Historiography

• 1. Introduction

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  Historiography is the study of the methods historians use to build history as an academic discipline. It is not the past itself. As one definition puts it, 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. The same war, the same revolution, the same king can be told a hundred different ways depending on who holds the pen. Why did one ancient Greek traveller decide to sift reliable accounts from rumor while his contemporaries wrote down divine omens without doubt? Why did a French philosopher in the 1700s declare that earlier history was rife with falsified evidence? Why would a twentieth-century thinker insist that millions crossed the Rubicon, yet only Julius Caesar's crossing was ever called noteworthy? This is the story of how the telling of history became a discipline with rules, rivalries, and revolutions of its own. The earliest chronologies reach back to ancient Egypt and Sumerian and Akkadian Mesopotamia, written as chronicles and annals. Most of those early writers were never even known by name.

• 2. The Greek Invention

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  Herodotus of Halicarnassus, who lived from 484 to 425 BC, composed The Histories and earned the title father of history. He tried to distinguish between more and less reliable accounts. He travelled widely and wrote down what he learned of various Mediterranean cultures, conducting research in person. His emphasis fell on the actions and characters of men, yet he still gave divinity an important role in shaping events. Before him, in Archaic Greece, came the logographers. Hecataeus of Miletus produced prose compilations about places and peoples, an early form of cultural anthropology, along with speeches used in courts of law. This tradition of logography came before the full narrative form of history. Thucydides took a sharper turn. In his account of the war between Athens and Sparta, he largely removed divine causality and established a rationalistic element that later Western writers would follow. He was the first to separate the cause of an event from its immediate origins. His successor Xenophon, who lived around 431 to 355 BC, brought autobiographical and biographical character studies into his Anabasis. The generation after Herodotus produced a wave of local histories of individual city-states, drawing on the written archives of city and sanctuary. Two figures stand out. Hippias of Elis compiled the lists of winners in the Olympic Games, which supplied the basic chronological framework for as long as the pagan classical tradition lasted. Hellanicus of Lesbos compiled more than two dozen histories from civic records, all of them now lost.

• 3. Rome And The Annals

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  The Origines, composed by the Roman statesman Cato the Elder, who lived from 234 to 149 BC, was written in Latin as a conscious effort to push back against Greek cultural influence. It marked the beginning of Latin historical writing. The Romans had adopted the Greek tradition and wrote at first in Greek, as in the annals of Quintus Fabius Pictor, before turning to their own language. Julius Caesar, who lived from 103 to 44 BC, gave the world a model of autobiographical war coverage in his de Bello Gallico, praised for its lucid style. Sallust, who lived from 86 to 35 BC, tried to analyze what he saw as the decline of the Republican Roman state and its virtues, in his accounts of the Catilinarian conspiracy and the Jugurthine War. Livy, who lived from 59 BC to 17 AD, recorded the rise of Rome from city-state to empire. His speculation about what would have happened if Alexander the Great had marched against Rome is the first known instance of alternate history. Plutarch, who lived around 45 to 125 AD, and Suetonius, who lived around 69 to after 130 AD, introduced biography as a branch of history, stressing the human side of their subjects. Tacitus, writing around 56 AD, denounced Roman immorality by praising German virtues and elaborating the idea of the Noble savage. His focus on personal character can be seen as pioneering work in psychohistory. Roman historiography, though rooted in Greek practice, shared traits with Chinese historiography. Both leaned on annalistic forms, revered ancestors, and aimed to impart moral lessons, laying groundwork for medieval Christian historiography.

• 4. The Chinese Standard

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  Sima Qian, the Han dynasty eunuch who lived from 145 to 86 BC, was the first in China to lay the groundwork for professional historical writing. His Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian, was initiated by his father Sima Tan, the court astronomer, who lived from 165 to 110 BC. Their work superseded the older style of the Spring and Autumn Annals, the Bamboo Annals, and the Classic of History, court and dynastic records that abstained from analysis and focused on moralistic teaching. The Shiji pioneered the Annals-biography format, which became the standard for prestige history writing in China. A history would open with a chronological outline of court affairs, then continue with detailed biographies of prominent people. Sima Qian reached as far back as the sixteenth century BC and the founding of the Shang dynasty, and he explored the lives of commoners as well as rulers. His successor Ban Gu narrowed the scope. His Book of Han, completed in 96 AD, covered only the Western Han dynasty and established the idea of using dynastic boundaries as start and end points. The Records of the Grand Historian and the Book of Han were later joined by the Book of the Later Han and the Records of the Three Kingdoms to form the Four Histories. These became mandatory reading for the Imperial Examinations, giving them an influence on Chinese culture comparable to the Confucian Classics. More such histories followed in later dynasties, eventually numbering between twenty-four and twenty-six, though none matched the impact of the first four. Around 710, the Tang historian Liu Zhiji, who lived from 661 to 721, published the Shitong, the first comprehensive work on historical criticism. He argued that historians should be skeptical of primary sources, rely on systematically gathered evidence, and not treat earlier scholars with undue deference.

