Historiography: Encyclopedia II - Historiography - Basic issues studied in historiography

Historiography - Basic issues studied in historiography

Some of the common questions of historiography are:

• Who wrote the source (primary or secondary)?
• For primary sources, we look at the person in his or her society, for secondary sources, we consider the theoretical orientation of the approach for example, Marxist or Annales School, ("total history"), political history, etc.
• What is the authenticity, authority, bias/interest, and intelligibility of the source?
• What was the view of history when the source was written?
• Was history supposed to provide moral lessons?
• What or who was the intended audience?
• What sources were privileged or ignored in the narrative?
• By what method was the evidence compiled?
• In what historical context was the work of history itself written?

Issues engaged in so-called critical historiography includes topics such as:

• What constitutes an historical "event"?
• In what modes does a historian write and produce statements of "truth" and "fact"?
• How does the medium (novel, textbook, film, theatre, comic) through which historical information is conveyed influence its meaning?
• What inherent epistemological problems does archive-based history contain?
• How does the historian establish their own objectivity or come to terms with their own subjectivity?
• What is the relation of historical theory to historical practice?
• What is the "goal" of history?
• What is history?

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Basic issues studied in historiography", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki