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Historiography, what is historiography, historiography reference.

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Historiography deals with the writing of history. In the broadest sense, it is the study of the history of history (as it is described by historians). Historiography has several facets, but for the purposes of a researcher trying to situate their work in the context of other historians' work on a particular topic, the most useful thing is the historiographic essay or review article that summarizes changing ideas about and approaches to the topic. A really good historiographic essay will also address why historians' ideas have changed.

• A companion to Western historical thought [electronic resource] . Edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza. Oxford : Blackwell, 2006. 
• Historiography : ancient, medieval, & modern. Ernst Breisach. 3rd ed. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2007. History Reference (SH). Firestone D13 .B686 2007
• Encyclopedia of historians and historical writing . Editor, Kelly Boyd. London; Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1999. History Reference (SH). Firestone D14 .E529 1999 This massive two-volume encyclopedia has authoritative articles on historians, the historiography of particular times and places, and approaches to the writing of history. There is good coverage of world history, as well as U.S. and European history. Suggestions for further reading are brief, but helpful.
• Blackwell dictionary of historians. Edited by John Cannon. New York: Blackwell, 1988. History Reference (SH). Firestone D14 .B58 1988 Outdated and Euro-centric, but still handy for the period before 1980.
• The study of history: a bibliographical guide. Compiled by R.C. Richardson. 2nd ed. Manchester [England]; New York: Manchester University Press, 2000. History Reference (SH). Firestone D13 .R44 2000 Well-organized and selective guide to books and articles on historiography. The section on the various approaches taken by historians in the 20th century is especially useful.
• The Routledge companion to historical studies. Alun Munslow. 2nd ed. London; New York: Routledge, 2006. History Reference (SH). Firestone D13 .M47 2006 A guide to the new approaches to history of the late 20th century. Arranged alphabetically. Very helpful for explaining the jargon of the new history. Good bibliographies, unfortunately presented in abbreviated lists with each article.
• Dictionary of concepts in history. Harry Ritter. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, c1986. Annex A, Forrestal (TEMP) D13 .R49 1986 Now outdated, but solid up through about 1980, and more readable than the above.
• Censorship of historical thought: a world guide, 1945-2000 . Antoon de Baets; foreword by John David Smith. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Firestone Library: Non Circulating (Fnc) Z657 .B135 2002
• A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography
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Types of Writing Assignments

• Narrative History
• Response Papers
• Creative Approaches
• Annotated Bibliographies
• Book Reviews

Historiographic Essays

• Research Papers

Basic Considerations When Writing on History

• Cause and Effect
• Establishing a Broader Context
• Common Fallacies

Types of Sources

• Secondary Sources
• Primary Sources
• Fiction/Art/Poetry
• The Internet

Critical Reading

• Historiography
• Bias/Prejudice
• Evaluating Contradictory Data and Claims

Preparation and Writing

• Time Management
• Note-Taking Tips
• Developing a Thesis
• Organization
• Formulating a Conclusion

Basic Quoting Skills

• Quotation/Annotation
• Bibliographies
• Advanced Quoting Skills
• The Ethics of Quoting

Style and Editing

• Drafts and Revisions
• Common Stylistic Errors

What is historiography?

Parts of a historiographic essay, a sample historiographic essay, works cited.

In a nutshell, historiography is the history of history. Rather than subjecting actual events - say, the Rape of Nanking - to historical analysis, the subject of historiography is the history of the history of the event: the way it has been written, the sometimes conflicting objectives pursued by those writing on it over time, and the way in which such factors shape our understanding of the actual event at stake, and of the nature of history itself.

A historiographic essay thus asks you to explore several sometimes contradictory sources on one event. An annotated bibliography might come in handy as you attempt to locate such sources; you should also consult the footnotes and bibliographies of any text you read on a certain event, as they will lead you to other texts on the same event; if your research is web-based, follow links - always bearing in mind the pitfalls of the Internet - and if you are researching in the library, check out the books on nearby shelves: you'll be surprised by how often this yields sources you may otherwise never have found.

For an example of an essay on multiple perspectives on the same event (for our purposes, the Rape of Nanking, an event also examined in the context of Book Reviews ), click here .

The purpose of an historiographic essay is threefold: 1.) to allow you to view an historical event or issue from multiple perspectives by engaging multiple sources; 2.) to display your mastery over those sources and over the event or issue itself; and 3.) to develop your critical reading skills as you seek to answer why your sources disagree, and what their disagreement tells you about the event or issue and the very nature of history itself.

Specific skills honed by such an exercise include your ability to discern bias or prejudice and to evaluate contradictory data and claims . As you will have to quote from your sources in order to make your point, you will also have to display basic quoting skills . The very nature of an essay on multiple sources also requires a Works Cited page, of course, on which, see Bibliography .

You will begin a historiographic essay with a thesis that presents the issue or event at stake, then introduces your sources and articulates, in brief, their authors' perspectives and their main points of (dis)agreement. In the main body of your paper you will elaborate upon and develop this latter point, pulling out specific points of (dis)agreement, juxtaposing quotes (and/or paraphrasing arguments) and subjecting them to analysis as you go along. As you do so, ask (and answer) why you think the authors of your various sources disagree. Is their disagreement a product of personal or professional rivalry, ideological incompatibility, national affiliation? These questions go to the heart of historiography. In your conclusion , finally, you will briefly summarize your findings and, more importantly, assess the credibility of your various sources, and specify which one(s) you find to be most compelling, and why. In final conclusion you might articulate in brief the insights you have gained into the event or issue at stake, the sources you have used, and the nature of history itself.

Let us assume that the subject of your historiographic essay is the Rape of Nanking, an event discussed in some detail in the Book Reviews section. There, we examine the event as it is described and analyzed by Iris Chang in her bestselling book The Rape of Nanking . To this we now add several other sources, all of which are listed in the Works Cited section at the end of this page , and cited in the text immediately following, which exemplifies, in brief, some of the basic strategies of a historiographic essay.

• THESIS: The so-called Rape of Nanking of 1937, a six-week massacre of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanking perpetrated by the invading Japanese army, was presented to a largely uninitiated American mass audience by Iris Chang in her best-selling book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997). Chang's vivid book spawned international interest and a number of responses from fellow historians worldwide. Western historians generally agreed with Chang's insistence that the event - long a mere footnote in the popular historiography of World War II - deserved larger notice, but some criticized her for displaying personal bias as well as historical inaccuracies and methodological weaknesses of various sorts. The response from a number of Japanese scholars was overwhelmingly negative. They denied her account of a post-war Japanese "cover up," yet at the same time also, to varying degrees, denied that the event had even occurred.
• EXAMPLE (1): Tanaka Masaaki, for example, author of the website "What Really Happened at Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth," refers to Chang's work as one of "lies, hyperbole, propaganda." Chang's "mountains of dead bodies," according to Matsaaki, were mountains "that no one saw." Her "Reports of mass murders of prisoners of War [were] fabricated," he claims, offering as evidence that there was "no mention of the 'Nanking Massacre'" - a term he pointedly places in quotation marks - "in Chinese Communist Party Records"; and that "No protests against the 'Nanking Massacre' [was] submitted to the League of Nations [or] ... by the United States, Great Britian, or France." The event, he concludes - if there even was one - was "a massacre with no witnesses" (Masaaki).

ANALYSIS: Much of Masaaki's criticism smacks of precisely the kind of revisionism Chang critiques in her book, and is easily exposed as such. The fact that Chinese communist party records make no mention of the event, for example, is hardly surprising, as the Chinese communists were at this time in disarray, operating largely underground in the Nanking area. Not until 1949 did the communists begin their rule over China and begin keeping official records: why then should we expect there to exist records dating back to 1937? Nor should the silence of the League of Nations, the United States, Great Britain and France come as any surprise. In the same year that France and Britain stood by as Nazi Germany re-militarized the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; and that the United States and the League of Nation stood by as Franco and Mussolini continued in their campaigns against the rightful governments of Spain and Ethiopia, why would we expect the United States or the League of Nations to have registered any protest over events halfway around the world?

• EXAMPLE (2): Other arguments by Masaaki are more compelling. For example, he notes of one of the many disturbing photographs in Chang's book - a famous one, apparently showing a Chinese prisoner of war about to be beheaded by a Japanese officer brandishing a sword - that its "fakery is easy to detect if you look at the shadow cast by the man at the center [the officer] and that cast by [a lower-ranking] soldier to his right. [The shadows] are facing in different directions" (Masaaki). The photograph does indeed seem to be a composite, and while stopping short of supporting Masaaki's claim that "not a single one of [Chang's photographs] bears witness to a 'Nanking Massacre'," even American historian Robert Entenmann concedes that several of the photos in Chang's book are indeed "fakes, forgeries and composites," including one (also singled out by Masaaki) "of a row of severed heads," which, according to Entenmann, in fact depicts "bandits executed by Chinese police in 1930 rather than victims of the Nanking Massacre" (Masaaki, Entenmann).

COUNTER-ARGUMENT: Faked though some of Chang's twelve pages of photos might be - perhaps even all of them, as Masaaki suggests - the fact that there exist literally hundreds of photographs of the Nanking Massacre, many of them "souvenir photos" taken by Japanese soldiers themselves, strains the credibility of his larger point and even more so the point made by his stridently anti-Chang colleagues Takemoto Tadao and Ohara Yasuo. In their The Alleged 'Nanking Massacre': Japan's Rebuttal to China's Forged Claims , these writers state that "none of these photos are dated, and the names of places and photographers are not stated. In other words, there exist [no] photos that are rigidly authentic, and definitely, these photos can not be used as evidence of [the] 'Nanking Massacre'" (Tadao and Yasuo 101). In fact, several hundred photographs have been published in one volume - The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs , by Shi Young and James Yin, many of them showing female rape victims with legs spread and genitalia exposed - graphic photographs it is hard to conceive of as staged. Such pictures, while not settling the matter beyond dispute, offer powerful testimony that speaks for itself.

• EXAMPLE (3): Notwithstanding the many graphic photographs that exist, it is precisely the accusation of widespread rape - most likely because of its abhorrent nature - that Chang's Japanese critics wish to deny. "The number of 'cases of rape' [the Chinese] claim is from 20,000 to 80,000 cases," Tadao and Yasuo note. "Suppose we took this number, there should have been from 500 to 2,000 cases of rapes...daily [during the six week period of the Massacre]. This number is absolutely not trustworthy," they conclude, citing instead the number of only 361 official complaints of rape actually registered during this period (130). Of course, they are parsing numbers here. The fact is, whether there were three hundred rapes, thirty thousand, more, or less, rape perpetrated by an occupying force against a civilian population (and that such was the case is amply documented in Chang and virtually all extant sources on Nanking, including the Japanese sources, although they, of course, acknowledge only 361) is a crime of war. But that it is an individual crime of war, rather than a collective, government-sponsored crime against humanity (such as the Holocaust) is precisely the point for the Japanese historians: "[Holocaust] killings were indeed ... 'crimes against humanity', [but] those crimes are fundamentally different from the 'war crimes' which the Japanese troops are said to have committed. ... Those acts of crimes [were] the responsibility of each individual soldier" (136, 130). Following this line of reasoning, the Japanese government is absolved of any blame for the rapes that did occur in Nanking, the exact number of which remains unknown. (On this issue, see Evaluating Contradictory Data and Claims ).
• EXAMPLE (4): More trenchant criticism of Chang than that offered by Japanese historians comes from the American academy. Robert Entenmann, for example, a China expert and senior faculty member in the History department at St. Olaf College, faults Chang on the very premise of her book. He denies that there is a conspiracy of silence surrounding Nanking in Japan; maintains (in contradiction to Chang's claims) that Japanese textbooks do address the event (it is rather quaintly referred to as an "incident" in Japanese historiography, if at all, rather than a massacre, far less a rape); states that those textbooks that do mention it offer fatality rates listed between 150,000 to 300,000 (the Western consensus is around 250,000; Chang claims 300,000); and that 80% of respondents to a 1994 opinion poll in Japan found "that their government had not adequately compensated victimized peoples in countries Japan had colonized or invaded" (Entenmann). On this last count, it is worth noting that the specific wording of the question does not appear to address Nanking explicitly, and that the opinion poll's finding thus bears little relevance to the question at hand. We might also be skeptical of Entenmann's generous appraisal of Japanese textbooks: on its role in World War II, Japan's high school textbooks in particular are subject to constant revision, much of it aimed at mitigating the government's role in wartime atrocities, as a 2007 New York Times article reminds us (Onishi 12).
• EXAMPLE (5): Entenmann's more fundamental criticism of Chang's work and perspective, however, goes deeper. As the granddaughter of former Nanking residents who barely escaped the city, she is guilty, he writes, of having fallen victim to "her own ethnic prejudice. ... Her explanations are, to a large extent, based on unexamined [anti-Japanese] ethnic stereotypes." Furthermore, she engages in "implausible speculations," according to Entenmann, for example, her claim that Emperor Hirohito himself exulted in the news of the Rape of Nanking (see Chang 179). In fact, Entenmann points out, Hirohito's response is unknown, and Chang may be guilty here of "confus[ing] Japanese leaders' delight in the fall of the Chinese capital with exulting in the massacre that occurred afterward" (Entenmann).

