Historiography — Schools of Interpretation and Why Historians Disagree

Historiography is the study of how history has been written: how interpretations of the past change over time and why historians reach different conclusions from similar evidence. For IB History, and especially for Paper 2, Paper 3, and the Internal Assessment, a working grasp of historiography lets you show that historical judgments are debated rather than fixed, which is a hallmark of top-level answers.

Why historians disagree

Historians differ for several honest reasons. They ask different questions; they emphasize different kinds of cause (economic, political, ideological, individual); they work with newly opened archives unavailable to earlier scholars; and they write in different times, shaped by the concerns of their own era. The Cold War, decolonization, feminism, and the digital o