The technological advances of the 21st century will undoubtedly bring new opportunities for the presentation of history. In the early 2000s there was already an interactive video game whose premise was that an evil woman has torn out the pages of the book in which human history is inscribed and substituted false information for them. The player, armed with a reference work, must replace the falsehoods with the correct information supplied by that work. The game is an apt allegory. Time itself has done its best to efface knowledge of the human past and has allowed ideologically distorted versions of that past to flourish instead. The historian’s task is to defeat time and the loss or deceits of memory. Unfortunately, there is no data bank of infallible truths to which one can have recourse—but that simply means that the game is never over.
There may come a time when it no longer seems worth playing, as some postmodernist thinkers have suggested—though postmodernism defines itself as post through a historical judgment. Historical thought, turned on itself, shows that history has not always existed, nor is it found in every culture. Historians, of all people, are reluctant to pose as prophets, because they know best how various are the twists and turns of human events. It is therefore impossible to find a conclusive argument against the suggestion of Foucault that history, like the human subject, will prove to be a transitory conception.
Postmodernism taught that texts allow many interpretations and that there is nothing other than the text. Its attacks on “essentialism” made it much harder to use “history” in such a way as to attribute will or agency to it, or even a capacity to teach. (Here Hegel had anticipated this position by saying that all one can learn from history is that humans have never learned from history.) Historians cannot make the grandiose claims for their discipline that were credible in the 19th century. Nevertheless, they know that there was a Holocaust, and they know that, despite Joseph Stalin’s efforts to make him an “unperson,” Leon Trotsky played some role in the Russian Revolution. Also, it makes quite a difference whether there was a Holocaust or not. This is reducing the case against total relativism or constructivism to truisms, but truisms are nonetheless true. It is hard to imagine that humanity’s grasp of the past, so laboriously achieved and tenuous as it is, would lightly be loosened. Richard T. Vann
Citation Information
Article Title: Historiography
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 23 August 2018
URL: https://www.britannica.com/topic/historiography
Access Date: August 19, 2019
Additional Reading
Historiography is a word historians use both for the activity and craft of writing history and also for what past historians have written. This bibliographical essay provides a guide to further reading about historiography in both senses and, since anything that people have done in the past can fall within its scope, explores the (fairly porous) boundaries between history and other human sciences. Introductions
Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography (1999), is a fine introduction. Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (1955, reissued 1969), describes the achievement of technical skills by the historians of 18th- and 19th-century Germany, while his posthumous The Origins of History, ed. by Adam Watson (1981), addresses, among other things, the question of why historical thought arose in some ancient cultures and not in others.
There is no substitute for reading complete historical works, but their flavour at least can be found in various anthologies. Donald R. Kelley (ed.), Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (1991), gives samples of western European historical writing through the 18th century. History of historiography
Historiography of a sort, like much else, can be traced to ancient Mesopotamia, as argued in Samuel Noah Kramer, From the Tablets of Sumer (1956, reissued as History Begins at Sumer, 1988), which also treats other aspects of Sumerian society. Historical writing in China is similarly ancient; a good guide is Charles S. Gardner, Chinese Traditional Historiography (1938, reissued 1966).
There is a vast body of scholarship on the Classical Greek and Roman historians, but almost all of it can be found by any bibliographical search for works on individual historians. Arnaldo Momigliano, Studies in Historiography (1966, reissued 1985), and The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (1990), are collections of essays and lectures by one of the greatest historians of historiography. Less familiar in the West is the rich Muslim tradition of historiography, which is the subject of Franz Rosenthal, A History of Muslim Historiography, 2nd rev. ed. (1968).
Beryl Smalley, Historians in the Middle Ages (1974), is an accessible and well-illustrated sketch of medieval historiography in all parts of Europe. One of the earliest works to take an interest in the relationship of memory to history is Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories (1992, reissued 2005).
Two huge books give encyclopaedic treatment to historians in the Renaissance: Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (1981); and Constanin Fasolt, The Limits of History (2004).
Many authors treat the national historiographical traditions that were beginning to be established in the 16th century. Anthony Grafton, What Was History?: The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (2007), emphasizes the literary character of that historiography, and his Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (1991), discusses the challenges presented to it.
Not surprisingly, there is an enormous body of literature about the development of German professional historiography in the 18th and 19th centuries. Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (1983), retains its importance. On the German Enlightenment, the best study is Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (1975). Jörn Rüsen (ed.), Meaning and Representation in History (2006), is an extensive study of German historical scholarship and historical theory.
One of the best ways to approach the lively current American historiographical scene is through Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (2008), a wide-ranging collection of thoughtful review essays. John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America, updated ed. (1989), is a comprehensive discussion of 20th-century scholarship.