ANALYSIS: Such sleights of hand (which Entenmann himself indulges in, as his opinion poll example above shows) are perhaps conscious on Chang's part, or perhaps a function of her not being a professional historian and therefore applying a less-than-rigorous methodology in her efforts to tell a good story. She is after all, a popular (rather than an academic) historian, whom another bestselling historian, Stephen Ambrose, whose scholarship has also been faulted on several counts, once called "the best young historian we've got because she understands that to communicate history, you've got to tell the story in an interesting way" (Ambrose qtd. in Sullivan B6).

• CONCLUSION: It is this zeal to tell a good story and back it up with sensational evidence (even if - like some of her photographs - it is faked), as well as her occasionally emotional prose, sometimes bordering on hyperbole, that remains Chang's greatest liability. In an effort to place the Rape of Nanking into historical context, for example, she states that "[u]sing numbers killed alone" it "surpasses much of the worst barbarism of the ages." Its casualties exceeded those of the Carthaginians at the hands of the Romans, the victims of the Spanish Inquisition, and those of the Mongolian leader Timur Lenk, she writes in a series of specious comparisons that culminate with the observation that "the deaths at Nanking far exceeded the deaths from the American raids on Tokyo ... and even the combined death toll of the two atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (Chang 6). In The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography , an anthology generally sympathetic to Chang's project (if not to her methodology), George Washington University history and international affairs professor Daqing Yang, himself a native of Nanking, notes that "such a comparison [as Chang's] is methodologically sterile" and "morally misguided" (Yang 161). Indeed, it is precisely the sort of parsing of numbers for which Chang herself would most likely challenge the above-mentioned Japanese historians in their effort to deny the extent to which rape occurred at Nanking. Despite these failings, Chang's book ultimately emerges as a more persuasive argument of what did in fact happen at Nanking than those offered by her Japanese detractors. The enduring controversy surrounding the event, however, and the specific criticism against Chang from even those who support her premise, point both to the endlessly debatable nature of history, and to the need for a more rigorous, analytical approach in its telling. As Joshua Fogel notes in his introduction to The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography , "The Massacre and related events must be lifted beyond the popular level ... to be studied with greater nuance and with a wider range of sources" (Fogel 1). In such a project, the contradictory data and claims of Chang and her critics need not necessarily be mutually exclusive but, instead, might help establish a broader context within which the event can be understood more fully, from all sides.
• Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: BasicBooks, 1997).
• Entenmann, Robert. "Review of Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II." October 29, 1998. H-Net List for Asian History and Culture , 1998. Accessed July 1, 2007. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/55/481.html .
• Yang, Daqin. "The Challenges of the Nanjing Massacre: Refections on Historical Inquiry." The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Ed. Joshua Fogel. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000, 133 - 180.
• Masaaki, Tanaka. "What Really Happened in Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth." N.d. Accessed July 1, 2007. http://www.ne.jp/asahi/unko/tamezou/nankin/whatreally/index.html .
• Onishi, Norimitsu. "Japan's Textbooks Reflect Revised History." The New York Times , April 1, 2007, A12.
• Sullivan, Patricia. "'Rape of Nanking' Author Irish Chang Dies." November 12, 2004, B6. Washington Post , November 12, 2004, B6. Accessed July 1, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44139-2004Nov11.html .
• Takemoto, Tadao and Ohara Yasuo. The Alleged 'Nanking Massacre': Japan's Rebuttal to China's Forged Claims. Tokyo: Meisei-sha, Inc., 2000.
• Young, Shi and James Ying. The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, expanded 2nd edition. Chicago, Innovative Publishing Group, Inc., 1997.

The interested reader will find another brief exercise in historiographical inquiry - this one on the disputed relationship between the Catholic Church and fascism during the 1930s - in the Research Paper section of this site, under "Conducting Research for 'The Austrian Catholic Church and the Anschluss': Catholicism and fascism."

Historical Methods & Theory

• Thinking Like a Historian
• Finding Books & Videos
• Finding Articles

What is a Historiographical Essay?

Historiographical essays, evaluating secondary sources, acknowledgement.

• Citing Sources This link opens in a new window
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A historiographical essay:

• Is based on a broad, less focused topic or theme, e.g., Reconstruction in the United States)
• Critically examines secondary sources written by historians
• Puts emphasis on the historian, the historian's bias and how the writing of a particular topic has changed over the years
• Examines and compares other historians' arguments in opposition to each other

The purpose of an historiographic essay is threefold:

• To allow you to view an historical event or issue from multiple perspectives by engaging multiple sources;
• To display your mastery over those sources and over the event or issue itself; and
• To develop your critical reading skills as you seek to answer why your sources disagree, and what their disagreement tells you about the event or issue and the very nature of history itself.

Selected Titles About Historiography

• What information is given about the author? Is the author an historian?
• Can you identify the historian's school of thought?
• Read the table of contents, preface and other introductry material. Does the author set up his/her thesis (or point of view) in these sections? Who is the intended audience? Is it written for historians or for a general audience?
• What is the date of publication? If the book or article is old, it will not highlight recent scholarship. Is this important? Is it a reflection of the histories of the time or does it deviate from the norm?
• What primary source material does the author use? What primary source material may have been available to the author at the time?
• Consider the bibliography. Do the sources listed indicate serious works that are relevant to your topic? You may want to consult works used by the author. 

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History 300: A Guide to Research: Historiography

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• Historiography

What is a Historiography?

A historiography (noun) or  historiographical paper  is an analysis of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past historians. 

• Specifically, a historiography identifies influential thinkers and reveals the shape of the scholarly debate on a particular subject.
• You can think of this as a narrative description of the web of scholars writing on the same or similar topics. A historiography traces how scholars' understanding of historical events has evolved and how scholars are in conversation with each other, both building on and disputing previous works. The process is similar to that used for creating literature reviews in other disciplines. 

The major purpose of writing a historiographical paper is to convey the scholarship of other historians on a particular subject, rather than to analyze the subject itself.

• A historiography can be a stand-alone paper, in which case your paper examines the work completed by other historians. 
• Alternately, a historiography can act as an introduction to a major research paper, in which you will go on to add your own analysis.

Thus, a good historiography does the following:

• Points out influential books and papers that exemplified, shaped, or revolutionized a topic or field of study.
• Shows which scholars were most effective in changing the scope of the discussion/debate.
• Describes the current trends in the field of study, such as which interpretations are currently in the mainstream.
• Allows the writer (that's you!) to position themselves in the discussion for their analysis.

Writing a Historiography

Parts of a historiography.

• presents the issue or event at stake, then introduces your sources and articulates, in brief, their authors' perspectives and their main points of (dis)agreement. 
• elaborates upon and develop your introduction, pulling out specific points of (dis)agreement, juxtaposing quotes (and/or paraphrasing arguments) and subjecting them to analysis as you go along. As you do so, ask (and answer)  why  you think the authors of your various sources disagree. Is their disagreement a product of personal or professional rivalry, ideological incompatibility, national affiliation? 
• briefly summarizes your findings and, more importantly, assess the credibility of your various sources, and specify which one(s) you find to be most compelling, and why. In final conclusion you might articulate in brief the insights you have gained into the event or issue at stake, the sources you have used, and the implications for the scholarly discussion about your topic/historical event overall.

Sample Historiographies

• Sample Historiographic Essay (CUNY)
• University of Toronto LibGuide: Examples of historiographic essays
• Historiographical essay examples

Historiographical Questions

Questions of historiography include the following:

• who writes history, with what agenda in mind, and towards what ends?
• how accurate can a historian ever hope to be, analyzing past events from the vantage point of the historian's present?
• does the historian's  own  perspective, impacted as it undoubtedly is by gender, age, national and ideological affiliation, etc., contribute to an "agenda" that the historian's work is playing into, unwittingly or consciously?
• what about the types of sources, both primary and secondary, an historian chooses to base their work upon? Do  they  too contribute to the above-mentioned "agenda"?
• does the very selection of sources (and, by extension, the decision to exclude certain other sources) prejudice the outcome of the historian's work in certain ways?  et cetera ...

As you can tell, the underlying sentiment of historiography is one of skepticism. This is due to the recognition that historians  do  have agendas and  do  select sources with the intent of "proving" certain preconceived notions. History is therefore never truly "objective," but always a construct that presents the historian's view of things.

Historiographical Evaluation

General source questions (the five ws).

• Who  – Who made the source - did they have an opinion or bias? Were they involved?
• What  – What information does the source give? Is it the full story? Is it accurate?
• Why  – Why was the source made? Was it made to persuade people of a particular opinion? Was it made to take the mickey out of something/someone?
• When  – Was it made at the time? Or years later? Was the person there?
• Where  – Where was the source made? Were they involved in the event? Did they have an opinion?

Questions for Evaluating Secondary Sources

• Who is the author (their expertise, previous research, affiliations, positionality, etc.), and what seems to have been their likely intention in writing this?
• What is the source's main argument?
• When was the source written, and does the date of publication potentially impact upon the source's information or argument?
• Who seems to be the intended audience for the source?
• How is the source structured?
• Does the structure of the source (its various parts, sections, and/or chapters) reinforce its larger argument? How?
• What kinds of sources, or examples, does the source offer in support of its argument, and which are most (and least) effective? Why?
• Does the source engage other writers' works on the same subject and, even if not, how would you position the source in relation to other texts you are aware of on the same subject (texts you have read for class, for example)?
• does the author uses inflammatory language: in the most extreme cases, racial epithets, slurs, etc.;
• does the author consistently makes claims whose larger purpose is to elevate (or demean) one social, ethnic, national, religious, or gender group as compared to another, or all others;
• does the author consciously presents evidence that serves to tell only one side of an event or issue, purposefully withholding or ignoring information that may shed the opposing view in a more positive light;
• does the author manufactures, falsifies and/or dishonestly cites evidence in order to present his or her case in a more positive light.
• and if so, is that prejudice the product of the author's own background, ideology, research agenda, etc. as far as you can tell?
• How persuasive is the source (if certain aspects are more persuasive than others, explain why)
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Historiography: Historiography

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Introduction

Historiography is the study of the methods and conclusions of historians concerning a specific topic.  Mastering historiography is a foundational activity of graduate education in history and related fields.  This guide provides suggestions to find already written historiographies and to gather sources to write such an original historiographical essay. The tools and suggestions here are only starting points. Please contact me if you need additional assistance. 

Searching for Historiographical Articles

Historiographies are rarely published as monographs. Most are articles, essays or book chapters. One of the best methods to find this type of scholarship is via a scholarly index. The two man indexes for historical research are America, History and Life (United States and Canada) and Historical Abstracts  (the rest of the world). The two keywords that retrieve this type of material are "historiograph*" (the * will return all words starting with that root) and "review essay." Enter these in one line and use the Boolean connector "or" between them. In the next line type the desired subject. If the initial search does not work, broaden the term. 

Historiography Journals

There are no journals devoted to historiography. There are a few journals that run historiographical essays frequently. For those interested in American history, Reviews in American History  is always worth the effort.

• Transversal: International Journal for the Historiography of Science This open access journal is published in English by the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. The journal take a broad approach to covering trends in history of science scholarship.

The majority of historiography is published in scholarly journals.Still, it is worth searching the KU Catalog for relevant monograph sources. Use the advanced search screen to search "historiography" and the relevant subject. 

Blackwell Companions

Blackwell Companions explore the historiography of various themes, eras, and/or people. The links below are to various subsets of the series. Please note that it is hard to tell from the series title what topics it includes--poke around at all the titles until you find what you need. Titles are in print and e-book formats.

• Blackwell Companions to American History Each of these books contains of historiographical essays. Be sure to note that some of these take chronological approach, but others are thematic.
• Blackwell Companions to American History. Presidential Companions
• Blackwell Companions to British History
• Blackwell companions to European History
• Blackwell Companions to History This series includes historiographical essays on a wide variety of topics including, gender, global environmental, Mexican, and international history.
• Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World
• Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World. Ancient History
• Blackwell Companions to World History This series includes collections of essays on a number of different countries and regions.

Subject Guide

Research Help

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Print Resources

• Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing Covering all areas of history, this two volume set provides criticism about historians as well as historiographical essays on selected topics.
• Reader's Guide to American History Arranged topically this work provides brief historiographical essays on important topics in American history.
• Reader's Guide to British History Arranged topically this work provides brief historiographical essays on important topics in British history.
• Reader's Guide to Military History International in scope, this volume contains historiographical essays on a variety of military history topics.
• The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature This two volume work provides brief annotations for important historical work published between 1962 and 1991. It covers all geographic areas. Be sure to use the index in volume two.

