What is History? What is Historiography?

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What is History? What is Historiography?

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Title: What is History? What is Historiography?

1
What is History?What is Historiography?
2
Introduction

History, in its broadest sense, is the totality
of all past events, although a more realistic
definition would limit it to the known past.
Historiography is the written record of what is
known of human lives and societies in the past
and how historians have attempted to understand
them.

Of all the fields of serious study and literary
effort, history may be the hardest to define
precisely, because the attempt to uncover past
events and formulate an intelligible account of
them necessarily involves the use and influence
of many auxiliary disciplines and literary forms.
The concern of all serious historians has been to
collect and record facts about the human past and
often to discover new facts.
They have known that the information they have is
incomplete, partly incorrect, or biased and
requires careful attention. All have tried to
discover in the facts patterns of meaning
addressed to the enduring questions of human
life.

4
The Historian's Craft

Except for the special circumstance in which
historians record events they themselves have
witnessed, historical facts can only be known
through intermediary sources.
These include testimony from living witnesses
narrative records, such as previous histories,
memoirs, letters, and imaginative literature the
legal and financial records of courts,
legislatures, religious institutions, or
businesses and the unwritten information derived
from the physical remains of past civilizations,
such as architecture, arts and crafts, burial
grounds, and cultivated land.
All these, and many more, sources of information
provide the evidence from which the historian
deciphers historical facts.

The relation between evidence and fact, however,
is rarely simple and direct.
The evidence may be biased or mistaken,
fragmentary, or nearly unintelligible after long
periods of cultural or linguistic change.
Historians, therefore, have to assess their
evidence with a critical eye.

6
Interpretation and Form

Moreover, the purpose of history as a serious
endeavor to understand human life is never
fulfilled by the mere sifting of evidence for
facts.
Fact-finding is only the foundation for the
selection, arrangement, and explanation that
constitute historical interpretation.
The process of interpretation informs all aspects
of historical inquiry, beginning with the
selection of a subject for investigation, because
the very choice of a particular event or society
or institution is itself an act of judgment that
asserts the importance of the subject.

Once chosen, the subject itself suggests a
provisional model or hypothesis that guides
research and helps the historian to assess and
classify the available evidence and to present a
detailed and coherent account of the subject.
The historian must respect the facts, avoid
ignorance and error as far as possible, and
create a convincing, intellectually satisfying
interpretation.

Until modern times, history was regarded
primarily as a special kind of literature that
shared many techniques and effects with fictional
narrative.
Historians were committed to factual materials
and personal truthfulness, but like writers of
fiction they wrote detailed narratives of events
and vivid character sketches with great attention
to language and style.
The complex relations between literary art and
historiography have been and continue to be a
subject of serious debate.

9
Historical Writing in the West
10

Western historiography originated with the
ancient Greeks, and the standards and interests
of the Greek historians dominated historical
study and writing for centuries.

11
Greek Historiography

In the 5th century B.C. Herodotus, who has been
called the father of history, wrote his famous
account of the Persian Wars.

12
The World According to Herodotuscirca 450 BCE
13
Herodotus, (c.485-425 B.C.)--Greek Historian
"Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks."
From The Histories of Herodotus "Haste in every
business brings failures." From The Histories of
Herodotus "If a man insisted always on being
serious, and never allowed himself a bit of fun
and relaxation, he would go mad or become
unstable without knowing it." From The Histories
of Herodotus "In peace, children inter their
parents war violates the order of nature and
causes parents to inter their children." From The
Histories of Herodotus "In soft regions are born
soft men." From The Histories of Herodotus "Not
snow, no, nor rain, nor heat, nor night keeps
them from accomplishing their appointed courses
with all speed." From The Histories of Herodotus
14

Shortly afterward, Thucydides wrote his classic
study of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and
Sparta.

15
Thucydides, (c.460-c.400 B.C.)--Greek Historian
Quotes by Thucydides "We secure our friends not
by accepting favors but by doing them." --From
Peloponnesian War The kind of events that once
took place will by reason of human nature take
places again. --Thucydides
16

These men recorded contemporary or
near-contemporary events in prose narratives of
striking style, depending as much as possible on
eyewitness or other reliable testimony for
evidence.
They concentrated on war, constitutional history,
and the character of political leaders to create
pictures of human societies in times of crisis or
change.

