History Buffs United discussion

Historiography is a subject that is oft forgotten by readers of history. Any thoughts?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historio...

Historiography, strictly speaking, is the study of historians' lives and the ways in which history is written. As such, it is a subset of intellectual history, useful in understanding the biases, strengths, and limitations of individual historians in specific time periods.

For writers of historical fiction, it would seem to be useful mostly if they happen to be writing about historians. For history buffs more generally, it has utility in terms of putting information in context.

Or did you have something else in mind?

I've truthfully, never heard the term before, but I can see that it might be an interesting subject. I certainly have my favorite historians who I know I can trust and then others I shun because they are either, blatantly wrong, or I don't agree with their ideas. besides that, I have never really thought about it, or have it have any effect on my books.

Hi C.P.! Thanks. That's a great definition.

For those of us who are historically-inclined or at least interested, it's one of those things that's important to remember when reading or researching anything historical, so I thought I'd mention it.

It would be interesting to look at cases where history books or documents that were long accepted as 'fact' may now be discredited or considered propaganda.

One extreme example would be The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was a false document that has created a lot of problems in the world.

It has been the subject of various books including:

by Will Eisner and
by Mike Evans among others. This being an extreme example of something believed by many as fact later being debunked, is one of the reasons historiography is important. How many historians writing in the early-mid 20th century were influenced by that document and did it influence the way they presented information in their own work?

If anyone knows of other examples of debunked or propagandist material masquerading as history, it might make for an interesting discussion.

Wow, David, there's a lot of 'debunked and propagandist'... subjectively, in my study of history. I've debunked schools of thought in which I once believed. I even have to say most history is this to one person or another.

I think a distressingly large number of people, even in the US, still believe in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but I don't know that I would refer to it as history writing in any sense. It was a propaganda piece developed by the Okhrana, the tsarist political police, and used by extremist right-wing groups to justify their violence against Jewish citizens of the Russian Empire. The Nazis then picked it up and used it as justification for the Final Solution, whence it migrated into various antisemitic campaigns. But its falsity was recognized from the beginning. In that sense, it is closer to Josephine Tey's description of Tonypandy (in The Daughter of Time): a historical myth that everyone knows to be false from the moment of creation but that people nonetheless accept and disseminate for political or ideological reasons.

Not that Tonypandy is rare. On the contrary, it abounds. And it can be fascinating to study. But most of the time, it falls under the heading of historical myth, rumor, or gossip rather than historiography per se.

Back when the world was young I took a course on the French Revolution. A lot of wonderous facts learned. But about half way through the course it became ever more clear that the teacher had a secondary agenda in his selection of text books. He began to want us to realize the secondary agendas of the historians he required us to buy.

As it turned out, the way the history was written depended on the politics of the writers. His choices, due to his own politics, had been evenly divided between marxist historians and capitalist historians - those that felt the Revolution was driven by class warfare and those that felt it was drven by economic pressures of industrialization. Each, it seems, required the overthrow of the Ancient Regime.

The only one of these books to survive all of my separate moves around the US was 'The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1798 - 1850' by Charles Breunig. I can't remember which side this book fell on and I'm not going to reread it now. However, we studied the author's lives and motives more than the Revolution. It's a shame that I don't retain any of that information.

I was more interested in the Bread Riots, overthrown kings, beheaded queens, Jacobites, sans culottes, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and those wonderful tall ships. And was surprised that all those historical events can all be found in all those books but for the sake of political arguments not for history.

I went away from the class feeling that truth was in the facts and in the middle and all of the motives and forces probably had a place.

I agree that it's important to study where historians' arguments come from (and trends in history writing more generally, which vary as the concerns of society change). That's a big part of what differentiates professional history from school history: the idea that there is not one right answer. And historiography plays an important part in that endeavor.

I still remember my first college history class, where by the end of week 3 I'd encountered four different explanations for the English Civil War, some using the same facts and others using entirely different facts. I was so confused! I just wanted someone to say, "This happened, then this." But of course, the professors were right to expose us to all those different answers to the same question (although they might have done a better job of explaining what they were doing and why).

Harking back to Tonypandy, there are plenty of examples in my field which is Shakespeare and the whole Authorship debate. The most egregious in my opinion is Robert Greene and his deathbed tirade against the unnamed Upstart Crow. Orthodox scholars take it as read that he is referring to Shakespeare and take great pride in its bitterness, believing it means that Shakespeare was so brilliant and successful by this time that the other playwrights were jealous of him. Anti-Stratfordians leap on it, believing it proves that Shakespeare was a plagiarist and therefore not the true author.

However, a close reading of the whole pamphlet, and not just the few lines the above theories are based on, shows that Greene is not referring to Shakespeare at all, but to the actor/entrepreneur who wrote a couple of mediocre plays, Edward Alleyn. This alternative, and much more convincing reading, has been known since the 1960s at least if not earlier, yet not one Shakespearean biographer refers to it, not even to repudiate it.

I go into more detail in my blog http://stuffofdreamsseries.blogspot.c...

Oh, that's a good one. I hadn't heard that one before.

It is astonishing what people will believe, even when they should know better.

In reviewing my own blog posts, I've remembered another case of Tonypandy. Did you know that the infamous Children's Crusade never happened? see http://msmontagnasmiscellany.blogspot...

What a fascinating blog! I intend to subscribe as soon as I am back on my computer. Anyone who loves Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy and had such doubts about The Birth of Venus (don't get me started—I found the story so interesting in its conception but so flawed in the execution that I am still trying to figure out how I would have written it to make it work) is definitely someone whose posts I would like to follow.

I love Tonypandy. There's an astonishing amount of it out there, and more being created every minute, for all that we're supposed to be more educated now.

C.P. wrote: "What a fascinating blog! I intend to subscribe as soon as I am back on my computer. Anyone who loves Georgette Heyer and Jean Plaidy and had such doubts about The Birth of Venus (don't get me start..."

Hi CP. I look forward to seeing you there. Do feel free to comment.

Pauline, that post on the Children's Crusade is great. In fact the real story's nearly as good as the myth :)
It's a little like the Angel of Mons, except that legend was created for military, rather than religious, propaganda, and many veterans swore they'd actually seen the vision, which was a big help. Or someone convinced them they'd seen it...