Hi! I'm a third year student at a Russell group uni, and the best advice I can give is that they will teach you this as part of the course. In my second year I completed two modules on Historiography, studying partial texts and discussing them in seminars. The value of seminars is that you can ask your professor to elaborate or simplify topics that confuse you, or even just email them ahead of class with more pressing questions.

If you're really desperate to get ahead of the game I would recommend A Companion to Western Historical Thought (edited by Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza). It covers a lot of the schools of historiography in comprehensive and understandable fashion, broken into sections, highlighting the central figures of each movement and suggesting texts for further reading. It can be found in PDF form here [Wiley e-book] (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9780470998748). If you cannot get access, you should be able to log on through your new university, or your previous college/sixth form.

Good luck, and don't stress yourself out. I'd never read a single piece on historiography or political thought and I am in no way struggling. Some people from more prestigious schools may have more background knowledge than others, but anything you need to know, you will be taught!

As others said, you're perhaps trying to do too much in advance (you're supposed to learn this stuff during undergrad, usually).

If you’re just curious about how history and historiography has changed in the past 200-or-so years and want a short (!) and relatively readable introduction to basic problems of history, I quite liked Chiel van den Akker’s The Modern Idea of History and its Value: An Introduction (2020). It is not practical, it won't teach you how to do history as a historian, but it gives a short, concise overview over the main problems and discourses that history and historiography faced within the past couple centuries.

What follows is, unfortunately, an anti-recommendation in direct reaction to the books you mentioned:

As far as the "typical" books that people in the UK apparently are being directed to—I'm German and I know the books you should read as an undergrad in German, so unless you say "I know German!" I can't recommend you books—both Bloch's classic The Historian's Craft and Carr's What is History? are really well written books and for that alone, worth reading. But they're not of all that much help to answer the question of "What does it mean to do history, and how should I do it, academically in 2022?", since they're pretty much ancient by now—nowadays, they're of value when you try to understand how the academic study of history was debated in the mid-20th century, but that’s not the purpose of a textbook, or introduction to the subject for beginners.

The same goes for Evans: In Defence of History is also over two decades old by now, and very much a product of its time. It is principally a polemic against so-called "postmodernist" history in the UK of the 1990s (e.g., very explicitly Keith Jenkins and Alun Munslow). Especially as an outsider from the “mainland”—academic history, despite having a certain shared "DNA," is actually shaped by national academic culture—it is impossible to overlook that both sides of the argument In Defence of History is a relic of suffer from their compulsion to construct strawmen ("the postmodernist", "the reconstructionist") for the sake of argument, instead of productively engaging with each other. In other words: any reading of Evans requires reading at least Munslow and/or Jenkins, to whom he actually reacts to—it is a “defence” for a reason—if you'd actually want to get an unbiased picture of "how to do history" in the UK in the 1990s to early 2000s. (But how much this is still the current debate in 2022...I wouldn't know, since I'm not in the UK.)

If you'd ever want to read a discussion of the historical state of the field that Evans' et al. were a part of without the polemics involved, I’d suggest C. Behan McCullagh's The Logic of History (2004), which is a much more unbiased read (its also more challenging, though).

You should read this:

Making History: An Introduction to the History and Practices of a Discipline

I studied History at uni and had to do a module on historiography with this being the core text - very interesting, not too dry, short(ish) chapters and will set you up for a good understanding of the subject of historiography, and the history of studying History.

Hi! You're an incoming undergraduate, you aren't expected to know everything right from the start! Your enthusiasm and determination is really wonderful but please, just take a moment to relax :) it's going to be okay.

Carr can be a lot to get into, but is a really good place to start. Try to take the pressure off when reading. I used to have very bad anxiety when I read because I was putting so much pressure on myself to understand and not letting myself think about what it meant.

Historiography is essentially the reflexive study of History as a discipline. History is not so much a factual detailed account of what happened in the past, but what we have chosen to write about it based on what we know/the sources we have available to us. Part of Historiography is being critical of the sources we use to base our writing on, and asking questions such as who writes history? Who does it leave out? What purpose does it serve? Who does it benefit? What context was this written in?

I live in South Africa and I did my undergrad double majored in history and anthropology. The history we do here is mostly African, social, and economic history, but there is a very strong emphasis on historiography, and writing history from the "bottom up".