The recognition by contemporaries of the
extraordinary accomplishment of both historians
gave their works an authority that influenced
succeeding historians.
They too would prefer recent events, consider
visual and oral evidence superior to written
(used only in ancillary ways), and assume that
the most significant human expression was the
state and political life.
Antiquarian research into religion, customs,
names, and art, based on documentary sources, was
also part of Greek and Roman culture but was
allied chiefly to philosophy, biography, and
areas of specialized learning and was excluded
from the main traditions of political history.

No specialized training was considered necessary
for historiography.
The historian's education was that of any
cultivated man careful reading of general
literature, followed by the study of rhetoric,
the art of fluent and persuasive use of language
that dominated ancient higher education.
The ideal historian would combine rigorous
truthfulness and freedom from bias with the gift
of developed expression.

In the 4th century B.C. Xenophon, Theopompus of
Chios (born about 378bc), and Ephorus continued
the main traditions of Greek historiography in
the Hellenistic period and extended its scope.

Polybius, in the 2nd century B.C., explained
Roman history, political life, and military
successes to his fellow Greeks, a subject also
taken up by Strabo the geographer and Dionysius
of Halicarnassus in the following century.

The history of the Jews was placed in its
Hellenistic and Roman context by Flavius
Josephus, a Jewish aristocrat of Greek culture,
who also defended and explained Jewish religion
and customs.

In the same period Plutarch wrote his biographies
of famous Greeks and Romans, emphasizing
dramatic, anecdotal materials in his depiction of
exemplary characterindividual lives regarded as
illustrations of moral choicesand its effect on
public life.

23
Roman Historiography
24
Roman Historiography

The prestige of Greek as a language of art and
learning was so great that the first Roman
historiography, even by Romans, was written in
Greek.
Cato the Elder was the first to write Roman
history in Latin, and his example inspired
others.

Sallust, impressed by the work of Thucydides,
developed a brilliant Latin style that combined
ethical reflections with acute psychological
insight.
His political analysis, based on human
motivation, was to have a long and pervasive
influence on historical writing.

At the same time, Cicero, although not himself a
historian, defined the prevailing ideals of
historiography in terms of stylistic elegance and
traditional moral standards applied to the events
of public life.
Latin historical writing continued in this mode
with Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius.

27
Early Christian Historiography
28

The writers mentioned thus far (with the
exception of Josephus) were all pagan, and their
works were entirely secular in subject and point
of view.
Educated pagans considered speculation on human
destiny and moral questions beyond those directly
applicable to political life the proper work of
philosophers, not historians.
During the 4th century, however, with the
conversion of Emperor Constantine the Great,
Christianity attained legal status and increasing
influence in the Roman Empire and introduced new
subjects and approaches to history.

Eusebius of Caesarea wrote an ecclesiastical
history (circa 324), tracing the growth of the
church from its origins, through generations of
persecution and martyrdom, to the triumphs of his
own day.
This radically new kind of history ignored the
traditional classical restrictions of subject and
style.

Eusebius described religious life, books, and
ideas, and people of no political importance he
included a great deal of documentary evidence and
considered the major questions of human
existence.
Such mingling of secular and religious history
with moral interpretation on the largest scale
had its only precedent in the Old Testament,
where the relation between God and humankind was
seen in historical terms as a covenant between
Yahweh and Israel worked out over centuries of
national history of the Jews.

Built on this foundation, Christianity too was a
religion with significant implications for the
interpretation of human history.
In the 5th century A.D., Paulus Orosius
reinterpreted Roman history from a polemical
Christian point of view, and St. Augustine, in
his City of God (413-26), conceived of far more
complex and subtle relations between Christians
and secular history.

32
The Middle Ages
33

With the disintegration of the Western Roman
Empire in the 5th century A.D., the traditions of
classical education and literary culture, of
which historiography was part, were disrupted and
attenuated.
Literacy became one of the professional skills of
the clergy, which carried on the task of
preserving and expanding a learned, religious
culture.
Many monasteries kept chronicles or annals, often
the anonymous work of generations of monks, which
simply recorded whatever the author knew of
events, year by year, without any attempt at
artistic or intellectual elaboration.

The achievements of past historians, however,
preserved in monastic libraries, kept alive the
idea of a more ambitious standard, and early
medieval writers, such as Gregory of Tours,
struggled to meet it.
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People
(731) by the Venerable Bede, an English monk,
achieved the integration of secular and
ecclesiastical history, natural and supernatural
events, in a forceful and intelligent narrative.

