History

Hello, this is the library research guide for HIST 400 Junior Seminar in Methods and Historiography with Professor Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley. The main section has recommended resources that will be useful for your draft bibliography and final historiographical essay. 

We have information on interlibrary loan options and a guide to citing your sources (remember to use Chicago style).

Need help? Feel free to contact Laurel Bliss, lbliss@sdsu.edu.

As stated in the syllabus for this class, "a good historiographical essay should introduce, analyze, and compare key scholarly works on a particular topic, and show how scholarly views of that topic have changed over the past several decades." 

You'll need a minimum of 4 scholarly books plus 2 additional sources.

Note: Historiography essays typically use secondary sources as a basis for analysis. This is very different from a direct investigation of historical events or people, which uses primary documents.

Sample historiography essays:

• Dixon, C. Scott., and Beat. Kümin. Interpreting Early Modern Europe. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group, 2019.
• Samuel, Lawrence R. Remembering America : How We Have Told Our Past. Lincoln, [Nebraska] ; University of Nebraska Press, 2015.
• Chapman, Erin D. “A Historiography of Black Feminist Activism.” History compass 17, no. 7 (2019).

Historiographical essays are similar to literature reviews, in that they address scholarship on a particular topic, rather than the topic itself. These critical essays are often a helpful introduction to the top historians in a field as well as a way to highlight the major issues, points of contention, and how approaches and interpretations have changed over time.

Some ways to find these types of essays:

• Use historiography as a subject in OneSearch, along with words describing your topic.
• Try this same strategy in history databases such as America: History and Life, Historical Abstracts, and JSTOR.
• Another option is browsing through issues of History Compass, which is a journal that specializes in historiographical essays.
• It may not be immediately obvious that an article is an historiographical essay. You'll want to read the abstract to see if the author mentions other works in the field as a key component of their paper.