Historiography

The research interests of historians change over time, and there has been a shift away from traditional diplomatic, economic, and political history toward newer approaches, especially social and cultural studies. From 1975 to 1995 the proportion of professors of history in American universities identifying with social history increased from 31 to 41 percent, while the proportion of political historians decreased from 40 to 30 percent.^[4] In 2007, of 5,723 faculty in the departments of history at British universities, 1,644 (29 percent) identified themselves with social history and 1,425 (25 percent) identified themselves with political history.^[5] Since the 1980s there has been a special interest in the memories and commemoration of past events—the histories as remembered and presented for popular celebration.^[6]

Terminology

In the early modern period, the term historiography meant "the writing of history", and historiographer meant "historian". In that sense certain official historians were given the title "Historiographer Royal" in Sweden (from 1618), England (from 1660), and Scotland (from 1681). The Scottish post is still in existence.

Historiography was more recently defined as "the study of the way history has been and is written—the history of historical writing", which means that, "When you study 'historiography' you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians."^[7]

History

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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

The earliest known systematic historical thought and methodologies emerged in

The generation following Herodotus witnessed a spate of local histories of the individual

Thucydides 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.^[8] He was also the first to distinguish between cause and immediate origins of an event, while his successor Xenophon (c. 431 – 355 BC) introduced autobiographical elements and biographical character studies in his Anabasis.^[8]

The proverbial

Traditional Chinese historiography describes history in terms of dynastic cycles. 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.^[15]

Middle Ages to Renaissance

Christendom

During the Renaissance, history was written about states or nations. The study of history changed during the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Voltaire 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

The earliest works of history produced in Japan were the Rikkokushi (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 in 720.

Korea

The tradition of Korean historiography was established with the

China

The

Six dynasties, Tang dynasty, and Five Dynasties, and in practice superseded those works in the mind of the general reader.^[33]

The great Song Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi 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 (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.^[34]

South East Asia

Philippines

Main article: Historiography of the Philippines

Historiography of the Philippines refers to the studies, sources, critical methods and interpretations used by scholars to study the history of the Philippines. It includes historical and archival research and writing on the history of the Philippine archipelago including the islands of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.^[35][36] 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^[37][38] and the Sinosphere.^[39][40] The archipelago had direct contact with China during the Song dynasty (960–1279),^[41] and was a part of the Srivijaya and Majapahit empires.^[42]

The pre-colonial Philippines widely used the abugida system in writing and seals on documents, though it was for communication and no recorded writings of early literature or history.^{[clarification needed][43]} 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 and Butuan Ivory Seal. The discovery of the Butuan Ivory Seal also proves the use of paper documents in ancient Philippines.

After the Spanish conquest, 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.^[44] 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.^[45]

Enlightenment

Enlightenment era

advances in accuracy.

During the Age of Enlightenment, the modern development of historiography through the application of scrupulous methods began. Among the many Italians who contributed to this were Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444), Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540), and Cesare Baronio (1538–1607).

Voltaire

French philosophe Voltaire (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 recast historiography in both factual and analytical terms. Not only did he reject traditional biographies and accounts that claim the work of supernatural forces, but he went so far as to suggest that earlier historiography was rife with falsified evidence and required new investigations at the source. Such an outlook was not unique in that the scientific spirit that 18th-century intellectuals perceived themselves as invested with. A rationalistic approach was key to rewriting history.^[46]

Voltaire's best-known histories are The Age of Louis XIV (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's History of Charles XII (1731) about the Swedish warrior king (Swedish: Karl XII) is also one of his most famous works. It is not least known as one of Napoleon's absolute favorite books.^[47]

Voltaire explains his view of historiography in his article on "History" in Diderot's Encyclopédie: "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."^[48] Voltaire's histories used the values of the Enlightenment to evaluate the past. He helped free historiography from antiquarianism, Eurocentrism, religious intolerance and a concentration on great men, diplomacy, and warfare.^[49] 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".^{[50][51][full citation needed]}

David Hume

At the same time, philosopher

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, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton and William Harvey.^[52]

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".[53]

Edward Gibbon

The apex of Enlightenment history was reached with

Leslie Stephen

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.

