October 2026
Sometimes a historian researches a topic that has already been addressed by several previous historians, perhaps dating back decades or centuries. In such cases, the historian’s duty is to write a historiographic statement that explains how each of those previous accounts understood events and what questions remain to be answered (or answered better) by the new account.
At other times, the historian is the first to take on a specific topic, so there is neither a need nor a possibility to explain previous historical scholarship on that topic. In such cases, the historian can instead explain how other historians have written about similar cases drawn from other places and times.
Such historiographies do three jobs. First, they give due credit to the scholars whose methodological insights have informed the present work. Second, they help the reader appreciate the methods being used, helping them to understand how the historian arrived at their claims. Finally, they help establish the significance of the current story, by showing its applicability to other times and place, and hence its contribution to a larger understanding of how the world works.
Here are three examples, with footnotes removed. I encourage you to consult the originals and to read the full footnotes.
1. Birgit Tremml-Werner adapts other stories of diplomatic, indigenous, and colonial history to tell a new story about the Pampanga nation
Birgit Tremml-Werner, “Rethinking Colonialism through Early Modern Global Diplomacy: A Tale of Pampangan Mobility,” Journal of Global History 19, no. 1 (2024): 18–36, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022823000219.
Historiographical trends and methodological parochialism have kept seventeenth-century Pampangans, notably members of the local elite such as Diego de Marocot and Juan Macapagal, who both crossed the Pacific and the Atlantic in both directions, from the world-historical stage. Pursuing very different questions and agendas, researchers in diplomatic, indigenous, and colonial history start from conflicting projections. Colonial history, to begin with, has often accentuated binary narratives of conquerors and colonized with the latter perceived as having limited agency. Their engagement with the metropolis and its (overseas) governing institutions and jurisdiction was rendered into a sort of vassal relationship with an overlord who pulled the strings. As a result, the Pampangan nation is not remembered as a sovereign governing body but as the one ethnolinguistic group that became a close indigenous ally of the Spaniards in Luzon. It will be useful to integrate the indigenous past of the Philippines with the wider story of maritime Southeast Asia where local forms of negotiating and different logics of diplomacy have dominated inter-polity relations, as started by the groundbreaking work of Leonard and Barbara Andaya. Leonard Andaya explored how oral expressions of traditional ideas of overlordship and non-interference determined written treaties in South Sulawesi; his work emphasized the different motivations of war and peace-making which ultimately caused misunderstanding between indigenous rulers and colonial Dutch leaders. Barbara Watson Andaya has stressed how real and imaginary kinship ties dominated politics in the Sumatran pepper trading kingdoms of Palembang and Jambi. Looking at the maritime frontiers in the southern parts of the Philippines and eastern Indonesia, Ariel Lopez has recently highlighted the role of religiously motivated negotiation strategies. The current article builds upon these strands of historiography that highlight indigenous concepts of negotiating and bargaining by showing how indigenous elites in the Philippines utilized imported forms of power bargaining to reshape their own political and economic status; this study thus demonstrates how the worlds of the colonized and the colonizers became intertwined in a more complex way than generally believed.
Indigenous history, on the other hand, has focused on restoring pre-colonial life stories of ‘history’s outsiders’, or on unearthing the lost pasts of on-the-ground processes and resistance. Given the epistemological challenges and the methodological burden on top of the abundance of topics to be rediscovered, it is understandable that indigenous historians are not primarily interested in highlighting indigenous actions in macro-historical processes, not to mention the involvement of indigenous elites with an oppressive regime. Scholarship on the history of indigenous people in the Philippines is no exception in this regard. Sebestian Kroupa has made a welcome intervention for the period between the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. He identified the tattooed body of the Visayans as part of the polyvocal archive of the Philippines. Analyzing the performative dimensions and different dimensions of literacy in interpreting body markings, he concludes that such ‘embodied histories’ should be read as signs of incomplete colonial control.
Diplomatic history, as the third relevant field of research, has paid limited attention to colonial settings. The all-dominant paradigm that sovereign polities were the pillars of an emerging international system excluded what had been categorically defined as dependent territories. Such a rigid conceptual framework eliminated alternative actors including quasi-state actors such as members of the colonial regime and non-state actors such as colonized parties from foreign relations narratives. As a result, the dynamics of the frontier, the negotiation practices of colonial officials, and in particular the political bargaining strategies of indigenous communities are rarely considered. It was only with the emergence of new imperial history and studies on plural legal regimes that scholars began to explore power relations within and outside colonial spaces. Similar points could be made for the integration of non-sovereign, non-European polities within new diplomatic history. Even the dynamic field of early modern diplomacy is slow to integrate non-European patterns of power negotiations in its broader research frame. The common hierarchical distinction between formal and informal diplomacy, in which the latter is practised by marginal individuals or non-sovereign groups with no official status points at limitations in an overdue reconceptualization of the field. If a global diplomatic history wants to seriously challenge the metanarrative of diplomacy based on the idea of singular European practices, it has to become more inclusive than generally is the case. Global diplomatic history must take full account of contributions from around the world by paying undivided attention to both non-European practices and to indigenous people’s engagement and selective adoption of imported practices.
