Beginnings and schools of historiography

Historiography is the history of historical writing itself: how different ages and schools have understood the past, and why their accounts differ. Ancient chroniclers recorded deeds of kings, Enlightenment thinkers sought laws of progress, Ranke professionalised source criticism, Marxists centred class, and subaltern historians recovered the agency of peasants and workers. A concrete example is the 1857 uprising, described as a mutiny by colonial historians, a war of independence by nationalist writers, and a complex popular revolt by later social historians. This chapter surveys that changing mirror.