Cambridge Histories

Biographical resources.

• American Historians 1866-1912
• American historians, 1607-1865
• American Women Historians, 1700s - 1900s: A Biographical Dictionary
• Blackwell Dictionary of Historians
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Historiography: Overview

• Examples of Historiographies

What Is a Historiography?

There are two common uses of the term "historiography."

Historiography as a General Descriptor

In this case, the historiography of a topic is the sum total of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past and current historians. This allows historians and scholars to talk about "the state of the historiography" at a point in time, or to "add historiography" to a paper to make it more complete.

Historiography as a Noun, or a Historiographical Paper

In this usage, a historiography or historiographical paper is an analysis of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past historians. Specifically, a historiography identifies influential thinkers and reveals the shape of the scholarly debate on a particular subject.

• The major purpose of writing a historiographical paper is to convey the scholarship of other historians on a particular subject, rather than to analyze the subject itself.
• A historiography can be a stand-alone paper, in which case your paper examines the work completed by other historians. 

Alternately, a historiography can act as an introduction to a major research paper, in which you will go on to add your own analysis. As an introduction, a good historiography does the following:

• Points out influential books and papers that exemplified, shaped, or revolutionized a field of study.
• Shows which scholars were most effective in changing the scope of the debate.
• Describes the current trends in the field of study, such as which interpretation is currently in the mainstream.
• Allows the writer to position themselves in the field for their analysis.

An example of historiography as introduction

"The historiography of the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima changed over the years as new research questioned the former consensus view that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was predicated on the necessity to save American lives."

Need More Help?

Helpful Links

• How to Create a Historiography Parts of this SMU guide are based on this research guide from the University of Rhode Island University Libraries.
• Historiographic Essays Examples from the History Department at Queens College, New York.

Search Tips

• Historiography is useful as a search term.
• Since you will be searching for change over time on a topic, you will want to make use of a database's ability to limit a search by date of publication.
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HIST 300 - Introduction to Historical Studies: Historiographic Essay (Literature Review)

• Getting Started
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What is a Historiographic Essay / Historiographic Review?

A Historiographic Essay (also known as a Historiographic Review or, outside of the history discipline, a Literature Review ) is a systematic and comprehensive analysis of books, scholarly articles, and other sources relevant to a specific topic that provides a base of knowledge. Literature reviews are designed to identify and critique the existing literature on a topic, justifying your research by exposing gaps in current research. 

This investigation should provide a description, summary, and critical evaluation of works related to the research problem or question, and should also add to the overall knowledge of the topic as well as demonstrating how your research will fit within a larger field of study.  A literature review should offer critical analysis of the current research on a topic and that analysis should direct your research objective. This should not be confused with a book review or an annotated bibliography; both are research tools but very different in purpose and scope.  A Literature Review can be a stand alone element or part of a larger end product, so be sure you know your assignment.  Finally, don't forget to document your process, and keep track of your citations!

Process of a Literature Review

The process of writing a literature review is not necessarily a linear process, you will often have to loop back and refine your topic, try new searches and altar your plans. The info graphic above illustrates this process.  It also reminds you to continually keep track of your research by citing sources and creating a bibliography.

• Know what the review is for; each assignment will offer the purpose for the review.  For example, is it for “background”, or a “pro and con discussion”, "integration", “summarizing”, etc.
• Create a “search plan”, decide where you will search for information, what type of information you will need.
• Research   - Preform Searches; choose sources and collect information to use in your paper.  Make sure you cite the sources used.
• Think  - Analyze information in a systematic manner and begin your literature review (e.g., summarize, synthesize, etc.). Make sure you cite the sources used.
• Complete  - Write your paper, proof & revise and create your finished bibliography.

Elements in a Literature Review

• Elements in a Literature Review txt of infographic

What to Avoid

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Write a Historiography

1. narrow your topic and select books and articles accordingly, 2. search for literature, 3. read the selected books and articles thoroughly and evaluate them, 4. organize the selected sources by looking for patterns and by developing subtopics, 5. develop a thesis statement, 6. draft the paper, 7. review your work.

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Consider your specific area of study. Think about what interests you and other researchers in your field.  

Talk to your professor or TA, brainstorm, and read lecture notes and current issues in periodicals in the field.  

Limit your scope appropriately based on the assignment guidelines (i.e., focusing on France's role in the Second World War, not the whole world, or on the legal agency of women in medieval Scotland, not all medieval European women). 

• Four Steps to Narrow Your Research Topic (Video) This 3-minute video provides instructions on how to narrow the focus of your research topic.
• Developing a Research Question + Worksheet Use this worksheet to develop, assess, and refine your research questions. There is also a downloadable PDF version.

Define your source selection criteria (i.e., articles published within a specific date range or written through specific historical lenses; or research applying specific theories and methodologies or focusing on a specific geographic region, chronological period, or historical event).  

Using keywords, search a library database. If you need help finding the literature, contact a librarian through 

• Ask Us Contact a librarian via chat, email, phone or the AskUs desk on the main floor of McLaughlin Library
• Book an appointment Book a consultation to get research help.

Published articles and books always cite earlier studies in the footnotes, endnotes or bibliography: you can use these to trace the development of the subject.  

Include studies with conflicting points of view to help create a more engaging discussion within your historiographical paper.  

Evaluate and synthesize the studies' findings and conclusions.  

Note the following:  

• assumptions some or most historians seem to make.  
• methodologies, theories, and sources that historians have used to answer historical questions.  
• experts in the field, usually recognized as names that come up repeatedly in the literature (cited in the text or in the footnotes).  
• conflicting assumptions, theories, methodologies, and types of sources.  
• popular theories and interpretations, and how these have changed (or not) over time.  

You may not agree with everything you read and, indeed, the point of historiography is to critique (positively and constructively) the work of other historians on a given subject. With that in mind, remember the following historical conventions:  

• Someone writing in 1883 about the Norman Conquest of 1066 may not consider questions that are central to more recent kinds of history, but this does not mean that earlier historians and antiquarians were unqualified, unintelligent, or uninformed: they simply had different biases and experiences. These are worth discussing (for example, it might be worthwhile to compare how Protestant and Catholic historians of the late nineteenth century wrote about the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation) but avoid condemning the authors outright without a thoughtful explanation of your critiques.  
• Consider why historians writing in the 1930s were not engaging with questions about gender history and compare the outcomes of their methods and research to the arguments being made by feminist scholars writing since the 1970s. Dig into how different theories, assumptions, and methodologies have led scholars to different conclusions about the same events. 

Note the following: 

• Findings that are common/contested. 
• Important trends in the research. 
• Popular sources, important theories, and common methodologies. 
• For example, the histories of many topics, regions, and periods have had “phases” like the Great Man Theory of History, the Cultural Turn, Feminist History, Disability Studies, and Queer History. Each of these has been tied to contemporary social changes, such as interest in nationalism during and after the World Wars, influences from sociology and anthropology, and different waves of social justice activism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tip: If your historiography is extensive, find a large table surface, and on it place post-it notes or filing cards to organize all your findings into categories.

• Move them around if you decide that (a) they fit better under different headings, or (b) you need to establish new topic headings. 
• Develop headings/subheadings that reflect the major themes and patterns you detected. 

Write a one- or two-sentence statement summarizing the conclusion you have reached about the major trends and developments you see in the research that has been conducted on your subject.

Some example statements to help you get started are: 

• Historians disagree about X (your topic), but I am the most convinced by the scholars who say Y because… 
• Historians disagree about X (your topic), but there is something bigger going on, and the whole debate should be reframed with Y in mind. 
• Historians have come to a consensus about X (your topic), but I disagree and propose a different interpretation (e.g., one that considers gender, one that takes a middle view, or one that incorporates underused primary sources). 

Explore the following library resources to help you create and revise your thesis statement: 

• Templates for Writing Thesis Statements This template provides a two-step guide for writing thesis statements. There is also a downloadable PDF version.
• 5 Types of Thesis Statements Learn about five different types of thesis statements to help you choose the best type for your research. There is also a downloadable PDF version.
• 5 Questions to Strengthen Your Thesis Statement Follow these five steps to strengthen your thesis statements. There is also a downloadable PDF version.

Note: The thesis statement is typically located in the first paragraph of a short paper (fewer than 2000 words) but can be left to the second paragraph of a larger paper (more than 2000 words) if you feel the reader needs more contextual or background information before you begin your argument. 

Follow the organizational structure you developed above, including any headings and subheadings you constructed. 

Make certain that each section links logically to the one before and after. 

Structure your sections by themes or subtopics, not by individual theorists or researchers. 

• Tip: If you find that each paragraph begins with a researcher's name, it might indicate that, instead of evaluating and comparing the research literature from an analytical point of view, you have simply described what research has been done. 

Prioritize analysis over description. 

• For example, look at the following two passages and note that Student A merely describes the literature. The writing is strong, but Student A has not explained how these two historians came to different conclusions. The paragraph would be stronger if it followed Student B’s approach. 
• Student B takes a more analytical and evaluative approach by comparing the methods and sources used by the historians. One thing to look for (and use) in historiographical writing is keywords that suggest there is some evaluation happening. Here, Student B makes logical connections (“conversely,” “this is due to,” and “as a result”). These techniques demonstrate Student B's ability to synthesize knowledge and explain the differences in the studies based on the sources used. 

Student A: Keith M. Brown argues that, although James VI had clear ideas about what he wanted the reformed Scottish and English churches to look like, he relied on his relationships with magnates and ministers to ensure the speed, success, and cohesion of reform efforts. A different scholar, Julian Goodare, argues that James VI came awfully close and indeed, in some cases, succeeded at reorganizing Scotland’s dissident authoritative bodies—the kirk, nobility, parliament, and crown—into a centralized and moderately absolutist government. According to Goodare, by the end of James VI’s reign, the state attained sufficient command of its organization to reintroduce an episcopal structure to the contemporary kirk. It also gained the authority to define the role of church and state in the trial and conviction of moral and criminal offences. In other words, the crown itself wielded sufficient authority to govern independently, and Scottish nobles acquiesced to or resisted its demands as they performed their institutional duties, with varying rewards and consequences.

Student B: Julian Goodare and Keith Brown have reached quite different conclusions about the role that the Scottish nobility played in helping or hindering the efforts of Protestant reformers.  This is due in part to the bodies of sources each employed. Brown drew on a wide variety of archival sources that provided insight into the lives of individuals and families: family papers and letters, local court records, and documents relating to bloodfeud. For Brown, these records demonstrate that, although James VI had clear ideas about what he wanted the reformed Scottish and English churches to look like, he relied on his relationships with magnates and ministers to ensure the speed, success, and cohesion of reform efforts. Conversely, Goodare offers a more traditional political examination of Scotland’s development from a medieval kingdom into an early modern state. After consulting crown financial documents, proceedings of the general assemblies, state papers, and the records of the privy seal records and justiciary court, Goodare argues that James VI came awfully close and indeed, in some cases, succeeded at reorganizing Scotland’s dissident authoritative bodies—the kirk, nobility, parliament, and crown—into a centralized and moderately absolutist government. As a result, the concepts of personal kingship and crown-magnate negotiations of power so central to Brown’s analysis are absent from Goodare’s assessment, in which the latter argues that the crown itself wielded sufficient authority to govern independently and that Scottish nobles merely acquiesced to or resisted its demands as they performed their institutional duties.

Note: These examples have been reproduced and modified with the permission of the student author. For the purposes of these example paragraphs, citations have been omitted, but you should always indicate your sources using footnotes.

Content 

Make an outline of each section of the paper and decide whether you need to add information, delete irrelevant information, or re-structure sections.  

Look at the topic sentences of each paragraph. If you were to read only these sentences, would you find that your paper presented a clear position, logically developed, from beginning to end? The topic sentences of each paragraph should indicate the main points of your historiography. 

Read your work aloud (or use the speech-to-text feature in your word processor to have the computer read it to you). That way you will be better able to identify where you need punctuation marks to signal pauses or divisions within sentences, where you have made grammatical errors, or where your sentences are unclear. 

Avoid over-generalizations: societies are made up of individuals and they vary regionally and temporally. Starting your paper with “Since the first history was written...” or claiming that "scholars agree that the Enlightenment was the Age of Reason” is neither specific nor accurate. 

Evidence 

Since the purpose of historiography is partly to demonstrate that the writer is familiar with the important literature on the chosen subject, check to make certain that you have covered a broad selection of the important, up-to-date, and pertinent texts. What is considered relevant will depend on your subject, region, and period. Good strategies are to pick a few monographs from each decade of the past fifty years and to follow up on authors whose names show up frequently in the historiography sections of other papers. If you need help, ask your instructor or TA for advice once you have picked your topic. 

Check to make sure that you have not plagiarized either by failing to cite a source of information or by using words quoted directly from a source. (Usually, if you take four or more words—in a row—directly from another source, you should put those words within quotation marks, and cite the page.) 