The revived vigor of intellectual and literary
life in the High Middle Ages is reflected in the
historical works of the English monk William of
Malmesbury, the German Otto of Freising, and the
Norman Orderic Vitalis.

Although most of the later medieval historians
were clerics and wrote in Latin, the traditions
of secular historiography were also revived by
chroniclers who wrote in the vernacular
languages.
Jean de Joinville recorded the deeds of his king,
Louis IX of France, on Crusade Jean Froissart
wrote of the exploits of French and English
chivalry during the Hundred Years' War.

37
The Renaissance
38

The intensified study of Greek and Roman
literature and the renewal of rhetorical
education that characterized intellectual life in
15th-century Italy had an effect on historical
study it encouraged a secular and realistic
approach to political history, both ancient and
modern.

Leonardo Bruni, a student of the newly recovered
works of Tacitus, reconsidered the history of
Republican and imperial Rome and of his native
Florence in the light of Roman experience.

In the 16th century Niccolo Machiavelli and
Francesco Guicciardini wrote works that again set
political history in a world bounded by human
laws and human ambitions.
This separation of ecclesiastical from secular
materials of history is evident wherever
Renaissance learning had influence in Europe.

41
Enlightenment History
42

The classical traditions of history writing had
emphasized literary skill and the
reinterpretation of history at the expense of
basic research.
From the 16th century onward, many scholars
throughout Europe devoted their lives to the
laborious, systematic collection of the sources
for their national and religious histories.

The French Benedictines, notably Jean Mabillon
and Bernard de Montfaucon, began the exhaustive
examination and publication of the sources of
ecclesiastical history.

Ludovico Muratori collected the sources for
Italian history.

Gottfried W. Leibniz compiled the annals of
medieval Germany, and the Austrian Joseph Eckhel
established the field of numismatics.

Sir William Dugdale, Bishop Thomas Tanner, and
Thomas Hearne collected documents and
inscriptions in England and edited medieval
annals.
These examples represent only a few of the many
antiquarians whose scrupulous work preserved the
sources of historical knowledge and created and
defined the major fields of critical research
such as diplomatics, numismatics, and
archaeology.

The same uncompromising attention to detail and
method that was the highest accomplishment of
erudition, however, separated the antiquarians,
in method and sympathy, from the newest
developments of 18th-century historiographythe
philosophic history inspired by the ideas of the
Enlightenment.

Voltaire recharged the literary traditions of
historiography with the excitement of his
provocative rationalism.
He ignored the classical focus on politics and
included all facets of civilization in a
historiography of sweeping intellectual scope but
displayed rather cavalier impatience with learned
detail.

Enlightenment historians, such as Montesquieu,
David Hume, William Robertson, and the marquis de
Condorcet continued the bolder philosophic
conception of history and the philosophers'
careless evaluation of evidence.

Edward Gibbon combined a deep respect for
antiquarian research with Enlightenment and great
literary gifts to produce The History of the
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88),
which set a standard for historical writing.

51
Non-Western Concepts of History Historiography
52

Muslim historiography appears to have originally
developed independently of European influences.
Until the 19th century Muslim writers only very
seldom consulted Christian sources and almost
never noted events in Christian countries.
Fortunately, they displayed at times more
curiosity about the non-Muslim peoples of Asia
than any Europeans did.

The first detailed studies on the subject of
historiography itself and the first critiques on
historical methods appeared in the works of the
Arab Muslim historian and historiographer Ibn
Khaldun (1332-1406), who is regarded as the
father of historiography, cultural history, and
the philosophy of history.
He is especially noted for his historiographical
writings in the Muqaddimah (Latinized as
Prolegomena) and Kitab al-I'bar (Book of Advice).

Among many other things, his Muqaddimah laid the
groundwork for the observation of the role of
state, communication, propaganda and systematic
bias in history and he discussed the rise and
fall of civilizations.

Muslim historical writings first began developing
earlier from the 7th century with the
reconstruction of Muhammad's life in the
centuries following his death.
Due to numerous conflicting narratives regarding
Muhammad and his companions from various sources,
it was necessary to verify which sources were
more reliable.

