Backstage passes. Insider accounts. "The making of." As much as people enjoy the show, whatever it may be, they seem to have a quenchless desire to peek at the gears and switches, to uncover the messiness behind the polished product. That's what this issue—our twentieth anniversary issue—is about.

The technical term for studying "the making of" history is historiography. This discipline is less interested in historical events than in the people who recorded them—their backgrounds, their biases, the tools they used and the way they used them. Where history examines the hand holding the sword, historiography examines the hand holding the pen.

Historiography matters at the professional level because historians want to know how their craft has evolved. But the subject matters to casual readers of history, too, because we all take accounts of the past on faith. With history, as with rumors and recommendations, it's crucial to consider the source.

Christian History has never broached quite so technical ...

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