What Is Historiography? The History of How History Gets Written

Every historical source exists because somebody produced it and somebody else preserved it, and both decisions introduce bias before a historian touches anything:

• •Literacy, since for most of history only a small minority wrote, so the record over-represents elites, administrators and the religious
• •Institutional survival, since states, churches and estates kept archives while households did not, which is why tax records and lawsuits survive and ordinary conversation does not
• •Material durability, since stone and parchment outlast paper, and dry climates preserve what wet ones destroy, which distorts geography as well as period
• •Deliberate destruction, through war, purges and the routine clearing of records considered useless at the time
• •Selection at the archive, since what is catalogued and accessible shapes what gets researched, and uncatalogued material effectively does not exist
• •Language, since a historian works in the languages they read, which has systematically shaped which regions receive attention
• •The result is that silence in the record is evidence of what was not written down rather than of what did not happen, a point made forcefully by Michel-Rolph Trouillot about the Haitian revolution

Historical writing has gone through identifiable phases and each rejected the priorities of the last. Ancient and medieval history was largely narrative, moral and frequently providential. The nineteenth century produced professional history in the German universities, associated with Leopold von Ranke, built on archival documents, source criticism and the ambition to show what actually happened, which established the discipline's methods and concentrated it heavily on states, diplomacy and great men. The Annales school in France from the 1920s rejected that focus, turning to long-term structures, geography, economy and the daily life of ordinary people, and pushing history towards the social sciences. Social history and history from below, associated with E. P. Thompson among others, sought to recover the experience of workers, women and the poor from records made about rather than by them. The cultural turn from the 1970s shifted attention to meaning, representation and language. Subsequent developments include gender history, postcolonial history, environmental history, global and connected history and, most recently, quantitative approaches using digitised records at scale.

Several disputes recur in every generation. Whether history is made by individuals or by structures, and how much room agency leaves within economic and demographic constraint. Whether historians can achieve objectivity, with the strong sceptical position holding that all history is written from a standpoint and the strong empiricist position holding that evidence constrains interpretation whatever the historian's views, and most practitioners occupying a middle position where interpretations differ and some are demonstrably wrong. Whether history has patterns or direction, which separates those who look for general explanations from those who insist each situation is particular. And presentism, meaning judging the past by present standards, which is criticised as anachronistic and defended on the grounds that pretending to have no standards is itself a position. The practical test used within the discipline is whether an account accounts for the evidence, including the inconvenient evidence, which is why a footnote is not decoration but the mechanism by which a claim can be checked.

Historiography becomes visible to everyone else whenever history is contested publicly, which is frequently. Disputes about statues, school curricula, museum labels and public apologies are disputes about which account of the past is authoritative and who gets to decide. States legislate about history, with laws in various countries requiring or prohibiting particular characterisations of specific events, and historians have been prosecuted under them. Denial of documented atrocities operates by attacking the evidential basis, which is why the technical apparatus of source criticism has been used in court, most prominently when a libel trial in 2000 turned on whether a writer had misrepresented documents, and the judgment turned on detailed examination of his footnotes. Understanding how historical claims are supported is therefore not preparation for an exam but the practical skill that allows a reader to tell the difference between an argument that rests on evidence and one that merely cites something.

Historiography studies how history is produced, starting from the fact that sources survive selectively, favouring the literate, the institutional and the durable, so silence records what was not written rather than what did not occur. The discipline moved from narrative and moral writing to archival professionalism under Ranke, then to long-term structures under the Annales school, then to history from below and to cultural, gender, postcolonial and environmental approaches. Recurring arguments concern agency against structure, objectivity and presentism.