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Historiography

Every piece of historical description actually describes for the reader two different sets of history. Each historical text discloses to the reader something of what happened during the era under discussion. But it also reveals at least as much about the era in which the history was written. What is considered significant enough to mention, what events are seen as causative rather than incidental, who are the true villains - all of these things may change from one generation's historical account to that of the next, and not because new facts have come to light.

Rather, people seek to understand the past in some measure to shed light on the present, and as the needs and particularities of the present change so the historian looks at the past differently. This is not a question of political or other form of bias (although certainly different biases also shape the writing of history, as they do everything else). Rather, this is simply a truth about the practice of history. This truth is encompassed in the word "historiography", which is the at least partially self-consciousness task of writing - which is to say creating - history. The historiography - the way that history is written - about a particular event changes as historians change.

One of the most striking evolutions in historiography involves the history of the period of Reconstruction that followed the American Civil War. Reconstruction, as envisioned by Lincoln and many others both inside and outside of the government, was envisioned as a series of policies (mostly involved governance) that would bring the Southern states back within the embrace of the Union in a way that would be least traumatic to everyone involved. In fact, it soon spawned its own violence as white Southerners fought back by all means at their disposal (including the formation of the Ku Klux Klan) to keep their already war-tattered region from being (as they saw it) further decimated by the uncivilized...

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Historiography. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 04:48, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1688036.html