Gary King, Jr. HIST 3000 Jared Poley

20 January 2014 !

What is historiography? !

I believe that historiography is an art of how a historian shares his perspective of an event

with an audience. It is a deep study of a particular subject but done to such a degree to find the

purest form of the source. Historians strive to find authentic sources and question how they can

make it relevant to the current audience or if there is any authenticity to change what was

previously recorded by other authors.

I was surprised by how different history and historiography actually are. The study of

history is of the actual past and looked at moments or events instead of an actual era. History is

broken up into time and what institutes the measurement of time. Historiography is how we are

able to study history. It is how we are able to prove the accuracy of our past in a writing form. We

are able to distinguish where the author acquired his or her sources from and how he or she

interpreted them into the text.

I thought it was interesting of how the entire history or historiography of the Canadian

Prime Minster was changed after the discovery and study of his journals. It shows that history

may be a finite action but also an ever-changing progression of understanding. If our culture did

not continue to dig into the past, then we would never learn from our mistakes nor learn about

facts that were left out of our history books. I like how researching the past could always bring

something new to life and something new to learn. I like how we can change our present by the

discovery and correction of the past we once knew before.