The most important thing to know about memory is that we have the gift of cutting it into a shape that we like in our mirror. The scissors are imprecise and there are some parts that we can gnaw at for years without cutting, but folding the fabric never hurts. We are memory whores, selling away fragments of our past for the rarest of commodities; self respect. It’s what we need most to live, and since there’s no regulating mental trafficking, this synapse whoredom goes on inside us, our minds all internal cat houses.

Here, strangely enough, historiography gains relevancy. As high school repeatedly told us in moments that would have been reminiscent of “Dead Poets’ Society” if they hadn’t been so stilted, history is more than memorizing dates off of a timeline. There’s no revelation here, the revelation is in why tracking the history of historical study’s evolution is important instead of redundant, why we should care how the switch from timeline to model was made.

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I used to make a joke of this. I would say that eventually professors would take historiography a step further and start studying the history of the history of changes of historical studies, or historiohistoriography, and continue on in an infinite regression that ended in meaninglessness. This argument provided me with a nice dinnertime joke for a time, but ultimately I recognized historiography’s role in my memory’s prostitution. It was the pimp of history, and I could not expect to keep my own string of memories in line if I did not learn its lessons.

Thinking that history is ever seriously studied without ulterior motives is a waste of time. The motives can be positive or destructive, but even the most mature historian will fashion an argument after looking at a row of Grecian plates long enough, if only to justify the time spent looking at them. In its broadest terms the historical community shapes the collective memory of mankind into the world it wants to see and present, and that we’re getting better at it leads us to historiography.

God knows that if we’re able to progress from reciting chronological Biblical events to creating models of colonial bullion flow and distribution, then we need to know how we came to be so good at tailoring humanities past. What approaches and techniques let us to construct it so well for what we want, and, most importantly, how can these attitudes help us to figure out how to craft the mental picture of ourselves that we want to keep?

My pimp is historiography, and it tells me to be a packrat. A packrat who is heavy on documents and light on objects, heavy on childhood sentimentality and light on pictures of my teenage limbo. I keep schedules and calendars from enjoyable semesters and labels from great beer discoveries. Even so, the pile of movie tickets that I have from good dates can’t erase gritty break-ups in my mind’s eye, and my collection of crayon drawings can’t stop me from remembering the rocks I threw at Peyton in kindergarten (even as he cried). My pimp can only slap, not kill, but historiography has helped me turn tricks on my streets well enough to where I may forget Peyton yet.