historical writing
Recording bygone events
Historical writing is the recording and interpretation of past events—from academic monographs to popular histories to textbook accounts.
The term encompasses both the craft of researching and narrating history and the body of work produced: She studied the historical writing of the Renaissance.
Distinguished from fiction, historical writing claims factual basis, though it involves selection, emphasis, and argument about what happened and why.
- paper trailDocumentary evidence chain
- archivesStored historical documents
- chronicleOrdered historical record
- paleographyStudy of ancient handwriting
- annalsYear-by-year historical account
dusty archives · periodization · revisionism · manuscripts · microhistory · deep dive · textual analysis · libraries · Herodotus · memoir · turning point · primary sources · secondary sources · antiquarianism · Thucydides · epigraphy · footnotes · biography
- Latin proseCicero, Seneca, Tacitus, Livy, Caesar
- medieval textsmanuscripts, Gutenberg Bible, breviary, codices, missals
historical writingfiction
Imagined narrative work
fictional narrative · fantasy · creative writing · mythmaking · science fiction
historical writingfuturism
Study of tomorrow's possibilities
futurology · forecasting · prognostication · journalism · news reporting
historical writingjournalism
News gathering and dissemination
news reporting · breaking news · op-ed writing · blogging · tweets
history, historic, historical, historically, historian, historians, histories, historiography, prehistoric