In order to evaluate these sources, various
methodologies were developed, such as the
"science of biography", "science of hadith" and
"Isnad" (chain of transmission).
These methodologies were later applied to other
historical figures in the Islamic civilization.

Egyptology began in Arab Egypt from the 9th
century, with the first known attempts at
deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs made by Dhul-Nun
al-Misri and Ibn Wahshiyya.

Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (838-923) is known
for writing a detailed and comprehensive
chronicle of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern
history in his History of the Prophets and Kings
in 915.

Until the 10th century, history most often meant
political and military history, but this was not
so with Persian historian Al-Biruni (973-1048).
In his Kitab fi Tahqiq ma l'il-Hind (Researches
on India), he did not record political and
military history in any detail, but wrote more on
India's cultural, scientific, social and
religious history.
He also discussed more on his idea of history in
another work The Chronology of the Ancient
Nations.
Biruni is considered the father of Indology for
his detailed studies on Indian history.

Franz Rosenthal wrote in the History of Muslim
Historiography
"....The Muslims achieved a definite advance
beyond previous historical writing in the
sociological understanding of history and the
systematisation of historiography. The
development of modern historical writing seems to
have gained considerably in speed and substance
through the utilization of a Muslim Literature
which enabled western historians, from the
seventeenth century on, to see a large section of
the world through foreign eyes. The Muslim
historiography helped indirectly and modestly to
shape present day historical thinking."

61
Asian Historiography
62

In China, Sima Qian (around 100 BC) was the first
to lay the groundwork for professional historical
writing.
His written work was the Shiji (Records of the
Grand Historian), a monumental lifelong
achievement in literature.
Its scope extends as far back as the 16th century
BC, including many treatises on specific
subjects, along with individual biographies for
prominent people, as well as exploring the lives
and deeds of commoners found in his own time or
in previous eras.
His work influenced every subsequent author of
history in China, including the prestigious Ban
family of the Eastern Han Dynasty era.

Traditionalist Chinese historiography describes
history in terms of dynastic cycles.
In this view, each new dynasty is founded by a
morally righteous founder.
Over time, the dynasty becomes morally corrupt
and dissolute.
Eventually, the dynasty becomes so weak as to
allow its replacement by a new dynasty.

64
Birth of Modern Historiography
65
The 19th Century

With the work and influence of Leopold von Ranke
(1795-1886), history achieved its identity as an
independent academic discipline with its own
critical method and approach, requiring rigorous
preparation.
Ranke insisted on dispassionate objectivity as
the historian's proper point of view and made
consultation of contemporary sources a law of
historical construction.

He substantially advanced the criticism of
sources beyond the achievements of the
antiquarians by making consideration of the
historical circumstances of the writer the key to
the evaluation of documents.

This combination of the neutral, nonpartisan
approach (at least as an ideal) with the acute
realization that all observers are the products
of their specific time and place and are thus
necessarily subjective recorders promised to
break history's ancient connection to the
intuitive literary arts and align it with modern
scientific research.
Many modern historians trace the intellectual
foundations of their discipline to this
development of the 19th-century German
universities, which influenced historical
scholarship throughout Europe and America.

French interest in the history of civilization
was sustained by Francois Guizot, and the new
scientific methods were applied to medieval
history by Fustel de Coulanges.

In England, Thomas Macaulay's brilliant style
continued the Enlightenment mode of a personal,
essay-like history, but more exacting methods
were applied in the universities.
With colleagues and students at the University of
Oxford, William Stubbs established English
history on foundations of a thorough examination
of sources, a movement carried forward by Samuel
R. Gardiner and Frederick W. Maitland.

George Bancroft was the first notable writer of
U.S. history, and American universities in his
time increasingly accepted the influence of
German methods.

71
Historiography of Your Professor
72
George Bancroft (1800-1891) (Founder of Study of
History in U.S.)
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) (Founder of
Study of Western/Frontier History)
Herbert E. Bolton (1870-1953) (Founder of Study
of Spanish American Borderlands History in U.S.)
Clarence Haring (1885-1860) (Founder of U.S.
Study of Colonial Latin American History, Piracy)
France V. Scholes (1897-1979) (Founder of Study
of Colonial Mexico/Yucatan/Inquisition History in
U.S.)
Richard E. Greenleaf (1921- ) (Founder of Study
of Mexican Inquisition Studies in U.S.)
John F. Chuchiak (1969- ) (Historian of Colonial
Mexico, Yucatan, Piracy Inquisition Studies)
73
Frederick Jackson Turner

Frederick Jackson Turner (November 14, 1861
March 14, 1932) is widely regarded, along with
Charles A. Beard, as one of the two most
influential American historians of the early 20th
century.
He is best known for The Significance of the
Frontier in American History.