Formatting 

Make certain that all the citations and references are correct and that you are using the appropriate formatting style for your discipline. Most history courses at the University of Guelph ask that you use the Chicago Manual of Style: Notes & Bibliography. If you are uncertain which style to use, ask your instructor.

Sentences should flow smoothly and logically. The text should be written in a clear and concise academic style; it should not be descriptive in nature or use the language of everyday speech (colloquialisms, slang) or excessive disciplinary jargon (specialist words). There should be no grammatical or spelling errors. 

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Historical Research & Historiography

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Historiography

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A historiography is a survey of the historical research conducted on a certain topic, for example the history of midwifery in the United States. Historiography is often called "the history of history," because they assess what research has been conducted on the topic, what was said and how primary sources were analyzed, and how certain arguments compare and contrast to one another within the broader context of the scholarly record.

To use our example above, a historiography of the history of midwifery in the United States would discuss which historians have researched midwifery in the US, what analytical lens did they use, what argument did they make, and how their argument sits against others' and in the scope of the research on the topic.

Historiographies will:

• identify the various debates and approaches that have influenced study of the topic
• identify the important scholars and works in relation to the topic
• identify the past and current arguments about the topic
• identify potential areas for more study

The purpose of a historiography is to discuss the research conducted by other historians on the topic, not to perform original research or commentary on the subject itself.

When Starting Research for a Historiography Paper

You are creating a survey of the research that has been conducted on a topic, so you will, of course, need to discover and become familiar with the notable scholars and arguments on that topic. There are a couple strategies you can use to find these figures and perspectives:

• Are there any scholars that your professor has identified as important to the topic? In the books or articles you have read for assigned readings, look through their bibliographies, references, and/or footnotes for other scholars to investigate on the topic.
• Using what you know, create a list of keywords you believe will be relevant to your topic. When you search these within the database, you will undoubtedly find more key words to add to your search strategy, so do not worry if your lists starts out small.
• For example: in a database, you may search (DE Historiography) AND citizenship AND women to look for historiographies on the history of women and citizenship. 
• When you find a book or article on your topic, search that resource's reference list to see what scholars they cited when constructing their argument.
• In certain databases like Scopus or in Google Scholar, you can also see what other articles have cited a particular resource. 

Preparing to Organize and Write the Historiography

As you search for and collect resources related to your topic, make note of common themes or analyses that the scholar's are making. A historiography should not only identify the prominent scholars and arguments on a topic - they need to set those arguments in context with each other and with scholarly trends over time.

• Identify the perspective from which an author is writing and their approach (for example, postmodern, feminist, structuralist, Marxist, etc.)
• Identify the type of history they have written (for example: cultural, social global, economic, etc.)

Once you have pinpointed the approach and type of history, you can then compare and contrast with your sources:

• What scholars are using the same overall approach? What specific argument are they making, and how do those arguments intersect?
• Does the argument of one scholar seem in response to the other? How so?
• What trends can you identify in the research? Has the focus or type of analysis on the topic changed over time?

When you have found commonalities in perspective, approach, or type, then you can use these to help organize your paper.

Historiography: Examples and Additional Resources

Examples of Historiographies

• Petrov, Yury. 2021. “Russia on the Eve of the Great Revolution of 1917: Recent Trends in Historiography.”   Russian Social Science Review  62 (1/3): 68–85. doi:10.1080/10611428.2021.1911516.
• Chapman, Erin D. 2019. “ A Historiography of Black Feminist Activism.”   History Compass  17 (7): N.PAG. doi:10.1111/hic3.12576.
• Wright, Sharon Hubbs. 2018. “Medieval English Peasant Women and Their Historians: A Historiography with a Future?”   History Compass  16 (8): 1. doi:10.1111/hic3.12461.
• Jones, Catherine A. 2018. “ Women, Gender, and the Boundaries of Reconstruction. ”  Journal of the Civil War Era  8 (1): 111–31. 

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Researching a Historiography

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Guide Feedback

About this guide.

This guide will provide you with information on researching for a historiographic essay , guide you to Pace resources to use for research and link to additional resources that may be helpful in completing your assignment.  

Use the links on the left side to access information. 

   (Image from Pixabay)

For questions on the guide, please contact librarian, Jessica Kiebler at [email protected]. For questions about research for the assignment, contact Jessica Kiebler or the Get Help tab on the left to contact a librarian. 

About the historiography assignment

What is a historiographic essay? 

"Historiography is the study of how history is written.  No single scholar’s approach is “correct” or unimpeachable, because no matter how much he or she tries to treat the subject at hand in a fair and unbiased manner, the final product is invariably shaped by political agendas and pressures, contemporary trends in academia, limitations of resources, and the inherent subjectivity of critical analysis....

A historiographical essay is one which summarizes and analyzes historians’ changing arguments and interpretations of a historical topic ."

(From  https://www.agnesscott.edu/writingandspeaking/handouts/f12-historiographical-essays_rev.-2018.pdf ) 

The links below provide descriptions and step by step details on crafting a historiographic essay. 

• Historiographic Essay Manual This manual provides guidance on selecting a topic, getting started and building a bibliography.
• The Center for Writing & Speaking: Historiographical Essays This PDF provides example perspectives and questions to ask as you research your historiography.
• VIDEO: Difference between a literature review & a historiography This video from Central Connecticut State University Libraries explains the differences between a literature review & a historiography as both deal with collecting past writings on a topic.
• Hints for Writing a Historiographical Essay A professor provides some strategies for writing a historiographical essay.
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An Introduction to Historiography

Selected essays on the history of history, what is historiography.

While reading history often seems like an adventure into the past, it never fully leaves the present. The ways in which existing power structures, political ideologies, personal interests, cultural criticism, and professional conventions impose on our interpretations of the past are rarely obvious. Historiography examines what these are and shows why we must aware of them for any critical reading of history.

Why Historiography?

In studying history, doubt is not only healthy, but necessary to the pursuit of ‘truth’. The most dangerous histories are those which are believed wholly and without hesitation.

Greek Historiography

The interest in the study of history can be traced back to the Greeks as bards and poets traveled widely around the Mediterranean before knowledge was recorded. Historical tradition in the ancient Greek world consisted of firsthand accounts that were retold across generations.

Roman Historiography

Roman historical works emphasized the Romans' superiority in relation to the rest of the world. The inclusion of fables and myths would create new challenges as it would be harder to determine what is the 'truth' that they are setting out to find and what is the 'fictional' or unimportant details.

Only victors get to share their stories but one Greek prisoner refused to be silenced.

Were the so-called "Dark Ages" really all that dark? Despite popular conceptions, there were significant histriographic advancements taking place before the Rennaisance in Medieval Europe.

Byzantine Historiography

Byzantine historiography has been largely overlooked in the general discussion of the history of history, but in fact has a lot to say about how history as it is done today can be improved in order to provide a more nuanced and potentially more accurate account of the past.

Medieval Russian and Tsarist Historiography

The histories of Russia are largely unknown to western audiences. These historical narratives paint a picture of a people from the Varangians and the early empire of the Rus’ to the advent of the Tsardom of Russia.

Medieval Islamic Historiography

Middle Eastern scientific and cultural achievements have traditionally been ignored by Eurocentric Western academia, and Middle Eastern historiography has accordingly been excluded from the traditional historiographical narrative. The sources most commonly used for Historiography classes focus almost exclusively on Greco-Roman and European historiographers, and this section hopes to include a medieval Middle Eastern perspective.

Renaissance Historiography

With humanism the approach to history began to change as scholars studied individual events and people in a more secular context. This shift in focus changes the purpose of writing history.

Reforming History

Reformation historiography largely centered around the revision of history, removing the elites as the sole makers and consumers of history. Protestant historians attempted to write their religion into history and to provide Protestantism with authority through origin stories. In the end, the Reformation became the catalyst for secular history and the professionalization of history as a profession.

What Was the Scottish Enlightenment?

Centered around education, entertainment, and scientific accomplishments 18th and 19th century, Scotland was a cultural center for Enlightenment thinking. Many of the individuals inspired thinkers from other parts of the world. Defined by the shared humanist thinking that centered on practical ideas. Championing the theory of empiricism we are still influenced by many ideas from Scotland's period of Enlightenment.

Enlightened History

Often described as a long 18th century, the Enlightenment spanned from 1685-1815 and has held a crucial place in the narratives of history and the methods of historiography. The social and political situations of the past led to the need for new ways of thinking with various innovative and revolutionary methods that broke from the historical traditions of past centuries.

Romanticism

Romantic thought and historical writing during the 18th and 19th centuries emphasized concepts of beauty, feeling and emotion, and individual human action. Often, but not exclusively opposed to Enlightenment ideals, Romanticism was a short lived but fiery and influential period in history, components of which are still practiced today.

History Under the Third Reich

For scholars of the Third Reich, a striking aspect remains the compliance exhibited by the German people. Historians were not exempt in this regard, and held great power in shaping the cultural milieu of the Weimar era. The anti-republican atmosphere they fostered ultimately proved to amenable to takeover by far-right authoritarianism.

The Dunning School

For a long time after the Civil War, The Dunning School of Thought dominated historical scholarship of slavery and Reconstruction. This deeply racist ideology was often mistaken for the truth because it was written in such a way that upheld the historical industry's highest standards.

THE GREAT WAR

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The Annales School

Some of the most innovative and influential historiographic changes in the twentieth-century came from a group of French historians known as the Annales School. The methods they introduced challenged traditional historical focus from prominent and powerful individuals and shed light on often overlooked or dismissed populations and cultures.

Historiography of the British Empire

Early soviet historiography.

Historiography in the early years of the Soviet Union was a battle to fit the Marxist ideology into the Communist Party’s idea of what Soviet history should represent.

Fernand Braudel

Have you ever wondered how *where* you live has influenced *who* you are? Are you a person of the desert, the mountains, the sea? Have you ever questioned the relativity of time or thought of time in terms of its relationship to space?

Maximilian Karl Emil Weber

Max Weber (1864-1920) is well known for his social theory writings---but less appreciated are his impacts on the writing of history. His emphasis on rationalisation, secularisation, disenchantment, capitalism, and charismatic leaders changed the ways many historians approached their work.

The Meiji Restoration and Japanese Historiography

History has the power to create nations. 19th century Japan's response to Western colonialism was not only a period of rapid modernization, but a time where the country would reforge its past and construct a new identity.

Microhistory

Microhistory is the style of looking at the past by looking at a smaller scale than standard history writing.

Early Feminist History

Feminist historians criticized the notion that there was a natural place for women within the world. This was not a view that historians actively tried to perpetuate, but rather a concept that previous historians had conformed to.

Eurocentrism

Eurocentrism encompasses many Western concepts and their effects, including colonialism, capitalism, monotheism, racism, and patriarchy. Yet, viewing the world with a Western perspective even impacts less-obvious aspects of daily life, such as conceptions of time, the calendar, familial structures, cosmology, use of the environment, etc.

History Wars

This essay will focus on the “History Wars” of conflicting historical narratives, different approaches to studying history and ultimately, the battle for authority, particularly the conflict between popular history and academic history.

Postcolonialism

The writing of Postcolonialist histories is an effort to counteract the lasting effects of the colonial histories, which tend to ignore or gloss over the severe damage colonialism has had on society. This includes the loss of land and resources, which hold significant spiritual and economic value. Cultural traditions and knowledge of pre-colonial pasts have also been wiped out in many places, due to persecution and forced conversions.

Marxist Historiography

History of archival theory.

How did we get “from then to now” with the practice of archival record-keeping, and who were the key figures responsible for establishing the modern methods of archival theory? As an essential component of historiography, understanding the development of archival theories and how they impact modern historical research is key to historical writing today.

Chinese Historiography

Chinese historiography contains a longer continuous tradition than any other on Earth, stretching back to ancient times. The length of this tradition, and the long standing belief by Chinese academics that Chinese historiography is the paramount form of the discipline make it valuable counterpoint to European historiography.

Creating Narrativity from Source Material

Does creating a story narrative from information distort the true events of history, or will it bring clarity and understanding for today's audience?

The Historical Value of Film

When watching a film or documentary, the average viewer is immersed in a moment in history in a way that reading a text could never accomplish. When viewing film through a historian’s lens, we can be more objective in our observations of footage from the past.

Historical Truth

From the scrolls of ancient Greece to the jargon packed books of the modern academic historian, historians have searched for “true histories”. In studying what constitutes history, we must focus on some themes that belong to what we call today historiography.

The Responsibility of Accuracy

When it comes to creating a historical film, to what degree is the filmmaker responsible as an occassional historian? How does simplification, individual framework, and artistic agency contribute to a filmmakers ability to entertain, then inform?

Professional History

In mid-nineteenth century Germany, a professor at the University of Berlin would fundamentally change the way history is taught and applied. No individual contributed more to the professionalization of historiography than Leopold Von Ranke.

