular history is a broad genre of historiography that takes a popular approach, aims at a wide readership, and usually emphasizes narrative, personality and vivid detail over scholarly analysis. The term is used in contradistinction to professio ...
** Primary source
In the study of history as an academic discipline, a primary source (also called an original source) is an artifact, document, diary, manuscript, autobiography, recording, or any other source of information that was created at the time under ...
– documents, correspondence, diaries
*** Secondary source – interpretations, written history
**** Tertiary source
A tertiary source is an index or textual consolidation of already published primary and secondary sources[Periodization
In historiography, periodization is the process or study of categorizing the past into discrete, quantified, and named blocks of time for the purpose of study or analysis.Adam Rabinowitz. It's about time: historical periodization and Linked Ancie ...](_blank)
* Public history, including museums and historical preservation
* Historical revisionism
* Shared historical authority
* Historiography at Wikiversity, where it is part of the School of History
Topics
* African historiography African historiography is a branch of historiography concerning the African continent, its peoples, nations and variety of written and non-written histories. It has differentiated itself from other continental areas of historiography due to its mult ...
* Historiography of Argentina
The Historiography of Argentina is composed of the works of the authors that have written about the History of Argentina. The first historiographical works are usually considered to be those by Bartolomé Mitre and other authors from the middle 19t ...
* Atlantic history
Atlantic history is a specialty field in history that studies the Atlantic World in the early modern period. The Atlantic World was created by the discovery of a new land by Europeans, and Atlantic History is the study of that world. It is p ...
* Historiography of Canada
The historiography of Canada deals with the manner in which historians have depicted, analyzed, and debated the history of Canada. It also covers the popular memory of critical historical events, ideas and leaders, as well as the depiction of thos ...
* Chinese historiography
* Historiography of the Cold War
As soon as the term "Cold War" was popularized to refer to postwar tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, interpreting the course and origins of the conflict became a source of heated controversy among historians, political scie ...
* Historiography of early Christianity
Historiography of early Christianity is the study of historical writings about early Christianity, which is the period before the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Historians have used a variety of sources and methods in exploring and describing Chri ...
* Historiography of the French Revolution
The historiography of the French Revolution stretches back over two hundred years, as commentators and historians have used a vast array of primary sources to explain the origins of the Revolution, and its meaning and its impact. By the year 2000, ...
** ''Annales'' school, in France
* Historiography of Germany The historiography of Germany deals with the manner in which historians have depicted, analyzed and debated the history of Germany. It also covers the popular memory of critical historical events, ideas and leaders, as well as the depiction of thos ...
** Bielefeld School
The Bielefeld School is a group of German historians based originally at Bielefeld University who promote social history and political history using quantification and the methods of political science and sociology.Lorenz, Chris "Wehler, Hans-Ul ...
, in Germany
* Greek historiography
** Historiography of Alexander the Great
There are numerous surviving ancient Greek and Latin sources on Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, as well as some Asian texts. The five main surviving accounts are by Arrian, Plutarch, Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, and Justin.Green, ...
** Classics
* History of India#Historiography
** Historiography of the fall of the Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire was an early-modern empire that controlled much of South Asia between the 16th and 19th centuries. Quote: "Although the first two Timurid emperors and many of their noblemen were recent migrants to the subcontinent, the d ...
* Historiography of Islam
** Historiography of early Islam
The historiography of early Islam is the scholarly literature on the early history of Islam during the 7th century, from Muhammad's first revelations in 610 until the disintegration of the Rashidun Caliphate in 661,
and arguably throughout the 8 ...
* Historiography of Japan
The historiography of Japan ( ') is the study of methods and hypotheses formulated in the study and literature of the history of Japan.
The earliest work of Japanese history is attributed to Prince Shōtoku, who is said to have written the ''Ten ...
* Historiography of Korea Korean nationalist historiography is the way of writing Korean history.
See also
*Historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of his ...
** Korean nationalist historiography
Korean nationalist historiography is a way of writing Korean history that centers on the Korean '' minjok'', an ethnically or racially defined Korean nation. This kind of historiography emerged in the early twentieth century among Korean intell ...