Saint Jerome.^[56] 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."^[57]

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.[58]

19th century

The tumultuous events surrounding the

Great Reform Act of 1832 in England. Nineteenth century historiography, especially among American historians, featured conflicting viewpoints that represented the times. According to 20th-century historian Richard Hofstadter:^[59]

The historians of the nineteenth century worked under the pressure of two internal tensions: on one side there was the constant demand of society—whether through the nationstate, the church, or some special group or class interest—for memory mixed with myth, for the historical tale that would strengthen group loyalties or confirm national pride; and against this there were the demands of critical method, and even, after a time, the goal of writing "scientific" history.

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle 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.^[60] 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.^[61][62]

French historians: Michelet and Taine

In his main work Histoire de France (1855), French historian Jules Michelet (1798–1874) coined the term Renaissance (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.^[63] The 19-volume work covered French history from Charlemagne to the outbreak of the French Revolution. 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.^[64]

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:

19th-century French historians no longer saw history as the chronicling of royal dynasties, armies, treaties, and great men of state, but as the history of ordinary French people and the landscape of France.^[65]

sociological positivism, and one of the first practitioners of historicist 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.^[66]

Cultural and constitutional history

One of the major progenitors of the history of

Siegfried Giedion described Burckhardt's achievement in the following terms: "The great discoverer of the age of the Renaissance, 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."^[68]

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, 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.^[69]

By the mid-19th century, scholars were beginning to analyse the history of institutional change, particularly the development of constitutional government. William Stubbs'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.^[70] 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, 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.^[71]

Von Ranke and professionalization in Germany

Main article: Historiography of Germany

The modern academic study of history and methods of historiography were pioneered in 19th-century German universities, especially the University of Göttingen. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) at Berlin was a pivotal influence in this regard, and was the founder of modern source-based history.^[72][73] 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."^[74][75]

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 sources, an emphasis on narrative history and especially international politics (Aussenpolitik).^[76] 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 Prussian government, Ranke founded and edited the first historical journal in the world, called Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift.

Another important German thinker was

freedom and of the consequent realization of this freedom."^[77]

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, 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, were the first to realize that All men are by nature free, and that freedom of spirit is his very essence.^[78]

nation-state. Capitalism appeared after the bourgeois revolution when the capitalists (or their merchant predecessors) overthrew the feudal system and established a market economy

, with

parliamentary democracy. Marx then predicted the eventual proletarian revolution that would result in the attainment of socialism, followed by communism

, 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 by such way of perceiving, understanding and treating the past that constructed history as history of a nation.^[79] A new discipline, sociology, emerged in the late 19th century and analyzed and compared these perspectives on a larger scale.

Macaulay and Whig history

Macaulay was the most influential exponent of the Whig history

.

The term "

British history (the history of science, for example) to criticize any teleological (or goal-directed), hero-based, and transhistorical narrative.^[80]

His legacy continues to be controversial; Gertrude Himmelfarb 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."^[85] 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".^[86]

The Whig consensus was steadily undermined during the post-World War I 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.^[87] 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."^[88]

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.^[89][90] Western Europe and the United States took leading roles in this development. The emergence of area studies of other regions also developed historiographical practices.

France: Annales school

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.^[91][92]

The Annales d'histoire économique et sociale journal was founded in 1929 in

An eminent member of this school, Georges Duby, 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, 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 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), 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.^[98]

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."^[99] 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.^[100] However, the Annales ignored the developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political and demographic research.^[101]

Marxist historiography

R. H. Tawney was an early historian working in this tradition. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912)^[102] 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 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 and John Cooper.

Historiography in the Soviet Union was greatly influenced by Marxist historiography, as historical materialism was extended into the Soviet version of dialectical materialism.

A circle of historians inside the

Christopher Hill's studies on 17th-century English history were widely acknowledged and recognised as representative of this school.^[103] 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, 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:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "Utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

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, who made similar studies of the American working classes.

Other important Marxist historians included Eric Hobsbawm, C. L. R. James, Raphael Samuel, A. L. Morton and Brian Pearce.

Biography

Biography has been a major form of historiography since the days when Plutarch 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. In the United States, the Dictionary of American Biography was planned in the late 1920s and appeared with numerous supplements into the 1980s. It has now been displaced by the American National Biography 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".^[104]

Daniel R. Meister argues that:

Biography Studies is emerging as an independent discipline, especially in the Netherlands. This Dutch School of biography is moving biography studies away from the less scholarly life writing tradition and towards history by encouraging its practitioners to utilize an approach adapted from microhistory.^[105]

British debates

Marxist historian E. H. Carr developed a controversial theory of history in his 1961 book What Is History?, which proved to be one of the most influential books ever written on the subject.^[106] 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.^[107][108] For this reason, Carr argued that Leopold von Ranke'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".^[109] 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".^[107][110]

Carr is held by some critics to have had a deterministic outlook in history.