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Independent History Research Fellows Program: Historiography

• Topic Development
• Historical Thinking Skills

Historiography

• Historical Method
• Using Sources Strategically
• Search Strategies: Keyword Development
• Historical Secondary Sources
• Reading a bibliography
• Secondary Sources: Books & Journal Articles
• Peer Review
• Primary Sources
• Locating Sources: Books
• Search Strategies
• Journal Articles
• NYPL Databases
• Google Scholar
• What are Archives?
• Locating Primary Source Archives: Physical Collections
• Locating Primary Source Archives: Digital Archives and Libraries
• Locating Primary Sources: Primary Source Database Collections

Why is it Important?

Before doing work in primary sources, historians must know what has been written on their topic.  They must be familiar with theories and arguments–as well as facts–that appear in secondary sources.

Before you proceed with your research project, you too must be familiar with the literature: you do not want to waste time on theories that others have disproved and you want to take full advantage of what others have argued.  You want to be able to discuss and analyze your topic.

-  Susan Fernsebner ,  Talking History Series , History and American Studies, University of Mary Washington.

• A historiography shows you the research that has been done on your topic in the past.
• This keeps you from having to reinvent the wheel.
• A historiography can give you new angles to research and new interpretations to dispute.
• Most importantly, a historiography shows you which interpretations have been challenged. This keeps you from championing an interpretation using arguments that have already been countered.

What is a Historiography?

Historians need to know what has been written on their topic–facts, theories, and arguments–so they can place their own thesis in the context of that body of work. Historiography is the study of what historians have written and argued about a given topic.

"Historiography deals with the writing of history. In the broadest sense, it is the study of the history of history (as it is described by historians). Historiography has several facets, but for the purposes of a researcher trying to situate his work in the context of other historians' work on a particular topic, the most useful thing is the historiographic essay or review article that summarizes changing ideas about and approaches to the topic. A really good historiographic essay will also address why historians' ideas have changed."

-  Steven Knowlton, Librarian for History and African American Studies, Princeton University Library.

There are two common uses of the term "Historiography."

The historiography (general descriptor)  of a topic is the sum total of the interpretations of a specific topic written by past and current historians.

• For example: "The historiography of the decision to use the atomic bomb on Hiroshima changed over the years as new research questioned the former consensus view that the decision to drop the atomic bomb was predicated on the necessity to save American lives."
• Specifically, a historiography identifies influential thinkers and reveals the shape of the scholarly debate on a particular subject. 

The major purpose of writing a historiographical paper is to convey the scholarship of other historians on a particular subject, rather than to analyze the subject itself.

• A historiography can be a stand-alone paper, in which case your paper examines the work completed by other historians. 
• Alternately, a historiography can act as an introduction to a major research paper, in which you will go on to add your own analysis.

A good historiography does the following:

• Points out influential books and papers that exemplified, shaped, or revolutionized a field of study.
• Shows which scholars were most effective in changing the scope of the debate.
• Describes the current trends in the field of study, such as which interpretation is currently in the mainstream.
• Allows the writer to position themselves in the field for their analysis.

Searching for Historiographies

A quick search in the library catalog using "Historiography" as a keyword will get you a host of books on a variety of subjects.

To find a historiography of a particular subject, you can use the following search structure: specific topic name AND historiography

• Ex: Holocaust AND Historiography

Rampolla  Section  3d-2: Comparing secondary sources: literature reviews and historiographic essays

"Historiographic essays: As noted in Chapter 1, historians frequently disagree about how to interpret the events they study. These differences in interpretation reflect the varying approaches that historians take to their subject. For example, individual historians might be interested primarily in social, cultural, political, economic, legal, or intellectual history. They might approach their work from a Marxist, Freudian, feminist, or postmodernist point of view. Such orientations and affiliations affect the ways in which historians explore and interpret the past; thus, historians interested in the same historical event might examine different sets of sources to answer the same question. For example, in studying the causes of the French Revolution, Marxist historians might focus on economic and class issues, while intellectual historians might concentrate on how the writings of the philosophes (a group of French Enlightenment writers) affected political thought and practice. Moreover, since the historian’s work is embedded in a particular social and cultural context, historical interpretations and methodologies change over time. For example, the growth of the civil rights and feminist movements in the 1960s led to a greater interest in African American and women’s history. Historiographic essays are thus a particularly effective way to introduce students to diverse perspectives and invite them to enter the exciting world of historical discussion and debate."

Examples of Historiographies

• Interpreting American History : Historiographical book series in ProQuest Ebook Central. 
• Wiley Blackwell Companions to American History : Historiographical book series in ProQuest Ebook Central. 

Journal Articles:

• Ryan, Mary P. “The Explosion of Family History.” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982): 181–95. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2701826
• Foner, Eric. “Reconstruction Revisited.”  Reviews in American History  10, no. 4 (1982): 82–100.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/2701820
• Helmbold, Lois Rita, and Ann Schofield. “Women’s Labor History, 1790-1945.”  Reviews in American History  17, no. 4 (1989): 501–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2703424
• McKay, Richard. “‘Patient Zero’: The Absence of a Patient’s View of the Early North American AIDS Epidemic.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88, no. 1 (2014): 161–94. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26308895 .

Created and Updated

The Guide is an adaptation of How to Create a Historiography from the University of Rhode Island Libraries created by Alan Witt, updated by Michaela Keating. 

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How to Write a Historiographical Essay

December 15, 2023

Understanding the purpose of a historiographical essay is crucial to writing a successful and informative essay. Essentially, the purpose of a historiographical essay is to provide an overview of the scholarly literature on a particular topic. Historiographical essays allow writers to identify, analyze and evaluate the existing scholarship on a topic and to present their findings in a cogent and persuasive manner. The key to writing a successful historiographical essay is to demonstrate a clear understanding of the topic and to provide a balanced and insightful analysis of the existing scholarship. To achieve this, writers must be able to critically evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing literature and identify areas where new research is needed. By doing so, writers can make important contributions to the historiography of their respective fields and advance our collective understanding of important historical topics.

Selecting a Topic

Selecting a topic is a crucial step in writing a historiographical essay. The topic must be appropriate in terms of its relevance, scope, and availability of sources. It is important to choose a topic that is important to the field and has a rich historiography, as this will allow the writer to engage with a range of different debates and interpretations. Once a suitable topic has been identified, it is important to begin the process of gathering sources and identifying key debates within the existing historiography. This process can be time-consuming and challenging, but it is crucial in developing a nuanced and insightful understanding of the topic. Ultimately, a strong historiographical essay will demonstrate a deep knowledge of the topic, a mastery of the relevant literature, and the ability to provide critical analysis and synthesis of existing scholarship.

Example Historiographical Essay Topics:

• The Historiography of the American Civil War
• The Historiography of World War II
• The Historiography of the French Revolution
• The Historiography of Ancient Greece
• The Historiography of Women’s Suffrage Movements
• The Historiography of Colonialism in Africa
• The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement
• The Historiography of the Renaissance
• The Historiography of the Holocaust
• The Historiography of the Cold War

Gathering and Analyzing Sources

Gathering and analyzing sources is a fundamental step in writing a historiographical essay. To effectively engage with the existing scholarship on a topic, writers must collect a wide range of sources and critically evaluate them. Here are some key steps to consider:

• Identify primary and secondary sources: Begin by identifying primary sources that are directly related to your topic. These may include archival documents, diaries, or personal letters. Also, gather relevant secondary sources such as scholarly articles, books, and monographs that provide analysis and interpretation of the topic.
• Evaluate the credibility and reliability of sources: Assess the credibility and expertise of the authors and publishers. Consider the date of publication to gauge how current the information is. Ensure that the sources come from reputable journals or publishing houses.
• Analyze the perspectives and arguments: Read the sources carefully and analyze the differing perspectives and arguments presented. Take note of recurring themes, debates, and gaps in the literature.
• Create an annotated bibliography: Compile an annotated bibliography that provides a summary and evaluation of each source. Include key arguments, methodologies used, and any biases or limitations.
• Identify trends and debates: Explore how different historians have approached the topic and identify key trends or shifts in interpretations over time. Look for areas of consensus and disagreement among scholars.

By effectively gathering and analyzing sources, writers can develop a comprehensive understanding of the existing historiography, identify gaps, and construct a well-rounded and persuasive argument in their historiographical essay.

Developing an Outline

Developing an outline is an essential step in organizing the structure and flow of a historiographical essay. It helps writers to establish a clear and logical framework for their arguments. Here are some key considerations when developing an outline for a historiographical essay:

Introduction:

• Provide an overview of the topic and its historical context.
• Clearly state the purpose of the essay and the thesis statement.

Background and Historiographical Context:

• Provide a brief overview of the existing scholarship and historiography on the topic.
• Highlight key debates, theories, and influential historians.

Themes and Trends in the Historiography:

• Identify major themes and trends that have emerged in the literature.
• Discuss the different approaches and interpretations.

Critique and Evaluation of Sources and Arguments:

• Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the existing scholarship.
• Evaluate the credibility, biases, and limitations of sources and arguments.

Identifying Gaps and Future Directions:

• Discuss areas where further research is needed and potential avenues for future scholarship.

Conclusion:

• Recap the main arguments and findings from the historiographical analysis.
• Reflect on the significance of the topic and its contribution to the field.

By structuring the essay with a well-developed outline, writers can ensure that their arguments are coherent, logical, and supported by the existing historiography.

Experience the convenience of generating historiography essays effortlessly with our new tool .

Writing the Introduction

The introduction of a historiographical essay plays a vital role in setting the stage for the reader and presenting the main objectives and arguments of the essay. Here are some key elements to consider when writing the introduction:

Contextualize the topic:

• Provide a brief overview of the historical era, event, or theme being examined.
• Establish the historical significance of the topic and its relevance to the field of study.

Introduce the historiographical approach:

• Explain the purpose of a historiographical essay, which is to analyze the existing scholarship and interpretations on the topic.
• Highlight the importance of understanding how historians have studied and written about the topic over time.

Present the main thesis or argument:

• Clearly state the main argument or thesis that the essay will be exploring.
• Provide a preview of the main points or themes that will be discussed to support the argument.

Outline the structure of the essay:

• Give a brief overview of how the essay will be structured, including the main sections or themes that will be covered.
• This helps provide a roadmap for the reader and allows them to understand the progression of the essay.

Engage the reader:

• Begin with an attention-grabbing opening sentence or a thought-provoking question related to the topic.
• Establish a connection with the reader by explaining why the topic is important and how it relates to broader historical debates or current events.

By crafting a well-written and informative introduction, the writer can effectively capture the reader’s attention and provide a solid foundation for the rest of the historiographical essay.

Background and Historiographical Context

Before delving into the analysis and evaluation of the existing scholarship, it is essential to provide a solid background and historiographical context in a historiographical essay. This section sets the stage for the reader and helps them understand the broader historical landscape surrounding the topic. Here are some key points to consider in this section:

Historical background:

• Provide a brief overview of the historical period, event, or theme being studied.
• Highlight any key historical developments or events that are relevant to the topic.

Importance of the topic:

• Explain why the topic is significant within the context of the broader field of study.
• Highlight its relevance to wider historical debates or its impact on society.

Historiographical overview:

• Summarize the development of the historiography on the topic over time.
• Identify influential works, key historians, and pivotal moments in the evolution of the scholarship.

Key debates and interpretations:

• Introduce major debates among historians regarding different aspects of the topic.
• Highlight the key interpretations and schools of thought that have emerged in the historiography.

By providing a comprehensive background and historiographical context, this section prepares the reader for the subsequent analysis and evaluation of the existing scholarship in the historiographical essay.

Themes and Trends in the Historiography

Analyzing the themes and trends in the historiography is a crucial aspect of writing a historiographical essay. This section explores the ideas, theories, and overarching patterns that have emerged in the scholarship on the topic. Here are key points to consider:

Identify major themes:

• Discuss the recurring topics or concepts that historians have focused on when studying the topic.
• Highlight the different aspects of the topic that have received significant attention within the historiography.

Examine evolving perspectives:

• Discuss how interpretations and perspectives on the topic have evolved over time.
• Identify significant shifts in historiographical approaches and theories.

Analyze methodologies:

• Explore the methodologies and approaches employed by historians in studying the topic.
• Consider the methods used in collecting and analyzing primary sources, as well as the theoretical frameworks applied.

Evaluate prevailing interpretations:

• Identify dominant interpretations or schools of thought within the historiography.
• Examine the strengths and weaknesses of these interpretations and their impact on the field.

By analyzing the themes and trends in the historiography, writers can demonstrate their understanding of the scholarly discourse and provide a comprehensive overview of the different perspectives on the topic.

