Historiography: A Useful Category of Analysis?

Ask an undergraduate, “What is historiography?” and you will most likely get a blank stare. Nothing can seem more esoteric to undergraduates than the idea of historiography. I set out in both the course I taught on European and American historiography at Sarah Lawrence – and the book that grew out of it, Historiography: An Introductory Guide – to challenge this view of historiography. Yet ten years after I published the book, historiography is still seen as something arcane and specialized, perhaps more so than ever. I stopped teaching my historiography course several years ago because of steadily declining enrollments, becoming part of a larger trend in which historiography has increasingly disappeared from the undergraduate curriculum. In both my course and my book, I present historiography as a branch of intellectual history, unlike how it is usually taught – as a methods or a craft of history course, segmented off from “real” history, just as historiography is still often separated out from the rest of history by the profession. It is no wonder that undergraduates see historiography as esoteric when professional historians themselves are ambivalent about its relationship to history. If we want to make undergraduates interested in historiography, do we need to better integrate it into “real” history and eliminate historiography as a distinct category altogether? What would be lost or gained by doing this? This paper does not aim to provide answers to these questions but hopes to provoke discussion of the implications of separating historiography as its own subcategory for the teaching of history and our understanding of history as a discipline.