* Latin American History
The term ''Latin America'' primarily refers to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries in the New World.
Before the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the region was home to many indigenous peoples, a number of ...
* Middle Ages
In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages or medieval period lasted approximately from the late 5th to the late 15th centuries, similar to the post-classical period of global history. It began with the fall of the Western Roman Empire ...
** Historiography of feudalism
** Dark Ages (historiography)
** Historiography of the Crusades
The historiography of the Crusades is the study of history-writing and the written history, especially as an academic discipline, regarding the military expeditions initially undertaken by European Christians in the 11th, 12th, or 13thcenturies ...
* Historiography and nationalism
Historiography is the study of how history is written. One pervasive influence upon the writing of history has been nationalism, a set of beliefs about political legitimacy and cultural identity. Nationalism has provided a significant framework ...
* Roman historiography Roman historiography stretches back to at least the 3rd century BC and was indebted to earlier Greek historiography. The Romans relied on previous models in the Greek tradition such as the works of Herodotus (c. 484 – 425 BC) and Thucydides (c. ...
** Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire
The causes and mechanisms of the fall of the Western Roman Empire are a historical theme that was introduced by historian Edward Gibbon in his 1776 book ''The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire''. Though Gibbon was not the first ...
* Historiography of Switzerland
The historiography of Switzerland is the study of the history of Switzerland.
Early accounts of the history of the Old Swiss Confederacy are found in the numerous Swiss chronicles of the 14th to 16th centuries.
As elsewhere in Europe, these l ...
* Historiography in the Soviet Union
Soviet historiography is the methodology of history studies by historians in the Soviet Union (USSR). In the USSR, the study of history was marked by restrictions imposed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Soviet historiography i ...
* Historiography of the United Kingdom
The historiography of the United Kingdom includes the historical and archival research and writing on the history of the United Kingdom, Great Britain, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. For studies of the overseas empire see historiography ...
** Historiography of Scotland
The historiography of Scotland refers to the sources, critical methods and interpretive models used by scholars to come to an understanding of the history of Scotland.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
Scottish historiography begins with Chronicles of t ...
** Historiography of the British Empire
The historiography of the British Empire refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to develop a history of Britain's empire. Historians and their ideas are the main focus here; specific lands and histori ...
* Historiography of the United States
The historiography of the United States refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the United States. While history examines the interplay of events in the past, historiography exa ...
** Frontier thesis
* World history
World history may refer to:
* Human history, the history of human beings
* History of Earth, the history of planet Earth
* World history (field), a field of historical study that takes a global perspective
* ''World History'' (album), a 1998 albu ...
* Historiography of the causes of World War I
Historians writing about the origins of World War I have differed over the relative emphasis they place upon the factors involved. Changes in historical arguments over time are in part related to the delayed availability of classified historical a ...
* Historiography of World War II The historiography of World War II is the study of how historians portray the causes, conduct, and outcomes of World War II.
There are different perspectives on the causes of the war; the three most prominent are the Orthodox from the 1950s, Revisi ...
** Historiography of the Battle of France
The historiography of the Battle of France describes how the German victory over French and British forces in the Battle of France had been explained by historians and others. Many people in 1940 found the fall of France unexpected and earth shak ...
, 1940
Bibliography
Theory
* Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob, ''Telling the Truth About History''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994.
* Bentley, Michael. ''Modern Historiography: An Introduction'', 1999
* Marc Bloch
Marc Léopold Benjamin Bloch (; ; 6 July 1886 – 16 June 1944) was a French historian. He was a founding member of the Annales School of French social history. Bloch specialised in medieval history and published widely on Medieval France ov ...
, ''The Historian's Craft'' (1940)
* Burke, Peter. ''History and Social Theory'', Polity Press, Oxford, 1992
* David Cannadine (editor), ''What is History Now'', Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
* E. H. Carr
Edward Hallett Carr (28 June 1892 – 3 November 1982) was a British historian, diplomat, journalist and international relations theorist, and an opponent of empiricism within historiography. Carr was best known for '' A History of Soviet Rus ...
