Historiography

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 governme

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trongly suggest the fallacy of many previous assumptions. No longer should any historian blithely accept the traditional concept of a universal preoccupation with the sectional issue.6 Both Nichols's examination7 of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Wolff's (in Swierenga) discussion of this same issue are perfect examples of Silbey-inspired scholarship in that they take great pains to consider nuances of both ethnicity and religion in their analyses. Foner elaborated on Silbey's arguments, also urging historians to avoid overly simplistic and therefore in essential ways false and misleading depictions of American history. As a way of avoiding overly simplistic and therefore in essential ways false and misleading depictions of American history. Foner urged his colleagues to borrow from the quasi-scientific arsenal of the psychologist and other social scientists.8 Foner was, it should be noted, in some ways at least properly cautious about the problems of applying such methods to the slippery, qualitative facts if history, warning his colleagues both not to mistake correlation for causation (and so to avoid that great bete-noir of both sociology and psychology). Foner also called on historians not to magnify beyond its true importance
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Approximate Word count = 2423
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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