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Intellectually I am primarily a student of American history. My primary framework for understanding politics and current events is to first put everything into historical perspective as I can best understand it. In my world understanding history at the highest level is to deal with it thru historiography. Though I am not an academic, I approach the study of history like an academician. Historiography interests me more than "history." History, as a serious study then, is historiography. The passage below best explains it.

"To know history, Edward Hallett Carr says, you must know the historian.

He says this because history is not only events that happened but also our understanding of those events. More, history is the interaction among events, historians, and the readers. Only by knowing more about the historian and the he or she has lived through and studied can we really know the history as recorded by that historian. The uniqueness of those interactions will define the choices made about what to include, what to exclude, what to emphasize, and what to deemphasize. History, as a serious study then, is historiography."

-John Herbert Roper, Sr. C. Vann Woodward, "A Southern Historian and His Critics," P. XI