Readings in Historiography for Students of Tibet

Compiled by Kurtis R. Schaeffer, University of Virginia. 2004-04-16

This reading list represents a fraction of contemporary writing on historiography, though the bibliographies of works listed here should provide a sufficient portal to other works, other perspectives, and other debates.

This list begins with several works on Tibet, and then moves on to several sources for the study of area-specific historiography. The majority of the list is devoted to recent influential works on the method and theory of historical writing and research, with an emphasis on cultural history.

Readers interested in a quick introduction to methods of historical study from a modern Euro-American perspective might first look at Howell and Walter Prevenier’s From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Lynn Hunt’s The New Cultural History, especially the Introduction and Chapters One through Four, provides a nice overview of issues and debates in contemporary cultural history.

Tibetan historiography

• van der Kuijp, Leonard W. J. (1996). "Tibetan Historiography." In Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre. José Ignacio Cabezón and Roger R. Jackson, eds. Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca, 39-65. Brief overview of the early development of Tibetan historical writing.
• Martin, Dan (1997). Tibetan Histories: A Bibliography of Tibetan-Language Historical Works. Serindia Publications. An essential guide to literature available up to 1996. See the introduction for more sources on Tibetan historiography.
• Sorensen, Per K. (1994) Tibetan Buddhist Historiography: The Mirror Illuminating the Royal Genealogies, An Annotated Translation of the XIVth Century Tibetan Chronicle: rGyal-rabs gsal-ba’i me-long. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden. One of the most detailed treatments of a Tibetan historical work.
• Vostrikov, A. (1994). Tibetan Historical Literature. Curzon, Surrey. A dated classic, the first study of Tibetan historical literature, first published posthumously in 1962 in Russian.

Chinese Historiography

• Wilkinson, Endymion (2000). Chinese History: A Manual. Harvard-Yenching Institute, Cambridge. Not on historiography per se, but rather a topically organized manual of resources.

Japanese Historiography

• Hall, John Whitney and Jeffrey P. Mass, Eds. Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History. Yale University Press, New Haven. 1974. (Reprint, Stanford University Press, 1988).
• Hall, John Whitney. "Terms and Concepts in Japanese Medieval History: An Inquiry into the Problems of Translation." Journal of Japanese Studies 9.1 (1983): 1-32.
• Mass, Jeffrey P. Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History. Stanford University Press, Stanford. 1992.

Islamic Historiography

• Robinson, Chase (2003). Islamic Historiography. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. A brief survey of Islamic historical writing from the eighth to the sixteenth centuries. There is a rich secondary literature on Islamic historiography from which Tibetanists will benefit.

General Introductions to Historical Research and Writing

• Arnold, John H. (2000). History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York. A brief introduction to issues in historical research and writing, with a short history of historiography interspersed. A modernist perspective.
• Bloch, Marc (1953). The Historian’s Craft. Classic if dated statement on historiographic method from one of the founder’s of the Annales school of French historical writing.
• Fulbrook, Mary (2002). Historical Theory: Ways of Imagining the Past. Routledge, London and New York. Rethinking historical study after postmodernism, emphasizing that all historical study entails theoretical commitments.
• Howell, Martha and Walter Prevenier (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. A brief but detailed guide to traditional historical methods. Five chapters: 1. The Source: The Basis of our Knowledge about the Past; 2. Technical Analysis of Sources; 3. Historical Interpretation: The Traditional Basics; 4. New Interpretive Approaches; 5. The Nature of Historical Knowledge.
• Jordanova, Ludmilla (2000). History in Practice. Arnold, London. An overview of historical concerns, methods, professional settings.
• Vansina, Jan (1985). Oral Tradition as History. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison. Influential work on the theory and practice of oral history.