, ''What is History?
''What Is History?'' is a 1961 non-fiction book by historian E. H. Carr on historiography. It discusses history, facts, the bias of historians, science, morality, individuals and society, and moral judgements in history.
The book originated in a ...
'' 1961,
* R.G. Collingwood
Robin George Collingwood (; 22 February 1889 – 9 January 1943) was an English philosopher, historian and archaeologist. He is best known for his philosophical works, including ''The Principles of Art'' (1938) and the posthumously published ...
, ''The Idea of History'', 1936,
* Deluermoz, Quentin, and Singaravélou, Pierre: ''A Past of Possibilities: A History of What Could Have Been’’ ; Yale University Press, 2021
* Doran, Robert. ed. ''Philosophy of History After Hayden White.'' London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
* Geoffrey Elton
Sir Geoffrey Rudolph Elton (born Gottfried Rudolf Otto Ehrenberg; 17 August 1921 – 4 December 1994) was a German-born British political and constitutional historian, specialising in the Tudor period. He taught at Clare College, Cambridge, and w ...
, ''The Practice of History'', 1969,
* Richard J. Evans
Sir Richard John Evans (born 29 September 1947) is a British historian of 19th- and 20th-century Europe with a focus on Germany. He is the author of eighteen books, including his three-volume ''The Third Reich Trilogy'' (2003–2008). Evans was ...
''In Defence of History'', 1997,
* Fischer, David Hackett. ''Historians' Fallacies: Towards a Logic of Historical Thought'', Harper & Row, 1970
* 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)
* Jenkins, Keith. ''Rethinking History'', 1991,
* Arthur Marwick
Arthur John Brereton Marwick (29 February 1936 – 27 September 2006) was a British social historian, who served for many years as Professor of History at the Open University. His research interests lay primarily in the history of Britain in the ...
, ''The New Nature of History: knowledge, evidence, language'', Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001,
* Munslow, Alan. ''The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies'' (2000), an encyclopedia of concepts, methods and historians
* Spalding, Roger & Christopher Parker, ''Historiography: An Introduction'', 2008,
* Sreedharan, E, "A Textbook of Historiography: 500 BC to AD 2000". New Delhi, Oreient Black Swan, 2004,
* Sreedharan, E, "A Manual of Historical Research Methodology." Trivandrum, Centre for South Indian Studies, 2007,
* Tosh, John. ''The Pursuit of History'', 2002,
* 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
Guides to scholarship
* ''The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature'', ed. by Mary Beth Norton and Pamela Gerardi (3rd ed. 2 vol, Oxford U.P. 1995) 2064 pages; annotated guide to 27,000 of the most important English language history books in all fields and topic
vol 1 online
vol 2 online
** Allison, William Henry et al. eds. ''A guide to historical literature'' (1931) comprehensive bibliography for scholarship to 1930 as selected by scholars from the American Historical Associatio
online edition, free
* Backhouse, Roger E. and Philippe Fontaine, eds. ''A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences'' (Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. ix, 248; essays on the ways in which the histories of psychology, anthropology, sociology, economics, history, and political science have been written since 1945
* Black, Jeremy. ''Clio's Battles: Historiography in Practice'' (Indiana University Press, 2015.) xvi, 323 pp.
* Boyd, Kelly, ed. ''Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writers'' (2 Vol 1999), 1600 pp covering major historians and themes
* Cline, Howard F. ed. ''Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, Handbook of Middle American Indians'' (4 vols U of Texas Press 1973.
* Gray, Wood. ''Historian's Handbook'', 2nd ed. (Houghton-Miffin Co., cop. 1964), vii, 88 pp; a primer
* Elton, G.R. ''Modern Historians on British History 1485–1945: A Critical Bibliography 1945–1969'' (1969), annotated guide to 1000 history books on every major topic, plus book reviews and major scholarly articles
online
* Loades, David, ed. ''Reader's Guide to British History'' (Routledge; 2 vol 2003) 1760 pp; highly detailed guide to British historiography
excerpt and text search
*
* Parish, Peter, ed. ''Reader's Guide to American History'' (Routledge, 1997), 880 pp; detailed guide to historiography of American topic
excerpt and text search
* Popkin, Jeremy D. ''From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography'' (Oxford UP, 2015).