One of Carr's most forthright critics was Hugh Trevor-Roper, who argued that Carr's dismissal of the "might-have-beens of history" reflected a fundamental lack of interest in examining historical causation.^[115] 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,^[116] as only by considering all possible outcomes of a given situation could a historian properly understand the period.

The controversy inspired Sir Geoffrey Elton 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".^[117] Elton, instead, strongly defended the traditional methods of history and was also appalled by the inroads made by postmodernism.^[118] 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.

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.^[119]

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.^[120]

Progressive historians

The Progressive historians were a group of 20th century historians of the United States associated with a historiographical tradition that embraced an economic interpretation of American history.^[121][122] Most prominent among these was Charles A. Beard, who was influential in academia and with the general public.^[121]

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

The fierceness of the political struggles has often been misleading: for the range of vision embraced by the primary contestants in the major parties has always been bounded by the horizons of property and enterprise. However much at odds on specific issues, the major political traditions have shared a belief in the rights of property, the philosophy of economic individualism, the value of competition; they have accepted the economic virtues of capitalist culture as necessary qualities of man.[125]

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.^{[126][127][128]}

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.^[129][130] 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.^[4]

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. 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.^[131][132]

The Social Science History Association was formed in 1976 as an interdisciplinary group with a journal Social Science History 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:

The case against the new mixed and confused a lengthy list of ingredients, including the following: history's supposed loss of identity and humanity in the stain of social science, the fear of subordinating quality to quantity, conceptual and technical fallacies, violation of the literary character and biographical base of "good" history (rhetorical and aesthetic concern), loss of audiences, derogation of history rooted in "great men" and "great events", trivialization in general, a hodgepodge of ideological objections from all directions, and a fear that new historians were reaping research funds that might otherwise come to their detractors. To defenders of history as they knew it, the discipline was in crisis, and the pursuit of the new was a major cause.^[133]

Meanwhile, "new" economic history became well-established. However, cliometrics has never been considered a historical field by the vast majority of historians so that cliometric articles have not been cited by historians.^[134][135] Economists mostly employed economic theories and econometric applications similar to typical economic papers. As a result, quantification remained central to demographic studies, but slipped behind in political and social history as traditional narrative approaches made a comeback.^[136] Recently, as the newest approach in economic history "new history of capitalism" appeared. In the first article of the related journal, Marc Flandreau defined their purpose as "crossing border" to create a truly interdisciplinary field.^[137]

Latin America

Latin America 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.^[138] The term "Latin America" did not come into general usage until the twentieth century and in some cases it was rejected.^[139] 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, the history of indigenous peoples, especially in Mexico based on alphabetic sources in Spanish or in indigenous languages.^{[140][141][142][143][144]}

For the early modern period, the emergence of Atlantic history, 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.^[145] 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."^[146]

Historical research appears in a number of specialized journals. These include

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.[148] 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.^[149] There is a small number of general works that have gone through multiple editions.^{[150][151][152]} Major trade publishers have also issued edited volumes on Latin American history^[153] and historiography.^[154] Reference works include the Handbook of Latin American Studies, which publishes articles by area experts, with annotated bibliographic entries, and the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture.^[155]

World history

World history, 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, 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.^[156]

Chicago historian

The "cultural turn" of the 1980s and 1990s affected scholars in most areas of history.[158] 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.^[159]

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 and postcolonial studies, as well as memory studies, and film studies.^[160]

Diplomatic historian Melvyn P. Leffler finds that the problem with the "cultural turn" is that the culture concept is imprecise, and may produce excessively broad interpretations, because it:

seems infinitely malleable and capable of giving shape to totally divergent policies; for example, to internationalism or isolationism in the United States, and to cooperative internationalism or race hatred in Japan. The malleability of culture suggest to me that in order to understand its effect on policy, one needs also to study the dynamics of political economy, the evolution of the international system, and the roles of technology and communication, among many other variables.^[161]

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.[162]^[163] 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.^[164] French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, opened the field with La mémoire collective (Paris: 1950).^[165]

Many historians examine how the memory of the past has been constructed, memorialized or distorted. Historians examine how legends are invented.^[166][167] For example, there are numerous studies of the memory of atrocities from World War II, notably the Holocaust in Europe and Japanese war crimes in Asia.^[168][169] 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.^[170]

Representative of recent scholarship is a collection of studies on the "Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe".

