Historiographie

Historiographie, generally known in English as historiography, is the study of how history is written and the body of historical works produced by historians. It examines the methods, sources, and argumentative strategies used to interpret the past, as well as the broader social and intellectual contexts in which historical writing occurs. Historiography is distinct from history itself: history concerns events and periods, while historiography analyzes the ways those events are researched, interpreted, and communicated.

Historical writing has diverse aims and styles. Ancient historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides combined narrative with moral and political reflection; medieval chronicles shaped communal memory; modern historiography emphasizes critical engagement with sources and questions of perspective, bias, and purpose. A milestone in the discipline was Leopold von Ranke’s emphasis on primary sources and a descriptive, evidence-based account of what happened, often summarized as describing history “as it actually happened.”

In the 20th century, historiography broadened to include many schools and approaches. The Annales School stressed long-term social structures; Marxist and economic historians highlighted material conditions and class relations; microhistory focused on small cases to illuminate larger patterns. Theoretical turns questioned objectivity and foregrounded discourse, power, and representation. Feminist, postcolonial, and cultural historiographies examined how gender, empire, race, and ideology shape historical narratives. Digital history and quantitative methods have added new tools for source analysis and data interpretation.

Historiography also studies the history of historical writing itself, revealing how historians’ questions, methods, and standards evolve. Its insights help explain why different societies remember the past in different ways and how present concerns shape our notions of what counts as reliable history.