* Woolf, Daniel et al. ''The Oxford History of Historical Writing
''The Oxford History of Historical Writing'' is a five volume multi-authored history of historical writing published by Oxford University Press under the general editorship of Daniel Woolf.
Volumes
* ''Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600''. Edited by ...
'' (5 vol 2011–r12), covers all major historians since AD 600; se
listings
** ''The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600'' online at DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199218158.001.0001
** ''The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 3: 1400–1800'' online at DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199219179.001.0001
** ''The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume 4: 1800–1945'' online at DOI:10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199533091.001.0001
Histories of historical writing
* Arnold, John H. ''History: A Very Short Introduction'' (2000). New York: Oxford University Press.
* Barnes, Harry Elmer. ''A history of historical writing'' (1962)
* Barraclough, Geoffrey. ''History: Main Trends of Research in the Social and Human Sciences'', (1978)
* Bauer, Stefan. ''The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform'' (Oxford University Press, 2020).
* Bentley, Michael. ed., ''Companion to Historiography'', Routledge, 1997, , 39 chapters by experts
* Boyd, Kelly, ed. ''Encyclopedia of historians and historical writing'' (2 vol. Taylor & Francis, 1999), 1562 pp
* Breisach, Ernst. ''Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern'', 3rd edition, 2007,
* Budd, Adam, ed. ''The Modern Historiography Reader: Western Sources.'' (Routledge, 2009).
* Cline, Howard F., ed.''Latin American History: Essays on Its Study and Teaching, 1898–1965''. 2 vols. Austin: University of Texas Press 1965.
* Cohen, H. Floris ''The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry'', (1994),
* Conrad, Sebastian. ''The Quest for the Lost Nation: Writing History in Germany and Japan in the American Century'' (2010)
* Crymble, Adam. ''Technology and the Historian: Transformations in the Digital Age'' (University of Illinois, 2021), 241 pp
* Fitzsimons, M.A. et al. eds. ''The development of historiography'' (1954) 471 pages; comprehensive global coverage
online free
* Gilderhus, Mark T. ''History and Historians: A Historiographical Introduction'', 2002,
* Iggers, Georg G. ''Historiography in the 20th Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge'' (2005)
* Kramer, Lloyd, and Sarah Maza, eds. ''A Companion to Western Historical Thought'' Blackwell 2006. 520 pp; .
* Momigliano, Arnaldo. ''The Classical Foundation of Modern Historiography'', 1990,
* ''The Oxford History of Historical Writing'' (5 vol 2011), Volume 1: Beginnings to AD 600; Volume 2: 600–1400; Volume 3: 1400–1800; Volume 4: 1800–1945; Volume 5: Historical Writing since 194
catalog
* Rahman, M. M. ed. ''Encyclopaedia of Historiography'' (2006
Excerpt and text search
* Soffer, Reba. '' History, Historians, and Conservatism in Britain and America: From the Great War to Thatcher and Reagan'' (2009
excerpt and text search
* Thompson, James Westfall. ''A History of Historical Writing. vol 1: From the earliest Times to the End of the 17th Century'' (1942
online edition
''A History of Historical Writing. vol 2: The 18th and 19th Centuries'' (1942
online edition
* Woolf, Daniel, ed. ''A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing'' (2 vol. 1998)
* Woolf, Daniel. "Historiography", in ''New Dictionary of the History of Ideas'', ed. M.C. Horowitz, (2005), vol. I.
* Woolf, Daniel. ''A Global History of History'' (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
* Woolf, Daniel, ed. ''The Oxford History of Historical Writing''. 5 vols. (Oxford University Press, 2011–12).2011)
* Woolf, Daniel, ''A Concise History Of History'' (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Feminist historiography
* Bonnie G. Smith, ''The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice'', Harvard University Press
Harvard University Press (HUP) is a publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University, and focused on academic publishing. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses. After the retir ...
2000
* Gerda Lerner
Gerda Hedwig Lerner (née Kronstein; April 30, 1920 – January 2, 2013) was an Austrian-born American historian and woman's history author. In addition to her numerous scholarly publications, she wrote poetry, fiction, theatre pieces, screenp ...
, ''The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History'', New York: Oxford University Press
Oxford University Press (OUP) is the university press of the University of Oxford. It is the largest university press in the world, and its printing history dates back to the 1480s. Having been officially granted the legal right to print books ...
1979
* Judith M. Bennett, ''History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism'', University of Pennsylvania Press
The University of Pennsylvania Press (or Penn Press) is a university press affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The press was originally incorporated with the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on 26 M ...
, 2006
* Julie Des Jardins, ''Women and the Historical Enterprise in America'', University of North Carolina Press
The University of North Carolina Press (or UNC Press), founded in 1922, is a university press that is part of the University of North Carolina. It was the first university press founded in the Southern United States. It is a member of the As ...
, 2002
* Donna Guy, "Gender and Sexuality in Latin America" in ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 367–81.
* Asunción Lavrin, "Sexuality in Colonial Spanish America" in ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History'', José C. Moya, ed. New York: Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 132–54.
* Mary Ritter Beard
Mary Ritter Beard (August 5, 1876 – August 14, 1958) was an American historian, author, women's suffrage activist, and women's history archivist who was also a lifelong advocate of social justice. As a Progressive Era reformer, Beard was ...
, ''Woman as force in history: A study in traditions and realities''
* Mary Spongberg, ''Writing women's history since the Renaissance'', Palgrave Macmillan
Palgrave Macmillan is a British academic and trade publishing company headquartered in the London Borough of Camden. Its programme includes textbooks, journals, monographs, professional and reference works in print and online. It maintains off ...
, 2002
* Clare Hemmings, "Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory", Duke University Press
Duke University Press is an academic publisher and university press affiliated with Duke University. It was founded in 1921 by William T. Laprade as The Trinity College Press. (Duke University was initially called Trinity College). In 1926 D ...
2011
National and regional studies
* Berger, Stefan et al., eds. ''Writing National Histories: Western Europe Since 1800'' (1999
excerpt and text search
how history has been used in Germany, France & Italy to legitimize the nation-state against socialist, communist and Catholic internationalism
* Iggers, Georg G. ''A new Directions and European Historiography'' (1975)
* LaCapra, Dominic, and Stephen L. Kaplan, eds. ''Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspective'' (1982)
Asia and Africa
* Cohen, Paul. ''Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past''. New York, London:: Columbia University Press, Studies of the East Asian Institute, 1984. 237p. Reprinted: 2010, with a New Introduction by the Author. .
* R.C. Majumdar, Historiography in Modem India (Bombay, 1970)
* Marcinkowski, M. Ismail. ''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)
* Martin, Thomas R. ''Herodotus and Sima Qian: The First Great Historians of Greece and China: A Brief History with Documents'' (2009)
* E. Sreedharan, A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000 (2004)
* Arvind Sharma
Arvind Sharma is the Birks Professor of Comparative Religion at McGill University. Sharma's works focus on Hinduism, philosophy of religion. In editing books his works include ''Our Religions'' and ''Women in World Religions,'' ''Feminism in W ...
, Hinduism and Its Sense of History (Oxford University Press, 2003)
* Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
* Yerxa, Donald A. ''Recent Themes in the History of Africa and the Atlantic World: Historians in Conversation'' (2008
excerpt and text search
Britain
* Bann, Stephen. ''Romanticism and the Rise of History'' (Twayne Publishers, 1995)
* Bentley, Michael. ''Modernizing England's Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970'' (2006
excerpt and text search
* Cannadine, David. ''In Churchill's Shadow: Confronting the Passed in Modern Britain'' (2003)
* Furber, Elizabeth, ed. ''Changing Views on British History; Essays on Historical Writing Since 1939'' (1966); 418pp; essays by scholars
*
*
* Hale, John Rigby, ed. ''The evolution of British historiography: from Bacon to Namier'' (1967).
