One of the main areas of study for people trying to be professional historians is called historiography, which is roughly the "history of history": how historians of earlier times (which can range from very early to "a couple decades ago") thought about the past, researched it, argued about it, etc. It's an important thing to know if you are a professional historian, because it helps you both understand the craft on a deeper level, helps one sees one place in the "big picture" of the community, and also can give on insights as to different ways to look at the past. It also shows one how much of the study of the past is rooted in the historian's present: you are always looking at the past through your own context.

Even undergraduate History majors typically have one course on historiography, though sometimes it is an "honors seminar" or some such. In graduate school it makes up a lot of the curriculum. There is quite a lot of scholarly activity in this area as well, though it is not the kind of thing that tends to interest non-experts (except in rare cases of controversies over very specific things — most people are probably at least vaguely aware that there have been disputes by historians over topics like slavery, the atomic bomb, and so on), so it does not have a lot of popular awareness.