2. Bathsheba Demuth writes about walruses, but adapts US-USSR comparisons from historians of agriculture, mining, and nuclear energy
Bathsheba Demuth, “The Walrus and the Bureaucrat: Energy, Ecology, and Making the State in the Russian and American Arctic, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 124, no. 2 (2019): 486-487. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26728172
The Soviet Union provides a particularly rich point of comparison with the United States, in part because it so clearly defined its difference from American—and global—capitalism by how it organized energy consumption, that fundamental mediating relationship between humans and non-humans, while requiring energy-intensive growth to further its ideological commitment to the freedom of radical equality. The promise of comparing U.S. and Soviet environmental management is evident in the few works that do so either implicitly or directly. Jenny Leigh Smith shows that Soviet industrial agriculture was no more preposterous and no more widely condemned than similar attempts in the United States. Like Smith’s, Andy Bruno’s comparison of the USSR with the United States is mostly implied, but the environmental damage he chronicles among reindeer herds and nickel mines on the Kola Peninsula came from a shared desire “to extract greater economic value from the natural world by manufacturing evermore products,” showing how capitalism “has neither been the exclusive cause of, nor a good solution to, modern environmental problems.” Kate Brown, the most precise ethnographer of American and Soviet environmental management, documents cities eerily parallel in the two countries’ treatment of nuclear waste, and towns drawn on mirrored grids where “both expanding American corporate power and expanding Soviet party-state power etched an anti-revolutionary conservatism” onto the steppes and plains.
For historians of the twentieth century, a major contribution of these authors is their ability to show capitalism as no more inevitable, stable, or inherently rational than Soviet economic and social life: their comparisons denaturalize the market and assumptions—particularly for Brown—of American exceptionalism. These authors also add to environmental historians’ longstanding attempt to detail nature “speaking back,” in Richard White’s phrase, particularly by documenting state failures, from seeping nuclear waste to altered reindeer migrations to other “non-human actors [that] helped direct change.” Yet what agency nature has is often the result of human provocation, a response to farming, mining, damming, splitting the non-human world to the atom. The same is regularly true of energy histories that detail the consequences of regions “sacrificed to meet the world’s desires for kerosene and lubricants.” Nature speaks back, but it does so in a conversation usually started by people, retaining for the human a narrative place of independence and an ability to transcend nature.
2. Connie Chiang uses scholarship about smells and dogs in earlier centuries to explain events of the 1940s
Connie Y. Chiang, “Japanese American Dog Bait: Racialized Odors, Canine Violence, and the Environment on Cat Island, Mississippi,” Modern American History, May 22, 2026, 3-4, https://doi.org/10.1017/mah.2026.10093.
Predicated on the theory that Japanese people emitted a distinct scent, the Cat Island project built upon a long history of olfactory racism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Anglo slaveholders posited that African people were innately pungent, which reinforced “biological definitions of inherent racial differences” and justified white dominance. With the growth of a racially mixed population in the nineteenth century, the supposed existence of a black odor became even more salient because “sight alone could not always reliably authenticate race.” As historian Mark M. Smith has argued, “seeing remains—and always has been—extraordinarily important for locating racial identity,” yet it was also “mediated and articulated” by the other senses. Smell was of particular importance.
The links between racial inferiority and smell extended to Asian immigrants. In late nineteenth-century San Francisco, city officials and observers believed that “foul and disgusting vapors” emanated from Chinatown, stigmatizing its inhabitants as diseased and degraded. Although scientists were adopting germ theory at this time, miasma theory—the idea that disease originated from putrefying organic matter—remained influential and marked this neighborhood and its residents as public health threats. On the outskirts of early twentieth-century Monterey, California, Chinese squid fishermen similarly irked businessmen, city officials, and visitors, who complained that their village was “unspeakably dirty and redolent with the odor of decaying fish” and threatened property values and the tourist economy. In all of these cases, “olfactory racialization” justified Chinese marginalization and displacement.
The perceived presence of racial odors also supported the use of dogs to hunt humans. By the early sixteenth century, European colonizers ordered dogs to attack Indigenous fugitives. Anglo slaveholders later used them to capture self-emancipating individuals. Dog breeding emerged, and the Cuban bloodhound, known for its strength, ferocity, and keen olfaction, became the most coveted slave-hunting dog between the Haitian Revolution and the Civil War. To develop canine “anti-black conditioning,” trainers secured a black person to a tree, then set the hounds on their track. They also allowed dogs to lick and sniff enslaved people’s blood so that they could recognize “the common black odor that was believed to be separate and distinct from individual slaves’ scents.” At the turn of the twentieth century, police forces continued to use some of these training methods, unleashing dogs on black outlaws or indebted sharecroppers.
This earlier animal history resonates with wartime Cat Island, where dogs once again became a tool to assert white power over a non-white adversary.
A note on AI usage
Most journal articles present only brief historiographies in the main text, supplemented by long footnotes that list previous accounts rather than explaining in depth their relation to the present work. For this page, I wanted to find journal articles with multiple historiographical paragraphs, but there is no way to find such articles using only traditional bibliographic databases. To find the above examples, I used Claude.ai (Fable 5.1) to search, starting with the following prompt:
Most articles published in scholarly history journals cram their historiography (literature review) into a single paragraph, or even into footnotes. Occasionally, however, a historian will devote five or six paragraphs to previous scholarship, explaining how that scholarship informed the historian’s own research. Can you provide a dozen examples of such articles, published in the last ten years?
Once I had my initial list (which included the Chiang article) I asked for more like it and gave Claude access to the George Mason University library databases. That produced the Demuth article. I then wanted an article not concerning the United States, the twentieth century, or environmental history. Those constraints produced another list that included the Tremml-Werner.
I wrote the introductory paragraphs and this note on AI without AI assistance.