Critique and Evaluation of Sources and Arguments

Critiquing and evaluating the sources and arguments is a crucial component of a historiographical essay. This section assesses the reliability, biases, and scholarly contributions of both primary and secondary sources. Here are some key points to consider:

Critique of primary sources:

• Evaluate the quality, authenticity, and biases of the primary sources used by historians.
• Consider the context in which the sources were created and any limitations they may have.

Evaluation of secondary sources:

• Assess the arguments, methodologies, and evidence presented in the secondary sources.
• Consider the credibility and expertise of the authors and their contributions to the field of study.

Comparison of perspectives:

• Compare and contrast the different interpretations and arguments presented by historians.
• Analyze the similarities, differences, and points of contention among the various perspectives.

Identification of gaps and limitations:

• Identify any gaps or limitations in the existing scholarship on the topic.
• Consider areas where further research or analysis is needed.

Synthesis of sources and arguments:

• Synthesize the various sources and arguments to identify overarching trends and common themes.
• Evaluate the overall strengths and weaknesses of the historiographical discourse on the topic.

By critically evaluating the sources and arguments, writers can demonstrate their ability to engage with the existing scholarship and contribute to the ongoing discourse on the topic in a historiographical essay.

Writing the Conclusion

The conclusion of a historiographical essay serves as the final opportunity to summarize and synthesize the key findings, arguments, and perspectives presented throughout the essay. Here are some important points to consider when writing the conclusion:

Summarize the main arguments:

• Recapitulate the main arguments and interpretations presented in the essay.
• Highlight the different perspectives and approaches that have been examined.

Evaluate the historiography:

• Reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of the existing scholarship on the topic.
• Discuss any overarching trends or significant shifts in historiographical interpretations.

Address remaining questions and gaps:

• Consider any lingering questions or unresolved issues in the historiography.
• Discuss areas where further research is needed to fill gaps in knowledge.

Discuss personal insights and contributions:

• Offer your own insights and reflections on the topic based on the analysis conducted.
• Highlight any unique contributions or perspectives you have brought to the historiography.

Emphasize the significance:

• Reinforce the importance and relevance of studying the topic within the field of history.
• Discuss how the historiographical essay contributes to the broader understanding of the topic.

By writing a concise and comprehensive conclusion, you can effectively summarize the key points and contributions made in the historiographical essay, leaving the reader with a clear understanding of the topic’s historiography and its significance.

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Why Study History? (1998)

In 2020, Peter N. Stearns revisited his “Why Study History? (1998)” essay with “ Why Study History? Revisited ” in Perspectives on History.

By Peter N. Stearns

People live in the present. They plan for and worry about the future. History, however, is the study of the past. Given all the demands that press in from living in the present and anticipating what is yet to come, why bother with what has been? Given all the desirable and available branches of knowledge, why insist—as most American educational programs do—on a good bit of history? And why urge many students to study even more history than they are required to?

Any subject of study needs justification: its advocates must explain why it is worth attention. Most widely accepted subjects—and history is certainly one of them—attract some people who simply like the information and modes of thought involved. But audiences less spontaneously drawn to the subject and more doubtful about why to bother need to know what the purpose is.

Historians do not perform heart transplants, improve highway design, or arrest criminals. In a society that quite correctly expects education to serve useful purposes, the functions of history can seem more difficult to define than those of engineering or medicine. History is in fact very useful, actually indispensable, but the products of historical study are less tangible, sometimes less immediate, than those that stem from some other disciplines.

In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline. History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt. An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act. Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

History Helps Us Understand Change and How the Society We Live in Came to Be

The second reason history is inescapable as a subject of serious study follows closely on the first. The past causes the present, and so the future. Any time we try to know why something happened—whether a shift in political party dominance in the American Congress, a major change in the teenage suicide rate, or a war in the Balkans or the Middle East—we have to look for factors that took shape earlier. Sometimes fairly recent history will suffice to explain a major development, but often we need to look further back to identify the causes of change. Only through studying history can we grasp how things change; only through history can we begin to comprehend the factors that cause change; and only through history can we understand what elements of an institution or a society persist despite change.

The Importance of History in Our Own Lives

These two fundamental reasons for studying history underlie more specific and quite diverse uses of history in our own lives. History well told is beautiful. Many of the historians who most appeal to the general reading public know the importance of dramatic and skillful writing—as well as of accuracy. Biography and military history appeal in part because of the tales they contain. History as art and entertainment serves a real purpose, on aesthetic grounds but also on the level of human understanding. Stories well done are stories that reveal how people and societies have actually functioned, and they prompt thoughts about the human experience in other times and places. The same aesthetic and humanistic goals inspire people to immerse themselves in efforts to reconstruct quite remote pasts, far removed from immediate, present-day utility. Exploring what historians sometimes call the "pastness of the past"—the ways people in distant ages constructed their lives—involves a sense of beauty and excitement, and ultimately another perspective on human life and society.

History Contributes to Moral Understanding

History also provides a terrain for moral contemplation. Studying the stories of individuals and situations in the past allows a student of history to test his or her own moral sense, to hone it against some of the real complexities individuals have faced in difficult settings. People who have weathered adversity not just in some work of fiction, but in real, historical circumstances can provide inspiration. "History teaching by example" is one phrase that describes this use of a study of the past—a study not only of certifiable heroes, the great men and women of history who successfully worked through moral dilemmas, but also of more ordinary people who provide lessons in courage, diligence, or constructive protest.

History Provides Identity

History also helps provide identity, and this is unquestionably one of the reasons all modern nations encourage its teaching in some form. Historical data include evidence about how families, groups, institutions and whole countries were formed and about how they have evolved while retaining cohesion. For many Americans, studying the history of one's own family is the most obvious use of history, for it provides facts about genealogy and (at a slightly more complex level) a basis for understanding how the family has interacted with larger historical change. Family identity is established and confirmed. Many institutions, businesses, communities, and social units, such as ethnic groups in the United States, use history for similar identity purposes. Merely defining the group in the present pales against the possibility of forming an identity based on a rich past. And of course nations use identity history as well—and sometimes abuse it. Histories that tell the national story, emphasizing distinctive features of the national experience, are meant to drive home an understanding of national values and a commitment to national loyalty.

Studying History Is Essential for Good Citizenship

A study of history is essential for good citizenship. This is the most common justification for the place of history in school curricula. Sometimes advocates of citizenship history hope merely to promote national identity and loyalty through a history spiced by vivid stories and lessons in individual success and morality. But the importance of history for citizenship goes beyond this narrow goal and can even challenge it at some points.

History that lays the foundation for genuine citizenship returns, in one sense, to the essential uses of the study of the past. History provides data about the emergence of national institutions, problems, and values—it's the only significant storehouse of such data available. It offers evidence also about how nations have interacted with other societies, providing international and comparative perspectives essential for responsible citizenship. Further, studying history helps us understand how recent, current, and prospective changes that affect the lives of citizens are emerging or may emerge and what causes are involved. More important, studying history encourages habits of mind that are vital for responsible public behavior, whether as a national or community leader, an informed voter, a petitioner, or a simple observer.

What Skills Does a Student of History Develop?

What does a well-trained student of history, schooled to work on past materials and on case studies in social change, learn how to do? The list is manageable, but it contains several overlapping categories.

The Ability to Assess Evidence . The study of history builds experience in dealing with and assessing various kinds of evidence—the sorts of evidence historians use in shaping the most accurate pictures of the past that they can. Learning how to interpret the statements of past political leaders—one kind of evidence—helps form the capacity to distinguish between the objective and the self-serving among statements made by present-day political leaders. Learning how to combine different kinds of evidence—public statements, private records, numerical data, visual materials—develops the ability to make coherent arguments based on a variety of data. This skill can also be applied to information encountered in everyday life.

The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations . Learning history means gaining some skill in sorting through diverse, often conflicting interpretations. Understanding how societies work—the central goal of historical study—is inherently imprecise, and the same certainly holds true for understanding what is going on in the present day. Learning how to identify and evaluate conflicting interpretations is an essential citizenship skill for which history, as an often-contested laboratory of human experience, provides training. This is one area in which the full benefits of historical study sometimes clash with the narrower uses of the past to construct identity. Experience in examining past situations provides a constructively critical sense that can be applied to partisan claims about the glories of national or group identity. The study of history in no sense undermines loyalty or commitment, but it does teach the need for assessing arguments, and it provides opportunities to engage in debate and achieve perspective.

Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change . Experience in assessing past examples of change is vital to understanding change in society today—it's an essential skill in what we are regularly told is our "ever-changing world." Analysis of change means developing some capacity for determining the magnitude and significance of change, for some changes are more fundamental than others. Comparing particular changes to relevant examples from the past helps students of history develop this capacity. The ability to identify the continuities that always accompany even the most dramatic changes also comes from studying history, as does the skill to determine probable causes of change. Learning history helps one figure out, for example, if one main factor—such as a technological innovation or some deliberate new policy—accounts for a change or whether, as is more commonly the case, a number of factors combine to generate the actual change that occurs.

Historical study, in sum, is crucial to the promotion of that elusive creature, the well-informed citizen. It provides basic factual information about the background of our political institutions and about the values and problems that affect our social well-being. It also contributes to our capacity to use evidence, assess interpretations, and analyze change and continuities. No one can ever quite deal with the present as the historian deals with the past—we lack the perspective for this feat; but we can move in this direction by applying historical habits of mind, and we will function as better citizens in the process.

History Is Useful in the World of Work

History is useful for work. Its study helps create good businesspeople, professionals, and political leaders. The number of explicit professional jobs for historians is considerable, but most people who study history do not become professional historians. Professional historians teach at various levels, work in museums and media centers, do historical research for businesses or public agencies, or participate in the growing number of historical consultancies. These categories are important—indeed vital—to keep the basic enterprise of history going, but most people who study history use their training for broader professional purposes. Students of history find their experience directly relevant to jobs in a variety of careers as well as to further study in fields like law and public administration. Employers often deliberately seek students with the kinds of capacities historical study promotes. The reasons are not hard to identify: students of history acquire, by studying different phases of the past and different societies in the past, a broad perspective that gives them the range and flexibility required in many work situations. They develop research skills, the ability to find and evaluate sources of information, and the means to identify and evaluate diverse interpretations. Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential. Historical study is unquestionably an asset for a variety of work and professional situations, even though it does not, for most students, lead as directly to a particular job slot, as do some technical fields. But history particularly prepares students for the long haul in their careers, its qualities helping adaptation and advancement beyond entry-level employment. There is no denying that in our society many people who are drawn to historical study worry about relevance. In our changing economy, there is concern about job futures in most fields. Historical training is not, however, an indulgence; it applies directly to many careers and can clearly help us in our working lives.

Why study history? The answer is because we virtually must, to gain access to the laboratory of human experience. When we study it reasonably well, and so acquire some usable habits of mind, as well as some basic data about the forces that affect our own lives, we emerge with relevant skills and an enhanced capacity for informed citizenship, critical thinking, and simple awareness. The uses of history are varied. Studying history can help us develop some literally "salable" skills, but its study must not be pinned down to the narrowest utilitarianism. Some history—that confined to personal recollections about changes and continuities in the immediate environment—is essential to function beyond childhood. Some history depends on personal taste, where one finds beauty, the joy of discovery, or intellectual challenge. Between the inescapable minimum and the pleasure of deep commitment comes the history that, through cumulative skill in interpreting the unfolding human record, provides a real grasp of how the world works.

Careers for History Majors

Through clear graphs and informal prose, readers will find hard data, practical advice, and answers to common questions about the study of history and the value it affords to individuals, their workplaces, and their communities in Careers for History Majors . You can purchase this pamphlet online at Oxford University Press. For questions about the pamphlet, please contact Karen Lou ( [email protected] ). For bulk orders contact OUP directly . 

What You'll Learn with a History Degree

What do history students learn? With the help of the AHA, faculty from around the United States have collaborated to create a list of skills students develop in their history coursework. This list, called the "History Discipline Core," is meant to help students understand the skills they are acquiring so that they can explain the value of their education to parents, friends, and employers, as well as take pride in their decision to study history. 

On the Nature and Purpose of History

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• William J. Reese  

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W hat is history? Since its emergence as a distinctive intellectual pursuit among the Greeks in the fifth century BCE, writers from a variety of backgrounds have tried to answer that question. To study, record, and educate others about the past seems so obvious to modern sensibility that it almost seems unnecessary to comment upon. In fact, the significance of the rise of history as a unique type of inquiry— related to but different from chronicles, storytelling, myths, and other ways of memorializing the past—can easily be underestimated. We assume today that acquiring knowledge of history, either for pleasure or for more utilitarian ends such as judging events and seeking “truth,” has some place in our lives, however vaguely the need may be articulated. Everyone, for example, has seen a movie where a character temporarily has lost his or her memory. This is a horrifying thought, since without a sense of the past, the present and future seem unnavigable. The same is true of any culture or society. While professionally trained historians routinely argue among themselves about the fine points of historical research in academic journals and seminars, citizens from all walks of life employ history—verifiable or invented, etched through a mixture of sources and means into personal or collective consciousness—to guide their thinking and behavior. 1

• Social History
• Scientific History
• Historical Scholarship
• Historical Writing
• Historical Profession

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Charles William Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley, 1983), chapter 1. On the multiple uses of history, see Allan Nevins, The Gateway to History (New York, 1938), chapters 1–2; and Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval & Modern (Chicago, 1983), 2.

