- "Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline."
Examine different approaches to writing history and how they inform Public History practices.
The Nature of History: Understanding the definition and purpose of history as a discipline.
Historical Methods: Understanding the tools and approaches to study history, including original research, archival work, oral history interviews, and secondary literature analysis.
Historiographical Debates: Understanding the different perspectives and debates surrounding major historical events, movements, and themes.
Historical Interpretation: Understanding how historical events have been interpreted and re-interpreted over time, and the impact that changing interpretations have had on our understanding of the past.
Critical Analysis: Understanding how to assess and analyze historical sources, including identifying bias and exploring the context in which sources were produced.
Contingency and Causation: Understanding the role of contingency and causation in history, and how events and actions link together over time.
Historical Narratives: Understanding the art of storytelling in history, including the use of narrative techniques and the importance of structure and pacing in historical narratives.
Epistemology: Understanding the questions around how we know what we know about the past, and the limitations of historical knowledge.
Intellectual History: Understanding the intellectual trends and ideas that have shaped history, including the role of philosophy, theology, and social theory in shaping historical narratives.
Public History: Understanding the role of history in public life, including the interpretation of historical sites and public memory projects.
Archaeology: Understanding how physical evidence and archaeological discoveries contribute to our understanding of the past.
Oral History: Understanding the role of verbal testimony and personal narratives in historical research.
Memory and History: Understanding the relationship between memory and history, and the role that memory plays in shaping our understanding of the past.
Digital Humanities: Understanding how digital tools and technology are changing the practice of history, including the use of GIS mapping, data visualization, and digital archives.
Social history: Focus on the social, cultural, and economic factors that shape historical events and individuals.
Political history: Focus on the politics, government policies, and governmental institutions that shape historical events.
Military history: Focus on the armed forces, wars, and battles that have taken place in history.
Labor history: Focus on the working class, trade unions, and labor movements.
Diplomatic history: Focus on international relationships, treaties, diplomacy, and foreign policies.
Environmental history: Focus on the relationship between humans and the natural environment over time.
Intellectual history: Focus on the evolution of ideas, beliefs, and ideologies within society.
Economic history: Focus on the economic forces that drive historical events, including capitalism, imperialism, and globalization.
Legal history: Focus on the evolution of legal systems and the role of law in historical events.
Gender history: Focus on gender roles and relationships, including women’s rights and feminist movements.
Cultural history: Focus on art, literature, language, religion, and other aspects of culture in historical events.
Oral history: Focus on capturing the first-hand experiences and memories of individuals through interviews and oral histories.
Public history: Focus on presenting historical knowledge to the general public through museums, public monuments, historic sites, and other forms of public engagement.
- "The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches."
- "Scholars discuss historiography by topic—such as the historiography of the United Kingdom, that of WWII, the pre-Columbian Americas, early Islam, and China—and different approaches and genres, such as political history and social history."
- "Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the development of academic history, 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."
- "The Histories of Herodotus, the founder of historiography."
- "The Roman statesman Cato the Elder produced the first Roman historiography, the Origines, in the 2nd century BCE."
- "Sima Tan and Sima Qian in the Han Empire of China established Chinese historiography, compiling the Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian)."
- "Medieval historiography included the works of chronicles in medieval Europe, Islamic histories by Muslim historians, and the Korean and Japanese historical writings based on the existing Chinese model."
- "Figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, who among others set the foundations for the modern discipline."
- "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."
- "The proportion of political historians decreased from 40 to 30 percent."
- "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."