Definition:
History is the writing of the past.
Historiography is the theory and geneaology of such a writing.
Exposition: Although I appreciate the sentiments of the above node I cannot agree with user
Stone99's assessment of the difference between history and historiography. History is not contrasted to historiography, but subsumed by it. All historians assume a particular
historiographical bias, though few explicate it, and if they do it is generally in their prefaces, and introductions. Historiography began as a
-graphe of
history-, or a
writing and a tracing of history: thus we arrive at a
theory of history, which is probably also a theory of writing and a theory of literature. The differences between
philosophy of history and historiography are minimal.
Historiography is not inherently
postmodern, though it would make sense that postmodernists (who admits to being one anyways?) would pick up on this discipline, given that it is a reflection about the
writing of
history, and postmodernism is a reflective mode of thought (the mode of thought that is post-modo or after-now, Lyotard's well-known
future-
anterior).
It is not that historiography is not a quest for
Truth, but that many postmodern historians do not believe in the notion of a Truth outside of a writing. Thus, their historiogaphical theory is that history is constructed according to a rhetoric of monument (in which we erect monuments to honor the past), but not a rhetoric of memorial (in which we remember the past through the monuments that it has left us).
Jacques Derrida writes in his
Archive Fever of the writing of the past, which is generally written and researched only through the
archive. The past, then, and the history that unveils it (if we may be allowed so tendetious a word) is a particular
technological form of
monument, or
reconstruction. The archive, being a technological form of preservation, preserves only those elements of events and persons which are susceptible to the technologies of this preservation. The point is simple, and obvious. It is not Truth, then, that is uncovered, but a particular technological practice of the reproduction of events, objects, and persons.
(The best historiographer is Jorge Luis Borges. On e2, my only goal is to find the flotsam of a popular conception of history that still pervades Nietzsche's weak, and shipwreck it over and over again. History is above all a story. In saying that I am postmodern if you will, I am after now. I am dead here.)