What the Heck is 'Historiography'?

"As if it couldn't get any worse," my Irish professor expressed half-jokingly two years ago, " there's not just history to learn. There's historiography too." 

No, it doesn't have anything to do with geography, or mapping out history per se. At its base level, it means the process of writing history, and how evidence is examined, interpreted, and finally taught. It can be seen as the history of history—how new evidence, fresh interpretations, and paradigm shifts affect the way a period of history is seen. However, historiography is crucial to how history is understood. Even if all the bare facts and figures of a particular topic are agreed upon by all to be true, depending on how they're interpreted could dramatically alter history's meaning; this has very real consequences, both immediate and long-term.

It's no accident that I first learned about the influence of historiography in my 20th Century Ireland history class. Though we absolutely shouldn't, (as many have learned or are learning), in this country it's fairly easy to take history for granted, due to its apparent distance and overall consensus. In another one of my professor's examples, if you were at a bar and there was a drunken fellow on the end raging on about how George Washington's conduct at the Battle of Monmouth was absolute folly, you might get a bit annoyed at him insulting our first president but still wouldn't give him much thought. However, an equivalent comment in Ireland could lead to a vicious bar fight, even with family. This is because Ireland is still in history and living as a direct result of events that occurred decades or even centuries ago, setting in motion a population in near constant insecurity and soul-searching. How any given Irish person sees history could either justify them joining the IRA, the UK, or the European Union, depending on their interpretation.

In Ireland alone, there's at least 9 (!) historiographical views, and none are or have ever been shared by all or are exclusive from one another. There's the granddaddy of all historiography, Whig history, which committed the cardinal sin of history and wrote it backwards from the perception of a known outcome. Written by Englishmen, it stated that "God is an Englishman" (no joke) and were destined to rule the world, spawning ideas like Social Darwinism and “the white man’s burden.” In response to that, around when Ireland gained its independence Irish Nationalism, embodied in “800 years of English oppression” began to be taught in schools, and to this day it remains dominant in and out of Ireland. Both of these views are uncritical and have no perspective.

Suddenly, in the late 60s, the government reversed course and adopted the much more even-handed and objective Revisionism to keep citizens from getting involved in terrorism in the North. In response to that view, Father Brendan Bradshaw pioneered his own Post-Revisionist history, mixing emotion with objectivity, with the goal of keeping the humanity in history. Since then there have been other schools of thought, some emphasizing ties with Europe, others with a “New Britain” view. The points are these: modern history is built upon previously written histories, and depending on how it is written, history can be used as a weapon or rob a people of its national identity or be anything in-between.

Ultimately, I believe that the goal for any historian is to do the best they can in their research and arguments so that the narrative doesn’t change over after their time, and acknowledge that the past needs to be understood in its own terms, not the present’s. So that the three main stages of historiography—early written history, revisionism, and post-revisionism—comes to be minimally altered as time goes by, even with the potential discovery of new evidence or paradigm shifts. It may be the historian’s greatest challenge.