Surveys of Historiography

• Bentley, Michael (1999). Modern Historiography: An Introduction. Routledge, London and New York. Focus eighteenth-twentieth century, final chapter on contemporary developments.
• Bentley, Michael, Ed. (2002). Companion to Historiography (Routledge World Reference). Routledge, London and New York. A massive collection of thirty-nine essays on many aspects of historiography. Has essays three essays on Asian historiographic traditions.
• Breisach, Ernst (1994). Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern. Chicago University Press, Chicago. A sweeping history of ideas from ancient Greece through medieval and renaissance Europe, ending in the mid-twentieth century.
• Burke, Peter, Ed. (2001). New Perspectives on Historical Writing. The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park. 2nd Edition. Essays on recent forms of historical inquiry, including chapters on: history from below, women’s history, overseas history, microhistory, history of reading, history of images, history of political thought, history of the body, environmental history, history of events and the revival of narrative.
• Iggers, Georg G. (1997). Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover. Divided into three sections, dealing in turn with "the establishment of history as a scholarly discipline, the challenge of the social sciences to the traditional scholarship, and finally the critique of social science approaches by postmodernist thought" (19).
• Munslow, Alan, Ed. (2000). The Routledge Companion to Historical Studies. Routledge, London and New York. A short encyclopedia of key terms and theorists in contemporary historiography.

Cultural History, Social History, and the Social Sciences

• Hunt, Lynn, Ed. (1989). The New Cultural History. Influential recent collection of essays on cultural history.
• Bonnell, Victoria E. and Lynn Hunt, Eds. (1999). Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. A sort of sequel to Hunt (1991) above, with an emphasis on "culture" as a category in both historiography and social science.
• Burke, Peter (1997). Varieties of Cultural History. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Readable essays on cultural history, five methodological reflections, and seven case studies.
• Darnton, Robert (1990). The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. Collected essays by an influential cultural and social historian of France. Final chapters dedicated to historiography of cultural and social history.
• Grafton, Anthony (2001). Bring out Your Dead: The Past as Revelation. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. The latest in a series of books and collected essays by one of the most prominent historians of the renaissance. Not really on historiography as such, but excellent examples of historical writing, always with a methodological point to make.

French Historiography

• Burke, Peter. The French Historical Revolution: The Annales School 1929-89. A narrative history of an extremely influential school of French historiography.
• de Certeau, Michel (1988). The Writing of History. Columbia University Press, New York. Influential French theorist’s opus on history, writing, and literature.
• Le Goff, Jacques (1992). History and Memory. Columbia University Press, New York. An influential member of the Annales school muses on history and memory, with an emphasis on medieval European thought and historiography.
• Revel, Jacques and Lynn Hunt. Histories: French Constructions of the Past. An anthology of influential postwar French historiography.

History/Cultural Studies/Subaltern Studies

• Chakrabarty, Dipesh (2000). Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press. Asks: "Can European though be dislodged from the center of the practice of history in a non-European place? What problems arise when we translated cultural practices into the categories of social sciences?”

Gender and Historiography

• Scott, Joan Wallach (1999). Gender and the Politics of History. Columbia University Press, New York. This revised edition of an influential work includes a new introduction on the deployment of the term "gender" since the original publication of the book in 1989.

Contemporary Appraisals and Critiques of Historiography

• Appleby, Joyce, Hunt, Lynn and Margaret Jacob (1994). Telling the Truth About History. Norton, New York. History of American historiography, arguing for the continued relevance for the study of history in a democratic society.
• Berkhofer, Rober F., Jr. (1995). Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse. Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Critique and reconstruction of historical writing after Hayden White.
• Carrard, Phillipe (1992). Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. A literary critique of Annales and contemporary French historiography.
• Hobsbawm. Eric. On History. Influential European historian’s essays on writing history, informed by Marxist historiography. Maintains a realist/modernist perspective, in contrast to Hayden White.
• Jenkins, Keith (2003, 2nd edition). Re-Thinking History. Routledge, London and New York. 2nd Ed. (1991). A brief introduction to postmodernist perspectives on the study of history.
• Novick, Peter (1988). That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. A history of nineteenth-twentieth century American historical practice focusing on the defense of historiographic objectivity.
• White, Hayden V. (1975). Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Influential literary critique of historical writing.
• White, Hayden V. (1987). The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Critical perspectives on narrative in historical writing.
• White, Hayden V. (1978). Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Johns Hopkins University Press. Now classic essays on literary figures and tropes in historical writing.