There has been a renewal of interest in the writing of national histories of sociology, with dozens of histories recently published in both the global North and South. Despite this, there has been a dearth of discussion about the methods and methodologies appropriate to such a task. Indeed, few histories of sociology, and fewer still national histories of sociology, explicitly address methodology. In this study, we review the literature on histories of sociology from a variety of countries, focusing on how the authors have approached the writing of history, and their implicit use of methods and methodologies. We suggest the use of a content analysis as an additional, though perhaps unusual, method of historiography, and apply this in the case of an Australian history of sociology. Our content analysis reveals both similarities and differences in the Australian approach, indicating the impact of settler-colonialism on Australian sociology and its historiography.

人们对国家社会学史的写作有了新的兴趣，最近在全球的北方和南方都发表了数十种历史。尽管如此，关于适合这种任务的方法和方法的讨论很少。确实，社会学史很少，而国家历史仍然很少社会学的历史，明确地涉及方法论。在这项研究中，我们回顾了来自不同国家的社会学历史文献，重点研究了作者如何进行历史写作，以及他们对方法和方法的隐式使用。我们建议使用内容分析作为一种额外的（虽然可能是不寻常的）史学方法，并将其应用于澳大利亚社会学史上。我们的内容分析揭示了澳大利亚方法的异同，表明了殖民者殖民主义对澳大利亚社会学及其史学的影响。