I keep being told to engage with historiography, and my attempts turn into a paragraph listing who argued what before I start on my own answer. It reads like a literature review bolted onto the front.
How much is expected, and where is it supposed to sit?
Accepted Answer
The listing paragraph is the thing to remove. Historiography should appear where it does work, which means inside the argument rather than before it.
Instead of opening with a survey of who said what, bring a historian in at the point where you disagree with them, or where their reading is the obvious alternative to yours. One sentence establishing the position, then your response to it.
That way each mention earns its place, and the essay reads as a contribution to a conversation rather than a summary of one followed by an unrelated answer.
As a rough gauge, an undergraduate essay usually needs two or three historians doing real work, not ten being catalogued.
One common misreading of the advice: engaging with historiography does not mean you must find a historian to disagree with.
Agreeing is allowed, provided you add something. Extending an argument to a case the original did not cover, or showing it holds up against evidence published since, is engagement.
Manufactured disagreement is easy to spot and reads worse than honest agreement, because the essay ends up arguing against a position nobody quite holds.
It also helps to name what the disagreement is about. "X emphasises economic factors while Y emphasises ideology" is a summary. Saying which evidence divides them turns it into something you can take a side on.
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