Some major historical journals

This list has no Manual of Style for standalone lists. Please improve this article by adding inclusion criteria, or discuss this issue on the talk page . (November 2023)

See also: List of history journals § Ideas and historiography

• 1839 Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (Brazil)
• 1840 Historisk tidsskrift (Denmark)
• 1859 Historische Zeitschrift (Germany)^[174]
• 1866 Archivum historicum, later Historiallinen arkisto (Finland, published in Finnish)
• 1867 Századok (Hungary)
• 1869 Časopis Matice moravské (Czech republic – then part of Austria-Hungary)
• 1871
  Historisk tidsskrift (Norway)
• 1876
  Revue Historique
  (France)
• 1880 Historisk tidskrift (Sweden)
• 1886
  English Historical Review
  (England)
• 1887 Kwartalnik Historyczny (Poland – then part of Austria-Hungary)
• 1892 William and Mary Quarterly (US)
• 1894
  Ons Hémecht
  (Luxembourg)
• 1895
  American Historical Review (US)^[175]
• 1895 Český časopis historický (Czech republic – then part of Austria-Hungary)
• 1914
  Journal of American History) (US)^[176]
• 1915 The Catholic Historical Review (US)
• 1916
  The Journal of Negro History (renamed in 2001 The Journal of African American History
  ) (US)
• 1916 Historisk Tidskrift för Finland (Finland, published in Swedish)
• 1918
  Hispanic American Historical Review
  (US)
• 1920 Canadian Historical Review (Canada)
• 1922
  Slavonic and East European Review (SEER), (England)^[177]
• 1928 Scandia (Sweden)
• 1929
  Annales d'histoire économique et sociale
  (France)
• 1935
  Journal of Southern History (US)^[176]
• 1941 The Journal of Economic History (US)
• 1944 The Americas (US)
• 1951 Historia Mexicana (Mexico)
• 1952 Past & present: a journal of historical studies (England)
• 1953
  Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte
  (Germany)
• 1954 Ethnohistory (US)
• 1956 Journal of the Historical Society of Nigeria (Nigeria)
• 1957 Victorian Studies (US)^[177]
• 1960
  Journal of African History
  (England)
• 1960 Technology and culture: the international quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology (US)
• 1960 History and Theory (US)
• 1967 Indian Church History Review (India) (earlier published as the Bulletin of Church History Association of India)^[178]
• 1967
  The Journal of Social History
  (US)
• 1969 Journal of Interdisciplinary History (US)
• 1969 Journal of Latin American Studies (UK)
• 1975 Geschichte und Gesellschaft. Zeitschrift für historische Sozialwissenschaft (Germany)
• 1975 Signs (US)
• 1976 Journal of Family History (US)
• 1978 The Public Historian (US)
• 1981 Bulletin of Latin American Research (UK)
• 1982 Storia della Storiografia – History of Historiography – Histoire de l'Historiographie – Geschichte der Geschichtsschreibung^[179]
• 1982 Subaltern Studies (Oxford University Press)
• 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
  (US)
• 1990 Journal of World History (US)
• 1990 L'Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft^[180] (Austria)
• 1990 Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (ÖZG)^[181]
• 1992 Women's History Review
• 1992 Colonial Latin American Historical Review (US)
• 1992 Colonial Latin American Review
• 1996
  Environmental History
  (US)
• 2011 International Journal for the Historiography of Education

Narrative

According to

chronologically; it is focused on a single coherent story; it is descriptive rather than analytical; it is concerned with people not abstract circumstances; and it deals with the particular and specific rather than the collective and statistical. He reported that, "More and more of the 'new historians' are now trying to discover what was going on inside people's heads in the past, and what it was like to live in the past, questions which inevitably lead back to the use of narrative."^[182]

Historians committed to a social science approach, however, have criticized the narrowness of narrative and its preference for anecdote over analysis, and its use of clever examples rather than statistically verified empirical regularities.[183]

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
  .
• Moral issues, guilt assignment, and praise assignment
• Revisionism versus orthodox interpretations
• Historical
  metanarratives and metahistory.^[184][185]

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^[by whom?] as a particular historiographical approach.