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Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT, 1998), 2.

Herodotus, The Histories (London, ©1972), 41; Paul K. Conkin and Roland Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge of History (New York, 1971), 11–12; M. I. Finley, The Portable Greek Historians (London, ©1959), 7; and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (London, ©1946), 17–19. Arnaldo Momigliano, in The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Berkeley, 1990), 40, points out that even Herodotus’s admirers doubted the reliability of his history. Kelley emphasizes that Herodotus anticipated the rise of “cultural history” (of growing interest by the eighteenth century) through his interest in “all aspects of human interest,” not simply war and politics. See Faces of History , 3, 19–28. In Herodotus in Context: Ethnography, Science, and the Art of Persuasion (Cambridge, UK, 2000), Rosalind Thomas recreates the larger intellectual world in which Herodotus lived.

Joseph Gavorse, ed., The Complete Writings of Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (New York, ©1934), 3, 13–15; Donald R. Kelley, Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment (New Haven, CT, 1991), 28–29; Kelley, Faces of History , 28–35; Beverley Southgate, History: What and Why? Ancient, Modern, and Postmodern Perspectives (London, 1996), chapter 2; and Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May, Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (New York, 1986), 233. For scholarly debates about views on time among the ancients, see Herbert J. Muller, The Uses of the Past: Profiles of Former Societies (New York, ©1952), 68–69; Arnaldo Momigliano, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography (Middletown, CT, 1977), 184–86, 197; and Gerald A. Press, The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity (Kingston and Montreal, 1982), 9–10, 125. As David Rohrbacher explains in The Historians of Late Antiquity (London, 2002), 159, speeches were commonly included in classical historiography, though they were obviously not “verbatim” but “approximations of what was actually said.”

G. R. Elton, The Practice of History (London, 1967), 12; and Kelley, Versions of History , 36–37.

M. I. Finley, The Use and Abuse of History (London, 1971), 12–15.

Ronald Mellor, The Roman Historians (London, 1999), 4, 10, 193; and Kelley, Versions of History , 77–78.

Kelley, Versions of History , 128; Kelley, Faces of History , 85–89; and Page Smith, The Historian and History (New York, ©1960), 17. On historiography in the medieval period, see Conkin and Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge , chapter 3.

Kelley, Versions of History , 147–48; Kelley, Faces of History , 89–92, 95–96; and Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley, 1969), chapter 9.

Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (New York, 1927), chapter 8; Harry Elmer Barnes, A History of Historical Writing (Norman, OK, 1937), 64–88; Breisach, Historiography , 98, 101, 128; Kelley, Faces of History , chapter 5; and Brian Croke and Alanna M. Emmett, “Historiography in Late Antiquity: An Overview,” in History and Historians in Late Antiquity , ed. Brian Croke and Alanna M. Emmett (Sydney, 1983), 9, who wrote that by the seventh century the various historiographical genres were largely set for the medieval period and “converged in a common goal, to tell the story of salvation and to demonstrate the ways of God to men both now and since time immemorial.” See also Dominic Janes, “The World and Its Past as Christian Allegory in the Early Middle Ages,” in The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages , ed. Yitzhak Hen and Matthew Innes (Cambridge, UK, 2000), 102–13.

Barnes, A History , 97; Haskins, Renaissance , 224, 228–29; Donald J. Wilcox, “The Sense of Time in Western Historical Narratives from Eusebius to Machiavelli,” in Classical Rhetoric and Medieval Historiography , ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo, MI, 1985), 172; and Gillian Evans, “St. Anselm and Sacred History,” in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern , ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, UK, 1981), 199.

Barnes, A History , 99–100; Breisach, Historiography , 160; E. B. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography (London, 1983), 4, 7–9, 55; Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (Toronto, 1967), 35–36, 40, 45–46, 60–64, 76–77; Donald R. Kelley, Renaissance Humanism (Boston, MA, 1991), 25, 94–102; Fornara, The Nature of History , 195; Patrick Collinson, “Truth, Lies, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century Protestant Historiography,” in The Historical Imagination in Early Modern Britain: History, Rhetoric, and Fiction, 1500–1800 , ed. Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (Cambridge, UK, 1997), 37–68; Conkin and Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge , 31–32; and Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994), 60.

Kelley, Versions of History , 446; Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present (Cleveland, OH, ©1954), 35–45; Theodore S. Hamerow, Reflections on History and Historians (Madison, WI, 1987), 227–28; David Carrithers, “Montesquieu’s Philosophy of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (January–March 1986): 61; and Martine Watson Brownley, “Gibbon’s Artistic and Historical Scope in the Decline and Fall ,” Journal of the History of Ideas 42 (October–December 1981): 629–42. For a succinct analysis of the incorporation of pagan classics into Christian theology, read Richard E. Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children: How Christians, Muslims, and Jews Rediscovered Ancient Wisdom and Illuminated the Middle Ages (New York, 2003).

Henry F. May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford, UK, 1976); and Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth , chapters 1–2. There has been an efflorescence of scholarship recently on the Scottish Enlightenment; see, for example, Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It (New York, 2001).

Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD, 1973), 136.

Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (Hanover, NH, 1997), chapter 1; Breisach, Historiography , 293; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth , chapter 2; and J. H. Plumb, “The Historian’s Dilemma,” in his edited volume, Crisis in the Humanities (Baltimore, MD, 1964), 26–27.

Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1988), 28; and Iggers, Historiography , 24.

Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, NY, 1965); Laurence R. Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965); and John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (New York, 1965), 9–10.

Bonnie G. Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA, 1998), especially chapter 5. On the American scene, read Julie Des Jardins, Women & the Historical Enterprise: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003).

Pieter Geyl, Use and Abuse of History (New Haven, CT, 1955), 33–34, 52–56; Iggers, Historiography , 31–35; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs, Telling the Truth , 73–74; and William J. Reese, The Origins of the American High School (New Haven, CT, 1995), 117–18.

Conkin and Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge , 79; Novick, That Noble Dream , chapter 5; Smith, Gender and History , 146–53; and Richard Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington (New York, 1968), 41–43. For a different perspective on the Progressives, read Ernst A. Breisach, American Progressive History: An Experiment in Modernization (Chicago, 1993).

Hofstadter, The Progressive Historians ; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs, Telling the Truth , chapter 4; Higham, History , part III, chapters 3–4; and Novick, That Noble Dream , chapter 4. On the evils of presentism, see Bernard Bailyn, On the Teaching and Writing of History (Hanover, NH, 1994), 42.

James Harvey Robinson, The New History: Essays Illustrating the Modern Historical Outlook (New York, ©1965), 1; and Kevin Mattson, “The Challenges of Democracy: James Harvey Robinson, the New History, and Adult Education for Citizenship,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2 (January 2003): 48–79. Ellen Fitzpatrick has laid to rest the common misconception that the “new” history proposed during the Progressive Era did not materialize until the 1960s. See History’s Memory: Writing America’s Past 1880–1980 (Cambridge, MA, 2002).

Robert William Fogel and G. R. Elton, Which Road to the Past? Two Views of History (New Haven, CT, 1983), 11–23.

Becker’s paper, delivered in 1926, was not published until 1955; see Carl L. Becker, “What Are Historical Facts?” The Western Political Quarterly 8 (September 1955): 327–29, 332.

The 1931 address was reprinted in Carl L. Becker, Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics (New York, 1935), with quotations from 243, 254; and Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT, 1932), 44, 88.

Charles A. Beard, “Written History as an Act of Faith,” American Historical Review 39 (January 1934): 219–20, 226. As John Lewis Gaddis notes in The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York, 2002), historians actually had much in common with scientists not confined to the laboratory, for example, geologists.

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1931); C. T. McIntire, Herbert Butterfield: Historian as Dissenter (New Haven, CT, 2004), ix–xi, 56–77, on the English context; and Collingwood, The Idea of History , 251–52. Collingwood emphasized that history was a science of a special sort. In What is History? (New York, 1961), 50–51, Edward Hallett Carr, in his critique of objectivity, noted that Butterfield, who had attacked the Whiggish, presentist view that history was an unfolding tale of greater liberty, applauded the tradition of liberty during World War II!

Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft (New York, ©1953), 14–26; Geyl, Use and Abuse , 61; and Plumb, “Historian’s Dilemma,” 43. 35. On the 1960s, see John Higham, Writing American History: Essays onModern Scholarship (Bloomington, IN, 1970), chapter 9; on the 1950s, Higham, History , Part III, chapter 6; and Bernard Sternsher, Consensus, Conflict, and American Historians (Bloomington, IN, 1975). For examples of trends in social history, see the essays in Part II of Michael Kammen, ed., The Past before Us (Ithaca, NY, 1980); and Olivier Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985). See also Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), which was interpreted by many critics as proof that even science was not particularly objective. In History’s Memory , chapter 5, Fitzpatrick reminds readers that many excellent histories appeared in the late 1940s and 1950s that did not reflect the values of “consensus” history.

On the French contribution, see Traian Stoianovich, French Historical Method: The Annales Paradigm (Ithaca, NY, 1976); and Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution : The Annales School (Stanford, 1990).

Conkin and Stromberg, The Heritage and Challenge of History , 90–91. Also see Terrence J. McDonald, “What We Talk about When We Talk about History: The Conversations of History and Sociology,” in The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences , ed. Terrence J. McDonald (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996), 112–13. For the traditional statement on why historians should avoid theories drawn from other disciplines, see the previously cited books by G. R. Elton.

Elton, The Practice of History , 84–85, 87. Elton was born in Tubingin but educated at the University of London and spent his professional career in England. For a sense of the great range of historical studies available today, see the essays in David Cannadine, ed., What is History Now? (New York, 2002).

I am relying heavily on Kenneth Cmiel’s outstanding essay, “Poststructural Theory,” in Encyclopedia of American Social History , ed. Mary Kupiec Cayton, Elliot Gorn, and Peter W. Williams (New York, 1992): vol. 1, 425–33. Also read Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA, 1995); and Keith Jenkins, ed., The Postmodern History Reader (New York, 1997). Commenting on the impact of postmodernism on historical scholarship on the early Middle Ages, Matthew Innes writes that the idea that all there is, is discourse, with no “reality external to… discourse, has had no real takers in early medieval studies.” But he goes on to say that it has enlivened debates about sources, texts, and the reconstruction of historical context in the field. See Innes, “Introduction: Using the Past, Interpreting the Present, Influencing the Future,” in The Uses of the Past , ed. Hen and Innes, 3–4. A few years earlier, Gabrielle M. Spiegel offered a most optimistic view of the impact in The Past as Text: The Theory and Practice of Medieval Historiography (Baltimore, MD, 1997), chapter 4, especially page 77. Gary McCulloch and William Richardson, in Historical Research in Educational Settings (Buckingham, UK, 2000), 33, notes how many historians ignore theory and have not usually embraced postmodern views.

Geoff Eley, “Is All the World a Text? From Social History to the History of Society Two Decades Later,” in The Historic Turn , 207; G. R. Elton, Return to Essentials: Some Reflections on the Present State of Historical Study (Cambridge, UK, 1991), 31; and White, Metahistory , 13, 283, 332.

Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, MD, 1978), 41. Sol Cohen explores the implications of postmodernism for historians of education in several chapters of Challenging Orthodoxies: Toward a New Cultural History of Education (New York, 1999). Richard T. Vann notes the impact of White on literary scholars, outside the field of history, in “The Reception of Hayden White,” History and Theory 37 (May 1998): 148–49, 156.

In addition to the books previously cited on social history, good introductions to modern historical scholarship include the following: James B. Gardner and George Rollie Adams, eds., Ordinary People and Everyday Life: Perspectives on the New Social History (Nashville, TN, 1983); and Eric Foner, ed., The New American History (Philadelphia, PA, 1990). On the problem of overspecialization in the historical profession, read Thomas Bender, “Whole and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” Journal of American History 73 (June 1986): 120–36, which generated lively debates with other scholars in subsequent issues of this journal.

Keith Jenkins, Re-Thinking History (London, 1991), 5, 13, 32.

Keith Jenkins, On “What is History?” From Carr and Elton to Rortyand White (London, 1995), 7, 20, 178–79.

Southgate, History , 85; Elton, Return to Essentials , 41, passim; Lawrence Stone, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present 131 (May 1991): 217–18; and, for the quotations in the text, Lawrence Stone, “History and Post-Modernism,” Past and Present 135 (May 1992): 190–191, 193. For a lively assessment and attack on the linguistic turn and other new approaches in social history, read Bryan D. Palmer’s Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, PA, 1990); and Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (London, 1997), a brilliant interpretation of the history of historical scholarship and critique of postmodernist excesses. In response to this sort of hostile reception of postmodern scholarship, also read Patrick Joyce, “The Return of History: Postmodernism and the Politics of Academic History,” Past and Present 158 (February 1998): 207–35.

