Metahistory

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An introductory guide to historiography

What is Historiography?

Disentangling the past from our stories about it

By Fred Gibbs

Simply put, historiography is the study of how people have written about the past, how and why methods and styles have changed, and a reflection on contemporary approaches of modern historians.

The first task in getting a handle on historiography is to recognize a distinction between the past and history, terms that almost everyone uses interchangably. But we need to see how the past and history are not exactly the same. The past is stuff that happened, either relatively recently or millions of years ago. Stuff happened, it’s over, and we have very limited access to the past. But we feel connected to the past because we tell stories about it based on surviving evidence. History, then, is the stories we tell about the past. Some histories are more accurate than others (based on plausible interpretations of historical sources), and we might say that they represent or correspond to the past more closely than histories that don’t use historical evidence very carefully (or at all).

What value is there in separating the history and the past? First, it helps us recognize that even widely accepted stories about the past are merely representations of the past and can be highly distorted or flat out wrong. More importantly, though, it helps us see how there can be completely different and even contradictory interpretations/stories about the past that are equally useful. You could look at ten different drawings of an apple and all recognize an apple, but have those representations evoke very different reactions. In other words, it helps us see that there is no absolute historical truth that we can ever know. This does not mean that history is fiction or useless—just that its meaning and value changes over time. This fact can be hard to recognize over the course of one lifetime, but it is quite obvious when one takes a broad historiographical perspective over a long period of time.

Even with this distinction in mind, historiography is also about the past in the sense that it considers what historians have written—in the past—either relatively recent or thousands of years ago. But instead of focusing on what happened in terms of a particular event, institution, topic, geographic region, or time period, it looks at what historians were trying to do in their research and writing, why they thought it was important, what purpose they thought it served, how they wrote about it. Most importantly, it considers why all these have constantly and so radically changed—and continue to change along with cultures that produce writers and readers (or tellers and listeners) of history.

Historiography also raises a number of methodlogical and sometimes philosophical questions about the nature of historical study itself. Some questions that historiographers and philosophers of history have addressed that historiography helps us think through:

  • Why do we really need to know what happened in the past? Can we really learn lessons and avoid past “mistakes”?
  • How is the fact that history is written as a narrative—in story form, with characters, and a kind of plot—impose an artificiality on history itself.
  • Given the complexity of real everday life, why do we think that telling supposedly factual stories about the past based on a tiny sliver of remaining evidence is possible?
  • How objective can any accout of the past really be? Is there a historical “truth” that everyone can agree on? What constitutes historical evidence?