historiography
Americannoun
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the body of literature dealing with historical matters; histories collectively.
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the body of techniques, theories, and principles of historical research and presentation; methods of historical scholarship.
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the narrative presentation of history based on a critical examination, evaluation, and selection of material from primary and secondary sources and subject to scholarly criteria.
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an official history.
medieval historiographies.
noun
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the writing of history
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the study of the development of historical method, historical research, and writing
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any body of historical literature
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of historiography
1560–70; < Middle French historiographie < Greek historiographía. See history, -o-, -graphy
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Her favorite spring semester class was historiography, a study of how historians research and interpret the past.
From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 31, 2025
“He has engaged with the historiography in a way that is clearly the equivalent of a professional historian,” Brooks said.
From Seattle Times ● Feb. 16, 2024
Good research requires both types of sources and some attention to historiography, which is the study of how other historians have already interpreted and written about the past.
From Textbooks ● Apr. 19, 2023
The Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko is quoted expanding on the idea, arguing that “a leitmotif of Ukrainian literature, historiography, and philosophy is opposition to the centralized idea of state and universe.”
From Washington Post ● Nov. 29, 2022
Chapters 2, 15, 16 and 17 deal with historiography, methodology and philosophy.
From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton
It began, like all historiographies, with the work of non-historians, the sermons, poems, speeches and memoirs by Black writers of the revolutionary period and beyond.
From New York Times ● Nov. 9, 2021
Undergrads have a tough enough time with the basics of Nabokov; whether the multiple historiographies of some butterfly archive in Iceland has bearing upon the materiality of Otherness will go over their heads.
From Slate ● Nov. 19, 2014
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
