Livy wondered what if Alexander had attacked Rome, inventing alternate history
Historiography is history about history: not what happened, but how people have chosen to tell it. Its long story includes Herodotus sorting reliable reports from unreliable ones, Thucydides stripping the gods out of war, and Livy asking what would have happened had Alexander the Great marched on Rome.
The word once simply meant writing history, which is why Sweden, England and Scotland appointed official Historiographers Royal from the seventeenth century; the Scottish post still exists. Today it means studying how history has been written: the sources, methods and theories historians use, and how their interpretations of the same events shift over time.
Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia kept chronicles and annals, but their authors were mostly anonymous and their texts rarely told a connected story with analysis. Narrative history meant to inform later generations begins in fifth-century BC Greece. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, remembered as the father of history, tried to weigh his sources. Thucydides, writing about the war between Athens and Sparta, largely dropped divine explanation and separated deep causes from immediate triggers, setting a rational precedent for the West. Hippias of Elis compiled lists of Olympic victors that gave the classical world its basic timeline.
Rome first wrote its history in Greek, until Cato the Elder composed his Origines in Latin, deliberately pushing back against Greek influence. Caesar reported his own campaigns, Sallust charted what he saw as the Republic's moral decay, and Plutarch and Suetonius turned biography into a branch of history. In China, Sima Tan and his son Sima Qian founded the historical tradition with the Shiji under the Han. Roman and Chinese writing shared habits: annual formats, reverence for ancestors and a taste for moral lessons rather than speculative theory.
Historians' interests keep moving. In American universities between 1975 and 1995, the share of history professors identifying with social history rose from 31 to 41 percent while political historians fell from 40 to 30 percent. A 2007 count of British history departments found 29 percent in social history against 25 percent in political history. Since the 1980s memory and commemoration, how the past is recalled and presented, has become a major field of its own.
Source: Historiography
