Looking for the best Historiography books? Browse our list to find excellent book recommendations on the subject.
1. Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, Third Edition (2007)
In this pioneering work, Ernst Breisach presents an effective, well-organized, and concise account of the development of historiography in Western culture. Neither a handbook nor an encyclopedia, this up-to-date third edition narrates and interprets the development of historiography from its origins in Greek poetry to the present, with compelling sections on postmodernism, deconstructionism, African-American history, women’s history, microhistory, the Historikerstreit, cultural history, and more. The definitive look at the writing of history by a historian,…
2. Historiography: An Introductory Guide (2012)
“What is historiography?” asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how…
3. Modern Historiography Reader (Routledge Readers in History) (2008)
In The Modern Historiography Reader, Adam Budd guides readers through European and North American developments in history-writing since the eighteenth century. Starting with Enlightenment history and moving through subjects such as moral history, national history, the emergence of history as a profession, and the impact of scientific principles on history, he then looks at some of the most important developments in twentieth-century historiography such as social history, traumatic memory, postcolonialism, gender history, postmodernism, and the history of material objects. This is the only book that brings…
4. The Essential Historiography Reader (2010)
The Essential Historiography Reader, not only details the history of historical practice and explains historical theories and philosophies in language that is accessible to college undergraduates, it also provides excerpts to illustrate these historical approaches and help students to identify them in their own writing and in the writings of contemporary historians The book is organized into two main parts. The first part traces the origins of contemporary American historical traditions to their roots in ancient Greece and explains how the profession of…
5. A Concise History of History: Global Historiography from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge Concise Histories) (2019)
This short history of history is an ideal introduction for those studying or teaching the subject as part of courses on the historian’s craft, historical theory and method, and historiography. Spanning the earliest known forms of historical writing in the ancient Near East right through to the present and covering developments in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, it also touches on the latest topics and debates in the field, such as ‘Big History’, ‘Deep History’ and the impact of the electronic age. It features timelines listing major dynasties or regimes throughout the world alongside historiographical…
6. From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography (2015)
From Herodotus to H-Net: The Story of Historiography offers a concise yet comprehensive and up-to-date account of the many ways in which history has been studied and recounted, from the ancient world to the new universe of the Internet. It shows how the same issues that historians debate today were already recognized in past centuries, and how the efforts of historians in the past remain relevant today. Balanced and fair-minded, the book covers the development of modern academic scholarship, but also helps students appreciate the contributions of popular historians and public history….
7. Modern Historiography (1999)
Modern Historiography is the essential introduction to the history of historical writing. It explains the broad philosophical background to the different historians and historical schools of the modern era, from James Boswell and Thomas Carlyle through to Lucien Febure and Eric Hobsbawm and surveys: Modern Historiography provides a clear and concise account of this modern period of historical writing….
8. Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge (2005)
In this book, now published in 10 languages, a preeminent intellectual historian examines the profound changes in ideas about the nature of history and historiography. Georg G. Iggers traces the basic assumptions upon which historical research and writing have been based, and describes how the newly emerging social sciences transformed historiography following World War II. The discipline’s greatest challenge may have come in the last two decades, when postmodern ideas forced a reevaluation of the relationship of historians to their subject and questioned the very…
9. Christian Historiography: Five Rival Versions (2015)
Christian faith complicates the task of historical writing. It does so because Christianity is at once deeply historical and profoundly transhistorical. Christian historians taking up the challenge of writing about the past have thus struggled to craft a single, identifiable Christian historiography. Overlapping, and even contradictory, Christian models for thinking and writing about the past abound―from accountings empathetic toward past religious expressions, to history imbued with Christian moral concern, to narratives tracing God’s movement through the ages….
10. The Methods and Skills of History: A Practical Guide (2015)
Widely acclaimed for its accessibility and engaging approach to the subject, the fourth edition of The Methods and Skills of History combines theory and instruction with hands-on practice, making it a comprehensive guide to historical research and writing….
11. A Century of American Historiography (2009)
Century of American Historiography features a collection of 15 historiographical essays, by respected scholars, which provide an up-to-date overview of major topics in American History….
12. The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (Sather Classical Lectures) (1992)
Here, at last, are the long-awaited Sather Classical Lectures of the great historian Arnaldo Momigliano, In a masterly survey of the origins of ancient historiography, Momigliano captures those features of an ancient historian's work that not only gave it importance in its own day but also encouraged imitation and exploitation in later centuries. He reveals the extent to which Greek, Persian, and Jewish historians influenced the Western historiographic tradition, and then goes on to examine the first Roman historians and the emergence of national history. In the course of his exposition, he traces the development of…
13. A Global History of Modern Historiography (2016)
The first book on historiography to adopt a global and comparative perspective on the topic, A Global History of Modern Historiography looks not just at developments in the West but also at the other great historiographical traditions in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world over the course of the past two and a half centuries. This second edition contains fully updated sections on Latin American and African historiography, discussion of the development of global history, environmental history, and feminist and gender history in recent years, and new…
14. The Historiography of Genocide (2010)
The Historiography of Genocide is an indispensable guide to the development of the emerging discipline of genocide studies and the only available assessment of the historical literature pertaining to genocides….
Best Historiography Books Reviewed & Ranked
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Early Sunni historiography: a study of the Tarikh of Khalifa b. Khayyat
Author(s): Tobias Sahl Andersson
Publisher: Brill, Year: 2019, Size: 1 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2323353
History as Wonder: Beginning with Historiography
Author(s): Marnie Hughes-Warrington
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2019, Size: 2 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2374870
The Historiography of Late Republican Civil War
Author(s): Carsten Lange; Frederik Juliaan Vervaet
Publisher: Brill, Year: 2019, Size: 3 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2402444
Explanation in Action Theory and Historiography : Causal and Teleological Approaches
Author(s): Schumann, Gunnar
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2019, Size: 3 Mb, Download: epub
ID: 2450617
Explanation In Action Theory And Historiography: Causal And Teleological Approaches
Author(s): Gunnar Schumann
Publisher: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, Year: 2019, Size: 1 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2450619
An Historical Sketch of Chinese Historiography
Author(s): Huaiqi Wu
Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, Year: 2018, Size: 7 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2180730
Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography
Author(s): Angeliki Pollali, Berthold Hub
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2018, Size: 33 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2238283
Shaping the canons of ancient Greek historiography : imitation, classicism, and literary criticism
Author(s): Matijašić, Ivan
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Year: 2018, Size: 2 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2248664
The Art of History: A study of four great historians of the eighteenth century.
Author(s): John B. Black
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2018, Size: 6 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2305077
The Grand Design of God: The Literary form of the Christian View of History
Author(s): C. A. Patrides
Publisher: Routledge, Year: 2018, Size: 23 Mb, Download: pdf
ID: 2305085
Please note that this booklist is not definite. Some books are really hot items according to The New York Times, others are drafted by unknown authors. On top of that, you can always find additional tutorials and courses on Coursera, Udemy or edX, for example. Are there any other relevant links you could recommend? Leave a comment if you have any feedback on the list.