• 5. Faith As Framework

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  Eusebius of Caesarea wrote his Ecclesiastical History around 324, weaving extensive written sources into a distinctly Christian view of the past. Christian theology treated time as linear, moving according to a divine plan. Because that plan encompassed everyone, Christian histories took a universal approach and often opened with summaries of important events from before their own period. The central role of the Bible showed in a preference for written sources, in contrast to the classical historians who favored oral ones, and in the inclusion of politically unimportant people. The shared author of the Gospel of Luke and the book of Acts has been considered the first Christian historian, using the methods of ancient historiographers. In the Early Middle Ages, history often took the form of annals or chronicles recording events year by year, a style that hampered the analysis of causes. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the work of several writers, was started during the reign of Alfred the Great in the late ninth century, and one copy was still being updated in 1154. Some writers managed a more narrative form. Bede wrote both secular and ecclesiastical history and is known for the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Christian historiography also flourished in Africa. Augustine of Hippo, the Berber theologian and bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, wrote his multi-volume autobiography Confessions between 397 and 400 AD. The fourth-century Ezana Stone commemorated Ezana of Axum's conquest of the Kingdom of Kush in Nubia and his conversion to Christianity, making him the first indigenous African head of state to convert. Ethiopian historiography matured under the Solomonic dynasty. The first proper biographical chronicle on an Emperor of Ethiopia was made for Amda Seyon I, who reigned from 1314 to 1344, shown as a Christian savior in conflict with the Islamic Ifat Sultanate.

• 6. Verifying The Source

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  Muslim historical writing began in the seventh century with the reconstruction of the Prophet Muhammad's life in the centuries after his death. The sources were a problem from the start. Numerous conflicting narratives about Muhammad and his companions made it necessary to verify which accounts were more reliable. To meet that need, historians developed methods such as the science of biography, the science of hadith, and Isnad, the chain of transmission. These methods were later applied to other figures across Islamic civilization. The tradition includes Urwah, who died in 712, Ibn Ishaq, who died in 761, al-Waqidi, who lived from 745 to 822, Muhammad al-Bukhari, who lived from 810 to 870, and Ibn Hajar, who lived from 1372 to 1449. Islamic historical writing culminated in Ibn Khaldun, who lived from 1332 to 1406. He published his historiographical studies in the Muqaddimah, translated as Prolegomena, and the Kitab al-I'bar, the Book of Advice. His work was forgotten until the late nineteenth century, when it was rediscovered. The same instinct toward verification echoed in Korea. The Samguk sagi, compiled by the Goryeo court historian Kim Pusik after a commission from King Injong, was completed in 1145. It drew not only on earlier Chinese histories but also on the Hwarang Segi, written by the Silla historian Kim Taemun in the eighth century, a work now lost.

• 7. The Enlightenment Turn

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  Voltaire, the French philosophe who lived from 1694 to 1778, recast historiography in both factual and analytical terms. He rejected traditional biographies and accounts that claimed the work of supernatural forces. He went further, suggesting that earlier historiography was rife with falsified evidence and required new investigations at the source. He advised scholars that anything contradicting the normal course of nature was not to be believed. His best-known histories are The Age of Louis XIV from 1751 and his Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of the Nations from 1756. He broke from narrating diplomatic and military events and emphasized customs, social history, and achievements in the arts and sciences. He was the first scholar to attempt a serious history of the world that eliminated theological frameworks. In 1739 he wrote that his chief object was not political or military history but the history of the arts, of commerce, of civilization, in a word of the human mind. David Hume had a similar effect in Great Britain. In 1754 he published The History of England, a six-volume work extending from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. He examined culture, literature, and science alongside kings and armies, and gave special attention to figures including Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Isaac Newton, and William Harvey. The apex of Enlightenment history came with Edward Gibbon's six-volume The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published on the 17th of February 1776. Its relative objectivity and heavy use of primary sources made it a model, and led to Gibbon being called the first modern historian. The book sold impressively, earning its author about £9000. Gibbon said he had always endeavoured to draw from the fountain-head, studying the originals rather than secondhand accounts.

• 8. Science, Class, And The Crowd

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  Leopold von Ranke, who lived from 1795 to 1886, was the founder of modern source-based history and worked at Berlin. He implemented the seminar teaching method and focused on archival research and the analysis of documents. His first book, the History of the Latin and Teutonic Peoples from 1494 to 1514, appeared in 1824 and drew on memoirs, diaries, letters, government documents, diplomatic dispatches, and eyewitness accounts. His credo was to write history the way it actually happened, insisting on primary sources with proven authenticity. In 1831, at the behest of the Prussian government, he founded the first historical journal in the world. Other thinkers pushed against his approach. Hegel held that world history represents the development of the spirit's consciousness of its own freedom. Karl Marx introduced historical materialism, arguing that economic conditions and dominant modes of production determined the structure of society. He laid out five successive stages, from primitive communism through slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, predicting an eventual proletarian revolution leading to socialism and then communism. A different revolution came in France in 1929, when Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre founded the Annales d'histoire economique et sociale journal in Strasbourg. The Annales school stressed long-term social history over politics and war, championing the study of structures over the longue duree. Its second era was led by Fernand Braudel, influential through the 1960s and 1970s, especially for his work on the Mediterranean in the era of Philip II of Spain. In Britain, E. P. Thompson pioneered history from below in The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963. He wrote that he sought to rescue the poor stockinger and the Luddite cropper from the enormous condescension of posterity. He argued that class was not a structure but a relationship that changed over time. The arguments never settled. E. H. Carr, in his 1961 book What Is History, called history an unending dialogue between the past and present, and noted that although millions had crossed the Rubicon, only Julius Caesar's crossing in 49 BC was declared noteworthy by historians.