* Howsam, Leslie. "Academic Discipline or Literary Genre?: The Establishment of Boundaries in Historical Writing." ''Victorian Literature and Culture'' (2004) 32#2 pp. 525–45
online
* Hexter, J. H. ''On Historians: Reappraisals of some of the makers of modern history'' (1979); covers Carl Becker, Wallace Ferguson, Fernan Braudel, Lawrence Stone, Christopher Hill, and J.G.A. Pocock
* Howsam, Leslie. "Academic Discipline or Literary Genre?: The Establishment of Boundaries in Historical Writing." ''Victorian Literature and Culture'' 32.02 (2004): 525–545
online
* Jann, Rosemary. ''The Art and Science of Victorian History'' (1985)
* Jann, Rosemary. "From Amateur to Professional: The Case of the Oxbridge Historians." ''Journal of British Studies'' (1983) 22#2 pp: 122–47.
* Kenyon, John. ''The History Men: The Historical Profession in England since the Renaissance'' (1983)
* Loades, David. ''Reader's Guide to British History'' (2 vol. 2003) 1700pp; 1600-word-long historiographical essays on about 1000 topics
* Mitchell, Rosemary. '' Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830–1870'' (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000)
* Philips, Mark Salber. ''Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820'' (Princeton University Press, 2000).
* Richardson, Roger Charles, ed. ''The debate on the English Revolution'' (2nd ed. Manchester University Press, 1998)
* Schlatter, Richard, ed. ''Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writing Since 1966'' (1984) 525 pp; 13 topics essays by scholars
=British Empire
=
* Berger, Carl. ''Writing Canadian History: Aspects of English Canadian Historical Writing since 1900'', (2nd ed. 1986)
* Bhattacharjee, J. B. ''Historians and Historiography of North East India'' (2012)
* Davison, Graeme. ''The Use and Abuse of Australian History'', (2000
online edition
* Farrell, Frank. ''Themes in Australian History: Questions, Issues and Interpretation in an Evolving Historiography'' (1990)
* Gare, Deborah. "Britishness in Recent Australian Historiography", ''The Historical Journal'', Vol. 43, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 1145–115
in JSTOR
* Guha, Ranajiit. ''Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India'' (Harvard UP, 1998)
* Granatstein, J. L. ''Who Killed Canadian History?
''Who Killed Canadian History?'' is a 1998 book by Canadian historian J. L. Granatstein. The book argues that Canadians lack national unity because of their failure to teach their country's history. Granatstein contends that multiculturalism, ...
'' (1998)
* Mittal, S. C ''India distorted: A study of British historians on India'' (1995), on 19th century writers
* Saunders, Christopher. ''The making of the South African past: major historians on race and class'', (1988)
* Winks, Robin, ed. ''The Oxford History of the British Empire: Volume V: Historiography'' (2001)
France
* Burke, Peter. ''The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–2014'' (John Wiley & Sons, 2015).
*
* Daileader, Philip and Philip Whalen, eds. ''French Historians 1900–2000: New Historical Writing in Twentieth-Century France'' (2010) 40 long essays by experts
excerpt
* Revel, Jacques, and Lynn Hunt, eds. ''Histories: French Constructions of the Past'', (1995). 654pp; 65 essays by French historians
* Stoianovich, Traian. ''French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm'' (1976)
Germany
* Fletcher, Roger. "Recent developments in West German Historiography: the Bielefeld School and its critics." ''German Studies Review'' (1984): 451–480
in JSTOR
* Hagemann, Karen, and Jean H. Quataert, eds. ''Gendering Modern German History: Rewriting Historiography'' (2008)
* Iggers, Georg G. ''The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present'' (2nd ed. 1983)
* Rüger, Jan, and Nikolaus Wachsmann, eds. ''Rewriting German history: new perspectives on modern Germany'' (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)
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* Sheehan, James J. "What is German history? Reflections on the role of the nation in German history and historiography." ''Journal of Modern History'' (1981): 2–23
in JSTOR
* Sperber, Jonathan. "Master Narratives of Nineteenth-century German History." ''Central European History'' (1991) 24#1: 69–91
online
* Stuchtey, Benedikt, and Peter Wende, eds. ''British and German historiography, 1750–1950: traditions, perceptions, and transfers'' (2000).
