12 - Modern History - Leon Trotsky: Personality Study: Historiography

The concept of history plays a fundamental role in human thought. It invokes notions of human agency, change, the role of material circumstances in human affairs, and the putative meaning of historical events. It raises the possibility of “learning from history.”

One of the most common problems in helping students to become thoughtful readers of historical narrative is the compulsion students feel to find the one right answer, the one essential fact, the one authoritative interpretation. "Am I on the right track?" "Is this what you want?" they ask. Or, worse yet, they rush to closure, reporting back as self-evident truths the facts or conclusions presented in the document or text.

"Historical theory" is a concept that is used in different ways. Often researchers will have a "theory" about historical events and connections – an orderly preconceived impression of the phenomenon to be studied. Used in this way, "theory" means the same thing as "hypothesis".

Historiographers survey historians' choice of topics, study the explanations employed by historians, look for underlying views and generalised opinions, investigate the influences of other historians and the extent to which the writing of history has been influenced by historians' political or religious views and social situations and contemporaneous trends. Accordingly, at its deepest level historiography addresses the ways in which knowledge comes into existence. As such it is both an area of textual studies and an aspect of the sociology of knowledge.