Historical Research & Historiography

The Information-Literate Historian is the only book specifically designed to teach today's history students how to successfully select and use sources-primary, secondary, and electronic-to carry out and present their research. Expanded and updated, the second edition of The Information-Literate Historian continues to be an indispensable reference for historians, students, and other readers doing history research.

"What is historiography?" asked the American historian Carl Becker in 1938. Professional historians continue to argue over the meaning of the term. This book challenges the view of historiography as an esoteric subject by presenting an accessible and concise overview of the history of historical writing from the Renaissance to the present. Historiography plays an integral role in aiding undergraduate students to better understand the nature and purpose of historical analysis more generally by examining the many conflicting ways that historians have defined and approached history. By demonstrating how these historians have differed in both their interpretations of specific historical events and their definitions of history itself, this book conveys to students the interpretive character of history as a discipline and the way that the historian's context and subjective perspective influence his or her understanding of the past.

In this pioneering work, Ernst Breisach presents an effective, well-organized, and concise account of the development of historiography in Western culture. Neither a handbook nor an encyclopedia, this updated second edition narrates and interprets the development of historiography from its origins in Greek poetry to the present, with sections on such current topics as postmodernism, deconstructionism, black history, women's history, microhistory, Historikerstreit, the linguistic turn, and more.