Some influential historiographical approaches include:

• Big history
• Business history, History of institutions and Official history
• Black history
• Chronology
• Comparative history
• Cultural history
• Diplomatic history
• Decolonization of knowledge
• Economic history (history of capitalism), (Business history), (financial history)
• Environmental history, a relatively new field
• Ethnohistory
• family history, feminist history
• Global history, or World History
• Global studies
• Heroism
• History of medicine
• History of religion and church history; the history of theology is usually handled^{[by whom?]} under theology
• Indigenous history
• Industrial history and the history of technology
• history of ideas
• Labor history
• Legendary history
  – important in pre-modern contexts
• Local history and microhistory
• Marxist historiography and historical materialism
• Migration studies
• Military history, including naval and air history
• Mythistory
  – history incorporating elements of myth
• National history
  – comforting myths of individual peoples
• Oral history and Traditional knowledge
• Political history
• Public history, especially museums and historic preservation
• Quantitative history (prosopography using statistics to study biographies)
• Historiography of science
• Social history and people's history; along with the French version the Annales school and the German Bielefeld School
• Subaltern Studies, regarding post-colonial India
• Urban history
  • American urban history
• Whig history, history interpreted as the story of continuous progress
• World history
• Zeitgeist

Related fields

Important related fields include:

• Antiquarianism
• Genealogy
• Historical archaeology
• Intellectual history
• Numismatics
• Paleography
• Philosophy of history
• Pseudohistory

See also

• List of historians by area of study
• Historical significance
• National memory

Methods

• Archival research
• Auxiliary sciences of history
• Historical method
• Humanistic historiography
• List of historians, inclusive of most major historians
  • List of historians by area of study
• List of history journals
• Philosophy of history
• Popular history
  • Primary source – documents, correspondence, diaries
    • Secondary source – interpretations, written history
      • Tertiary source – textbooks and encyclopedias
• Periodization
• 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
• Historiography of Argentina
• Atlantic history
• Historiography of Canada
• Chinese historiography
• Historiography of the Cold War
• Historiography of early Christianity
• Ethiopian historiography
• Historiography of the French Revolution
  • Annales school, in France
• Historiography of Germany
  • Bielefeld School, in Germany
• Greek historiography
  • Historiography of Alexander the Great
  • Classics
• History of India#Historiography
  • Historiography of the fall of the Mughal Empire
• Historiography of Islam
  • Historiography of early Islam
• Historiography of Japan
• Historiography of Korea
  • Korean nationalist historiography
• Latin American History
• Middle Ages
  • Historiography of feudalism
  • Dark Ages (historiography)
  • Historiography of the Crusades
• Historiography and nationalism
• Roman historiography
  • Historiography of the fall of the Western Roman Empire
• Historiography of Switzerland
• Historiography in the Soviet Union
• Historiography of the United Kingdom
  • Historiography of Scotland
  • Historiography of the British Empire
• Historiography of the United States
  • Frontier thesis
• World history
• Historiography of the causes of World War I
• Historiography of World War II
  • Historiography of the Battle of France, 1940