74
Herbert Eugene Bolton

Herbert Eugene Bolton (July 20, 1870January 30,
1953) was an American historian and one of the
most prominent authorities in Spanish-American
history.
He originated what became the Bolton theory of
the history of the Americas and wrote or
co-authored 94 works.
A student of Frederick Jackson Turner, Bolton
disagreed with his mentor and argued that the
history of the Americans is best understood by
taking a holistic view.
The height of his career was spent at the
University of California, Berkeley where he
served as chair of the history department for 22
years and is credited with making the renowned
Bancroft Library the dominant research center it
is today.

75
Clarence Henry Haring

Clarence Henry Haring (born 9 February 1885 in
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - died 4 September
1960 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an
important historian of Latin America and the
pioneer who initiated the study of Spanish
American colonial institutions among scholars in
the United States.

76
France V. Scholes

A medievalist by training, he became one of the
foremost historians of colonial Latin America and
the Hispanic South-west.
After studying at Harvard University with
Frederick Jackson Turner, Clarence Haring Scholes
first taught at Radcliffe, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Colorado College
before he accepted an appointment at the
University of New Mexico in the spring of 1924.
Except for intervals in the 1930s and 1940s, he
served the university as professor, department
chairman, Graduate Dean and Academic
Vice-President until 1956 when he was named
Research Professor of History, a position he held
until his retirement in 1962.

77
Richard E Greenleaf

Until his retirement in 1998, Richard E.
Greenleaf served as the France Vinton Scholes
Professor of Colonial Latin American History, and
as the Director of the Center for Latin American
Studies at Tulane University.
He also served as Chair of the Department of
History.
Greenleaf grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and
took his Bachelors, Masters and Doctoral degrees
at the University of New Mexico , where he
studied under the dean of Inquisition scholars,
France V. Scholes.
Greenleaf has authored eleven major scholarly
books, co-authored or contributed to seventeen
others, and published almost four dozen articles
in the field of Latin American and New Mexico
history.
In his long and distinguished teaching career in
New Mexico , Mexico City and New Orleans,
Greenleaf has served as mentor to 34 doctoral
students at Tulane, and countless masters and
undergraduate students.

78
John F. Chuchiak IV

Entering the Graduate School of Tulane University
in 1992, he received his M.A. degree in Latin
American History/Latin American Studies in May
1994.
From 1994 until 1998 he held the prestigious
France V. Scholes Fellowship of Colonial Latin
American History at Tulane University.

79
George Bancroft (1800-1891) (Founder of Study of
History in U.S.)
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932) (Founder of
Study of Western/Frontier History)
Herbert E. Bolton (1870-1953) (Founder of Study
of Spanish American Borderlands History in U.S.)
Clarence Haring (1885-1860) (Founder of U.S.
Study of Colonial Latin American History, Piracy)
France V. Scholes (1897-1979) (Founder of Study
of Colonial Mexico/Yucatan/Inquisition History in
U.S.)
Richard E. Greenleaf (1921- ) (Founder of Study
of Mexican Inquisition Studies in U.S.)
John F. Chuchiak (1969- ) (Historian of Colonial
Mexico, Yucatan, Piracy Inquisition Studies)
80

By the 20th century, history was firmly
established in European and American universities
as a professional field, resting on exact methods
and making productive use of archival collections
and new sources of evidence.

81
Current Trends
82

Furthermore, the scope of history has expanded
immeasurably, in time, as archaeology and
anthropology have provided knowledge of earlier
ages, and in breadth, as fields of inquiry
entirely unknown in the past (such as economic
history, psychohistory, history of ideas, of
family structures, and of peasant societies) have
emerged and refined their methods and goals.
To many scholars, national history has come to
seem an outmoded, culture-bound approach,
although history written on thoroughly
international assumptions is extremely difficult
to achieve.

Historians have looked more and more to the
social sciencessociology, psychology,
anthropology, and economicsfor new methods and
forms of explanation the sophisticated use of
quantitative data has become the accepted
approach to economic and demographic studies.

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