Ernst Breisach, On the Future of History: The Postmodernist Challenge and Its Aftermath (Chicago, 2003), 200–01; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacobs, Telling the Truth , 7, 12, 196, 235, 247–51, 275; and Iggers, Historiography , 12–13, 132–33, 145. On page 13, Iggers notes, “The contradictions of resolving history into purely imaginative literature become apparent in Hayden White’s admission that from a moral perspective it is unacceptable to deny the reality of the Holocaust, yet it is impossible in a historical narrative to establish objectively that it happened.” On the debate over the relationship between relativism, postmodernism, and historical understanding, read Patrick Finney, “Ethics, Historical Relativism, and Holocaust Denial,” Rethinking History 2 (Autumn 1998), 359–69. Richard Aldrich notes in his Inaugural Lecture at the University of London’s Institute of Education, The End of History and the Beginning of Education (London, 1997) that, contrary to the views of Hayden White, most historians continue to discover more evidence than they invent and that the differences between history and literature remain evident. Also see Roy Lowe, “Postmodernity and Historians of Education: A View from Britain,” Paedagogica Historica 15 (1996): 307–23. As Gaddis noted in Landscape , 9–10, 33–34, 136, most practicing historians did not welcome another lecture on the “the relative character on historical judgements,” since scholars generally knew that no human being could claim to capture the past in its entirety or find or intuit the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what went before. Like cartographers drawing maps, he argued, historians write about the past from a certain vantage point, field of vision, and perspective, trying to represent and approximate reality with the best intellectual tools at their disposal.

Dorothy Ross, “The New and Newer Histories: Social Theory and Historiography in an American Key,” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past , ed. Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 99–100. On the quotation from Cicero, see Kelley, Versions of History , 77–78.

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Reese, W.J. (2007). On the Nature and Purpose of History. In: History, Education, and the Schools. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230104822_2

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• The Case for Marrying an Older Man

A woman’s life is all work and little rest. An age gap relationship can help.

In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.

When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.

So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me.  But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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Each evening in her tent, researcher Jane Goodall would write up data from her field notebooks, recounting the chimpanzee behavior she observed that day. Immerse yourself in a replica of Jane’s research camp at “Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall,” an exhibition organized by National Geographic and the Jane Goodall Institute. The exhibition is open at the Natural History Museum of Utah in Salt Lake City, UT from December 7, 2023 through May 27, 2024. Photo by Hugo Van Lawick, Jane Goodall Institute

Inspired by Jane: A Winning Essay

By mark johnston.

In celebration of Dr. Jane Goodall's 90th birthday on April 3, and in conjunction with our current special exhibition, Becoming Jane: The Evolution of Dr. Jane Goodall , NHMU hosted an essay contest to inspire a new generation of visionaries among Utah's 6th, 7th, and 8th graders. Titled Inspired by Jane , the contest invited contestants to share the positive impact they hope to make in the world by the time they turn 90 years old. 

With the contest running only a couple of weeks, 293 submissions were received from students all around Utah offering a colorful variety of visions of change. From space farming to saving the dwindling Great Salt Lake, the essays delivered assurances of hope from hundreds of young voices inspired by icons like Jane Goodall. Selecting a winner was no easy task, but eventually a consensus was reached among judges and on March 18 a winner was notified. 

Lily Peterson, a 7th grader from Mountain Heights Academy, submitted a moving essay that was awarded the top prize for thoughtfully addressing a local ecological issue in a manner influenced by Jane Goodall. In her submission, Lily shared how she was moved by the sight of wild mustangs enduring the challenges of their environment in Utah's West Desert, along with those they faced from inhumane population control methods. From that moment, Lily decided to pursue a career as an equine veterinarian to deliver more humane methods of population control to these majestic animals. 

Photo by Eliza Petersen

As the contest winner, Lily was awarded an all-expenses-paid trip to Seattle, Washington, where she met Jane Goodall in person after attending one of her lectures at the Moore Theater on March 30, 2024. Lily also received a $1,000 college savings certificate from the my529 Educational Savings Plan , a VIP visit to the Becoming Jane exhibition at NHMU (which is open through May 27, 2024), and a gift basket of Jane Goodall keepsakes from the Museum Store.

Following Lily's meet and greet with Jane, she recounted her admiration for her real-life superhero. 

“I admire her because of all she has done as a scientist, conservationist, and activist. As an animal lover I am thankful that she has proven that animals have feelings and emotions too," Lily said. "I loved being able to talk with her one on one about her own childhood experience with horses. It was so special to meet someone who worked so hard to make their own big childhood dreams come true. It is a moment I will never forget, and for which I am very thankful.” 

Read Lily's complete essay below.

Congratulations, Lily!

By Lily Peterson

For my seventh birthday, we took a trip out to see the Onaqui herd of wild mustangs. We searched for hours to find them, but it wasn’t until we were driving back along the desolate road that we spotted a small band of about nine horses out in the distance. Even though we kept our distance, I could feel the gentleness and protection the older horses showed towards their young. All these horses ever wanted was to survive the harsh desert and teach their young how to do the same. Throughout the years, these innocent wild horses have faced many challenges including roundups that often end with dead horses, being shipped off to slaughterhouses, and being shot for no reason. By my 90th birthday, I hope to impact the lives of wild mustangs so they can live on the range without the threat of being taken from their home or shot on any given day. 

In the history of the West, there has been a feud between ranchers and wild horse activists over where the mustangs should live. As the cattle industry grew it demanded more land for grazing, which the American government happily supplied, choosing to support cattle ranching rather than protect the wild mustangs. In the early 1900s, an estimated one million wild mustangs were counted, but during a recent count, there were only 8,300 free mustangs, and an additional 300 mustang skulls were found from those that had died (Moretti). The choice doesn’t have to be ranching or wild mustangs; there are ways for the two to coexist. Mustangs deserve to stay. Humans caused the problem, and humans should fix it. 

Wild horse activists have been working since the mid 1900s when Wild Horse Annie brought attention to the problems facing wild mustangs to the public. She hoped to find ways that cattle ranchers could live in harmony with the mustangs. One of the best solutions that has been suggested for mustang population control is the humane administration of birth control to some of the wild mares. This would allow the birth of wild horses each year but on a smaller scale. We cannot, however, have untrained people administering birth control to untamed horses. 

Equine veterinarians are best equipped to administer birth control, and I plan to become one of them when I grow up. Many horse-crazy girls have a copy of Black Beauty, but next to my copy, I have the Merck Veterinary Manual, which I received for my tenth birthday. I have also completed an online class in equine welfare and management through UC Davis. I want to become a veterinarian because I will be better equipped to advocate for the use of humane birth control if I am a trained veterinarian. When I am a veterinarian, I will also be able to assist in the administration of birth control, if such a time comes where it is allowed. 

Wild mustangs are an important part of our country, and by my 90th birthday, I want to provide wild mustangs with the opportunity to thrive in their homeland, unharmed by the human populations around them. If we were to take steps to protect the wild mustangs, it would show that we as a people care about more than just our own needs. Dr. Jane Goodall inspires me because she demonstrates the importance of understanding other creatures and protecting them and their environment. We are all interconnected, and like Dr. Goodall, we can strive to make the world safe for all living creatures. 

Work Cited 

Moretti, Laura. “History of America's Wild Horses | American Wild Horse Campaign.” American Wild Horse Conservation, https://americanwildhorse.org/history-americas-wild-horses. Accessed 5 March 2024.

Becoming Jane

Visit Becoming Jane at NHMU before it closes after May 27, 2024, to learn more about Jane Goodall's incredible career, from scientific research, to animal conservation, to inspiring a new generation of visionaries through programs like Roots & Shoots. The exhibit is included with museum admission.

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Baltimore's Key Bridge was built in the '70s, but has a deep and patriotic history

Rachel Treisman

Artwork of Francis Scott key Composing "Star- Spangled Banner" after watching the failed British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the Baltimore Harbor in 1814. AP hide caption

Artwork of Francis Scott key Composing "Star- Spangled Banner" after watching the failed British bombardment of Fort McHenry in the Baltimore Harbor in 1814.

Baltimore's Key Bridge, which collapsed after being hit by a cargo ship early Tuesday morning, isn't just a vital transit and shipping route. It also has a special historical significance.

The structure was built between 1972 and 1977, opening to the public on March 23 of that year. But its history goes much deeper than that, according to the Maryland Transportation Authority .

Scholars believe it stood within 100 yards of the site where its namesake, Francis Scott Key, witnessed the failed British bombardment of Fort McHenry in September 1814.

The Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore collapses, 6 feared dead

The bombardment was a key turning point in the War of 1812, forcing the British to abandon the land assault on the crucial port city of Baltimore. The two sides went on to reach a peace agreement later that year.

British warships fired thousands of exploding mortar shells, cannonballs and rockets at the fort for more than 25 hours, but inflicted only minor damage because it was so heavily fortified. The Americans raised their 30-by-42-foot garrison flag the next morning.

Key, an American lawyer, witnessed the battle from the British warship he had boarded to negotiate the release of a detained American civilian.

The awe he felt at seeing the flag rise the next morning inspired him to write "Defense of Fort McHenry," which was renamed "The Star-Spangled Banner" and became the U.S. national anthem in 1931.

It also overlooks an abandoned artificial island

An aerial view of the cargo ship the Dali and pieces of the Key Bridge after its collapse on Tuesday. The hexagonal island of Fort Carroll can be seen on the left. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images hide caption

An aerial view of the cargo ship the Dali and pieces of the Key Bridge after its collapse on Tuesday. The hexagonal island of Fort Carroll can be seen on the left.

Just southeast of the bridge are the ruins of Fort Carroll , a 3.4-acre, hexagonal island created in 1848 under the supervision of then-Brevet-Colonel Robert E. Lee to house a fort aimed at protecting Baltimore from naval attacks (since Fort McHenry was the only other military defensive structure between Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay up until that point).

Construction of the fort itself was never completed, though the Preservation Alliance of Baltimore County says it featured impressive architecture like curved granite stairs and brick archways, and was originally home to 350 cannon ports, a blacksmith shop and a carpentry shop.

Torrential rains flooded the island in 1864 and rendered it vulnerable, and it was used in the decades that followed to store mines, hold seamen and as a pistol range.

Loss of ship's power and stiff current may have led to bridge collision, experts say

The U.S. government abandoned it as a military post in 1920 and declared it excess property in 1923.

A Baltimore attorney purchased the island for $10,000 in 1958, but it was never developed and is now deserted. According to Atlas Obscura , the island is so overgrown that it's become an "accidental bird sanctuary."

The bridge became a commute staple and local landmark

A cargo ship passes below the Francis Scott Key Bridge in 2021. Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

A cargo ship passes below the Francis Scott Key Bridge in 2021.

The bridge is the outermost of three toll crossings of Baltimore's Harbor, and the only one that's not a tunnel. It was constructed to alleviate traffic and provide a route for vehicles carrying hazardous materials, which are not allowed in the tunnels.

The project cost an estimated $110 million and took five years to complete. When the bridge opened in 1977, it became the final link in Interstate 695, known locally as the Baltimore Beltway.

Interestingly, the bridge was hit by a ship in 1980 but left relatively intact, according to a 1983 report by the National Research Council .

More from WYPR in Baltimore:

• Construction worker says friends, colleagues missing in bridge collapse
• Federal government pledges full support to rebuild FSK bridge, reopen port

For the latest from member station WYPR in Baltimore head to wypr.org

A vessel sailing at 12 knots "lost all propulsion and control about 600 yards" from the bridge and drifted into the main pier at a speed of about 6 knots, the council said. A protective concrete structure was destroyed.

Over the decades, the bridge has become a vital transportation route for Maryland residents and many other drivers traversing the East Coast, especially between New York and Washington, D.C. The 1.6-mile bridge saw about 30,000 commuters a day and an overall traffic volume of some 11.3 million vehicles each year.

Mercedes, GM, Stellantis scramble; Port jobs are at risk after Baltimore disaster

It was also a Baltimore landmark in its own right.

"The words 'the Key Bridge is gone,' it's still sinking in," Maryland Gov. Wes Moore said at a briefing on Tuesday. "For 47 years, that's all we've known. It's not just unprecedented; it's heartbreaking."

Officials' focus on Tuesday was on searching for the six construction workers who fell into the water when the bridge collapsed and are now presumed dead. They said discussions about how to rebuild would come later.

President Biden said in remarks that he wants the federal government to fund the reconstruction of the bridge, which would require support from Congress.

"This is going to take some time," he said. "The people of Baltimore can count on us, though, to stick with them at every step of the way until the port is reopened and the bridge is rebuilt."

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