One of my nerdier interests (even within the general header of history) is historiography, eg. the study of how history is written and interpreted. Some will find this a hopelessly dense and dry topic, but I’m fascinated by how the way we discuss, frame and interpret historical people and events evolves, and how it reflects broader cultural trends and beliefs. Today’s hero might be tomorrow’s villain, and as we learn more things about someone the image we thought we knew becomes more clouded or complicated.

I became fascinated by this topic through studying of T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence, of course, became a media celebrity after the First World War due to the promotion of journalist Lowell Thomas, who turned him into a matinee idol hero (rather than the neurotic, self-loathing archaeologist-soldier he was). This remained the dominant image for decades, until Richard Aldington’s scabrous “biographical enquiry” of the 1950s reframed him as a self-promoting, pathologically dishonest egomaniac (also gay and illegitimate). Over the subsequent decades, biography after biography came out about Lawrence, almost no two of them coming to the same conclusions about the man, his motives, his achievements and his tangled personal life. He became less of a historical figure than a Rohrsach test who reflected the preoccupations of the biographers, and the sociocultural values of their times.

You see this trend with other historical figures, and events more broadly, like recent arguments in the US about whether the American Revolution was as idealistic as it’s generally believed to be, Britain’s ongoing debate over the First World War or how Europe and Japan wrestle with their legacy of colonialism. Or how Richard Nixon (yes, had to sneak him in there) went from a pariah to being rehabilitated to an elder statesman in the early ’90s…and then back again once more source material became available. History is never a settled matter, nor does it exist in a vacuum. And historiography is a fascinating way to explore  that.