Historian

Lore & Background

The professional occupation of historian emerged in the late nineteenth century as research universities were developing in Germany. This professionalization process spread to Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Russia, Scandinavia, Greece, Romania, and Latin America, with each adapting the German model with local modifications. In the 19th century, historical studies became professionalized at universities and research centers along with a belief that history was a type of science. In the 20th century, historians incorporated social science dimensions like politics, economy, and culture in their historiography, including postmodernism. Since the 1980s there has been a special interest in the memories and commemoration of past events.

Ancient historians were very different from modern historians in terms of goals, documentation, sources, and methods. For instance, chronological systems were not widely used, their sources were often absorbed (traceability of such sources usually disappeared), and the goal of an ancient work was often to create political or military paradigms. It was only after the emergence of Christianity that philosophies of history grew in prominence due to the destiny of man from the Christian account. Modern historians of the ancient world have to deal with diverse types of evidence, which are debated more today than in the 19th century due to innovations in the field.

Reader's Guide

Historians are significant because they provide methodical narratives of past events, but their work is inherently subject to debate and bias. The article notes that 'strict objectivity is epistemologically unattainable for historians' and that 'specific canons of historical proof are neither widely observed nor generally agreed upon' among professional historians. Historical scholarship is never value free since historians' writings are impacted by the frameworks of their times. Three commonly held reasons why avoiding bias is not seen as possible include: a historian's interest inevitably influences their judgement; sources used by historians all have bias; and historians are products of their culture, concepts, and beliefs. Racial, cultural, and gender biases can play major roles in national histories. One way to deal with this is for historians to state their biases explicitly for their readers. In legal contexts, such as the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, the concept of the 'objective historian' was used as a benchmark to compare scholarship against illegitimate methods. Justice Gray's judgment distilled seven points for what an objective historian means, including treating sources with appropriate reservations, not dismissing counter-evidence, being even-handed, clearly indicating speculation, not mistranslating documents, weighing authenticity of all accounts, and taking motives of historical actors into consideration.

Did You Know?

• Historian became a professional occupation in the late nineteenth century as research universities were emerging in Germany.
• During the Irving v Penguin Books and Lipstadt trial, the High Court of Justice relied on a witness report which mentioned 'objective historian' in the same vein as the reasonable person.

Roots in Antiquity

The impulse to narrate the past seems to be a universal human drive, and the earliest surviving chronologies come from ancient Egypt and the Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations of Mesopotamia, where scribes recorded chronicles and annals. Yet most of these early writers remain anonymous, and their texts lacked the narrative architecture or analytical depth that later scholars would demand. The field as we recognize it took shape in fifth-century BC Classical Greece, where logographers like Hecataeus of Miletus laid groundwork through prose compilations of geography, peoples, and legal speeches. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (484–425 BC) then produced The Histories, a fully narrative critical work that earned him the title "father of history." He traveled widely across the Mediterranean, weighed competing accounts for reliability, and still credited divine forces with shaping events. His successors, including Hippias of Elis with his Olympic victor lists and Hellanicus of Lesbos with over two dozen civic histories, built on this foundation. Meanwhile, Cato the Elder's Origines in the second century BC marked Rome's first historiographic effort, and in Han-dynasty China, Sima Tan and his son Sima Qian established the tradition with the Shiji.

Medieval Traditions and the Enlightenment Turn

During the Middle Ages, the practice of recording history spread well beyond the Mediterranean. European monastic and royal courts produced chronicles, while the Ethiopian Empire in the Horn of Africa, Muslim scholars across the Islamic world, and Korean and Japanese court historians—many of them working within a framework inherited from the Chinese model—each contributed their own strands to the global historiographic tradition. A major transformation arrived with the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment in the Western world. Thinkers such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon reshaped how the past was interpreted and presented, laying intellectual groundwork that would eventually become the modern academic discipline. The nineteenth century then saw history become professionalized within universities and dedicated research centers, accompanied by a widespread conviction that the discipline operated much like a natural science. This institutional maturation generated an enormous body of historiographic literature, and by the twentieth century, scholars had begun weaving in dimensions drawn from the social sciences—politics, economics, and culture—broadening the scope of what historical inquiry could encompass.

The Social Turn and Shifting Priorities

A striking trend in modern historiography is the gradual migration of scholarly attention away from traditional diplomatic, economic, and political narratives toward social and cultural approaches. In American universities, the share of history professors who identified with social history climbed from 31 percent in 1975 to 41 percent by 1995, while those aligned with political history fell from 40 to 30 percent over the same two decades. A 2007 survey of 5,723 faculty members in British university history departments found that 1,644 (29 percent) identified with social history and 1,425 (25 percent) with political history, confirming that the shift was not confined to one national tradition. Since the 1980s, a further line of inquiry has focused on how societies remember and commemorate past events—the public, popular presentation of history rather than the academic one. Underlying all of these shifts is an ongoing debate about the degree to which a historian's own national loyalties, institutional affiliations, and cultural groupings shape the questions they ask and the sources they privilege.

What Historiography Actually Studies

The word "historiography" has shifted meaning over the centuries. In the early modern period it simply meant "the writing of history," and a historiographer was just another word for a historian. That older sense still echoes in official titles: Sweden appointed a Historiographer Royal beginning in 1618, England followed in 1660, and Scotland in 1681, with the Scottish post remaining in existence to this day. The modern academic definition, however, is far more specific. Historiography is an examination of the evolving craft of historical writing—essentially the history of how history has been composed across generations. In practice, this means a scholar does not examine past events directly but instead traces how successive historians have interpreted those events, which sources they selected, what research techniques they applied, and which theoretical frameworks they brought to bear. The field can be organized by topic—World War II, the pre-Columbian Americas, early Islam, China—or by genre, such as political versus social history. In every case, the object of study is the evolving conversation among historians rather than the past itself.

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