References

Bibliography

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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
  ISBN 0-415-20267-1
• Marc Bloch, 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
• ISBN 0-394-70391-X
• ISBN 0-19-285306-6
• Deluermoz, Quentin, and
  ISBN 978-0300227543
   ; Yale University Press, 2021
• Doran, Robert. ed. Philosophy of History After Hayden White. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.
• ISBN 0-631-22980-9
• ISBN 1-86207-104-7
• 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)
• ISBN 0-415-30443-1
• ISBN 0-333-96447-0
• Munslow, Alan. The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies (2000), an encyclopedia of concepts, methods and historians
• Olstein, Diego. Thinking History Globally (2025), summary
• Spalding, Roger & Christopher Parker, Historiography: An Introduction, 2008,
  ISBN 0-7190-7285-9
• Sreedharan, E. (2004). A Textbook of Historiography, 500 B.C. to A.D. 2000. Orient Blackswan.
  ISBN 978-8125026570. Archived
  from the original on 13 January 2023. Retrieved 13 February 2016.
• Sreedharan (2007). A Manual of Historical Research Methodology. South Indian Studies.
  ISBN 978-8190592802
  .
• ISBN 0-582-77254-0
• 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 topics 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 Association 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
• Wikidata Q26157365
• Parish, Peter, ed. Reader's Guide to American History (Routledge, 1997), 880 pp; detailed guide to historiography of American topics 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 (5 vol 2011–r12), covers all major historians since AD 600
  • 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.
  ISBN 978-0192853523
• 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,
  ISBN 0415285577
  , 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 ed., 2007,
  ISBN 0-226-07278-9
• 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),
  ISBN 0-226-11280-2
• 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,
  ISBN 0-13-044824-9
• 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;
  ISBN 978-1-4051-4961-7
  .
• ISBN 978-0-226-07283-8
• 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 1945 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); A History of Historical Writing. vol 2: The 18th and 19th Centuries (1942)
• 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)
• 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 2000
• Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds its Past: Placing Women in History, New York: Oxford University Press 1979
• Judith M. Bennett, History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006
• Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America, University of North Carolina Press, 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. 367–381.
• 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. 132–154.
• Mary Ritter Beard, Woman as force in history: A study in traditions and realities
• Mary Spongberg, Writing women's history since the Renaissance, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002
• Clare Hemmings, "Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory", Duke University Press 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 (1984). Preview of Discovering history in China: American historical writing on the recent Chinese past [WorldCat.org]. Columbia University Press - Studies of the East Asian Institute.
  OCLC 456728837
  .
• ISBN 978-2102227356
• 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)
• ISBN 978-0-19-566531-4
• Shourie, Arun (2014). Eminent historians: Their technology, their line, their fraud. Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India : HarperCollins Publishers.
  ISBN 978-9351365914
• 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
• Goldstein, Doris S. (1986). "The origins and early years of the English Historical Review". English Historical Review. 101 (398): 6–19.
  doi:10.1093/ehr/ci.cccxcviii.6
  .
• Goldstein, Doris S. (1982). "The Organizational Development of the British Historical Profession, 1884–1921". Historical Research. 55 (132): 180–193.
  doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.1982.tb01157.x
  .
• Hale, John Rigby, ed. The evolution of British historiography: from Bacon to Namier (1967).
• 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: 122–147.
• 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)
• 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. 1145–1155 in JSTOR
• Guha, Ranajiit. Dominance Without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Harvard UP, 1998)
• Granatstein, J. L. Who Killed Canadian History?
  (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

Further information: Historiography of the French Revolution, Annales school, and Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine

• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929–2014 (John Wiley & Sons, 2015).
• Clark, Stuart (1983). "French historians and early modern popular culture". Past & Present. 100: 62–99.
  doi:10.1093/past/100.1.62
  .
• 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

Further information: Historiography of Germany and Bielefeld School

• 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). excerpt
• 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 Methods18:1 (Winter 1985)31–37.
• Gootenberg, Paul (2004). "Between a Rock and a Softer Place: Reflections on Some Recent Economic History of Latin America".
  S2CID 144339079
  .
• Kuzensof; Oppenheimer, Robert (1985). "The Family and Society in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historiographical Introduction".
  S2CID 145607701
  .
• Lockhart, James. "The Social History of Early Latin America". Latin American Research Review 1972.
• Moya, José C. The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History. New York: Oxford University Press 2011.
• Russell-Wood, A. J. R. (2001). "Archives and the Recent Historiography on Colonial Brazil".
  S2CID 252750152
  .
• Van Young, Eric (1999). "The New Cultural History Comes to Old Mexico".
  doi:10.1215/00182168-79.2.211
  .

United States

• Hofstadter, Richard. The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (1968)
• ISBN 0-521-34328-3
• 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: 111–153.
  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) excerpt and text search
• 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.
  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)
• Jarzombek, Mark, A Prolegomenon to Critical Historiography, Journal of Architectural Education 52/4 (May 1999): 197-206 [2]
• Keita, Maghan. Race and the Writing of History. Oxford UP (2000)
• Leavy, Patricia. Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research (2011) excerpt and text search
• 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.
  doi: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
• ISBN 1-85984-513-4
• Ritchie, Donald A. 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.), Handbook of Historical Studies in Education (2019); [3]

External links

Library resources about
Historiography

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• Resources in your library
• Resources in other libraries

• International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography
• [4] short guide to Historiographical terms
• Basic guide to historiography research for undergraduates
• Cromohs – cyber review of modern historiography open-access electronic scholarly journal Archived 2019-10-23 at the Wayback Machine
• History of Historiography scholarly journal in several languages