Latin America
* Adelman, Jeremy, ed. ''Colonial Legacies''. New York: Routledge 1999.
* Coatsworth, John. "Cliometrics and Mexican History," ''Historical Methods''18:1 (Winter 1985)31–37.
*
*
* Lockhart, James. "The Social History of Early Latin America". ''Latin American Research Review
The ''Latin American Research Review'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal covering research on Latin America and the Caribbean. It was established in 1965 by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and is published by LASA's publis ...
'' 1972.
* Moya, José C. ''The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History''. New York: Oxford University Press 2011.
*
*
United States
* Hofstadter, Richard. ''The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington'' (1968)
* Novick, Peter. ''That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession'' (1988),
* Palmer, William W. "All Coherence Gone? A Cultural History of Leading History Departments in the United States, 1970–2010", ''Journal of The Historical Society'' (2012), 12: 111–53. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-5923.2012.00360.x
* Palmer, William. ''Engagement with the Past: The Lives and Works of the World War II Generation of Historians'' (2001)
* Parish, Peter J., ed. ''Reader's Guide to American History'' (1997), historiographical overview of 600 topics
* Wish, Harvey. ''The American Historian'' (1960), covers pre-1920
Themes, organizations, and teaching
* Carlebach, Elishiva, et al. eds. ''Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi'' (1998
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* Charlton, Thomas L. ''History of Oral History: Foundations and Methodology'' (2007)
* Darcy, R. and Richard C. Rohrs, ''A Guide to Quantitative History'' (1995)
* Dawidowicz, Lucy S.
Lucy Dawidowicz ( Schildkret; June 16, 1915 – December 5, 1990) was an American historian and writer. She wrote books about modern Jewish history, in particular, she wrote books about the Holocaust.
Life
Dawidowicz was born in New York City a ...
''The Holocaust and Historians''. (1981).
* Ernest, John. ''Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861''. (2004)
* Evans, Ronald W. ''The Hope for American School Reform: The Cold War Pursuit of Inquiry Learning in Social Studies''(Palgrave Macmillan; 2011) 265 pages
* Ferro, Marc, ''Cinema and History'' (1988)
* Green, Anna, and Kathleeen Troup. ''The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth Century History and Theory''. 2 ed. Manchester University Press, 2016.
* Hudson, Pat. ''History by Numbers: An Introduction to Quantitative Approaches'' (2002)
* Keita, Maghan. ''Race and the Writing of History''. Oxford UP (2000)
* Leavy, Patricia. ''Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research'' (2011
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* Loewen, James W. '' Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong'', (1996)
* Manning, Patrick, ed. ''World History: Global And Local Interactions'' (2006)
* Maza, Sarah. ''Thinking About History''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. do
10.7208/chicago/9780226109473.001.0001
* Meister, Daniel R. "The biographical turn and the case for historical biography" ''History Compass'' (Dec. 2017) DOI: 10.1111/hic3.12436
abstract
* Morris-Suzuki, Tessa. ''The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History'' (2005),
* Ritchie, Donald A.
Donald A. Ritchie (born December 23, 1945) is Historian Emeritus of the United States Senate.
Education
He graduated from the City College of New York in 1967; and received a master's degree, in 1969, and a Ph.D., in 1975, from the University ...
''The Oxford Handbook of Oral History'' (2010
excerpt and text search
* Tröhler, Daniel "History and Historiography. Approaches to Historical Research in Education" T. Fitzgerald (ed.), ''THandbook of Historical Studies in Education'' (2019)
References
External links
International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography
short guide to Historiographical terms
Web Portal on Historiography and Historical Culture
from University of Barcelona ead link as of 2021-04
Basic guide to historiography research for undergraduates
''Cromohs'' – cyber review of modern historiography open-access electronic scholarly journal
{{Authority control
Philosophy of history