The earliest descriptions of Wiesbaden deal with the thermal springs and bathing facilities that were already in use in ancient times. The first brief description of Wiesbaden's baths dates from 1232, and from the end of the 15th century, the city and its springs were increasingly mentioned in balneological literature along with other German bathing resorts. The interest in the natural sciences and medicine in late humanism encouraged the Nassau-Idstein personal physician Philipp Weber to publish the first treatise devoted exclusively to Wiesbaden's thermal springs. In his monograph "Thermarum Wisbadensium Descriptio", published in 1617 (or 1632 in German), he described this natural phenomenon and for the first time scientifically investigated its medicinal effects. His book also marks the beginning of the city's historiography, as Weber describes the stone evidence from Wiesbaden's Roman and medieval past in detail for the first time thanks to his good local knowledge. Although further treatises on the thermal springs were printed in the following years, none of the authors followed on from Weber's historical descriptions.

It was not until 1736 that another historical treatise on the city was published. The "Memorabilia Urbis Wisbadenae oder Merkwürdigkeiten der Stadt Wiesbaden" by theologian Gottfried Anton Schenck is a travelogue, a genre that was very popular with the enlightened bourgeois readership in the 18th century. Schenck's book contains a wide variety of news items, which are strung together randomly and without comment. The reader learns entertaining and interesting facts about the landscape, the Roman past, the town's rulers, the town's coat of arms and its constitution, and gets to know the character of the population and their beliefs. The description of striking buildings is followed by news of war events, executions and natural phenomena. Schenck's "Memorabilia" can be classified as a reliable primary source, as much of his information was taken from town administration files - some of which are now lost - which were probably provided to him by his father, who was the town's mayor. Schenck's book, republished in 1758 under the title "Geschicht-Beschreibung", remained the only account of its kind about Wiesbaden until the beginning of the 19th century.

A city history by the priest and rector of Wiesbaden's Latin school Georg Philipp Kraus (1713-92) remained unfinished. All other publications about Wiesbaden published up to the beginning of the 19th century belong to the traditional spa literature, which only deals with the medical benefits of the thermal springs.

Historical studies based on historical sources only appeared again from the middle of the 19th century. Karl Rossel, who worked as secretary of the Association for Nassau Antiquities and Historical Research, among other things, dealt intensively with the Roman and especially the medieval past of Wiesbaden. As important written material was destroyed in the city fire of 1547, he tried to compensate for this loss through excavations. We owe him valuable information on the topography of the Roman and medieval city. They are irreplaceable, as this evidence has been irretrievably lost due to the complete structural transformation in the 19th century. Events of the 16th-18th centuries, on the other hand, were of little interest to Rossel or his contemporaries.

Friedrich Otto's works were characterized by a different zeitgeist. In 1877, his "History of the City of Wiesbaden" was published, a concise summary of what was then considered certain knowledge about the city's history. Encouraged by the success of the booklet, he went on to systematically analyze the city's records from the 16th to 18th centuries for the first time. He published a number of treatises on topics that had not previously been considered, such as the budget and taxation. Otto's strength was not the comprehensive presentation of a topic, but rather the examination of individual aspects. His editions of the oldest surviving Wiesbaden sources on the court system, the "Merkerbuch" and the "Gerichtsbuch", brought him in line with the historical research of the time. In his explanations, Otto carefully reproduced the findings from the files. As he avoided any interpretation or ideological evaluation of the sources, his descriptions have a certain timelessness.

Ferdinand Wilhelm Emil Roth presented a comprehensive account of Wiesbaden's history. Roth, an autodidact with many interests, published almost 500 articles on the political, cultural, church and school history of Nassau, as well as source editions such as the "Fontes Rerum Nassoicarum" published in 1879, until the outbreak of severe paranoia, which necessitated his admission to a sanatorium in 1904. Contemporaries accused Roth of working incorrectly, as he compiled sources at random and strung them together without commentary. The fact that he often misinterpreted the sources is clearly shown in his history of Wiesbaden. Roth makes assertions about many events for which no evidence could be found in the archives despite intensive searches. Incorrect dates and misreading make it impossible to use his city history.

One of the most versatile personalities in Wiesbaden historiography is Johann Christian Karl Spielmann, who worked at the newly founded Wiesbaden City Archive from 1892. He published numerous historical novels, dramas and ballads as well as pedagogical treatises that were recognized in specialist circles. Spielmann established his fame with his three-volume "History of Nassau". He also wrote numerous smaller articles on the history of the town, which he published from 1900 onwards in the magazine "Nassovia", which he founded, or in the Wiesbadener Tagblatt. His Spielmann-Atlas zur Weichbildentwicklung, published in 1913, can be regarded as a unique preliminary study for a modern city atlas. He provided material for a social topography in his "History of the city of Wiesbaden and its inhabitants at the beginning of our century". This work is all the more valuable because Spielmann reconstructs the local conditions in the old town before its complete structural transformation. His last work, a comprehensive "History of the City of Wiesbaden from Antiquity to the Beginning of the 20th Century", remained unfinished. It should be critically noted that Spielmann based his treatises exclusively on the files of the city archives and excluded the records of the then Prussian state archives. Many of his descriptions therefore remain incomplete. He filled in gaps in the records by interpolation, which often led to a distorted view of things.

In addition, Spielmann ignored the results of previously published accounts, such as the work of Theodor Schüler, in whom he saw a competitor. This isolated way of working considerably diminishes the value of his account. Theodor Schüler (pseudonym G. Schleusinger), archivist at the Prussian State Archives, wrote numerous individual articles on the history of Nassau and Wiesbaden. He merely reproduced the contents of the files, mostly verbatim. His meticulous approach gives his publications lasting value, as they can almost be considered source editions. Involuntarily, they thus help to compensate for the loss of files during the Second World War.

A monograph on the history of the city was not published again until 1925. The "History of the City of Wiesbaden", written by the grammar school teacher Ferdinand Heymach (1856-1930), was a reminiscence of the city's "great" past, written in a politically and economically difficult time. Heymach's book is a short and very traditional history of the city, in which he merely summarizes the results of the available literature.

The first monograph of the post-war period to be published was "Geschichte und Kommunalpolitik der Stadt Wiesbaden" by the journalist and head of the city archives (1951-65), Herbert Müller-Werth, in 1963. In his book, he spans the period from antiquity to the 1960s. For the post-war period, he presents for the first time an outline of the city's local politics based on records. Apart from the section on the Thirty Years' War, the presentation of the older history is based on existing literature.

In the 1970s, a donation from a Wiesbaden pharmacist gave new impetus to the historiography of the city. Funds from his estate were to be used to finance the editing and printing of a multi-volume academic history of the city. In addition to the volume on Roman Wiesbaden by Helmut Schoppa, another by Otto Renkhoff on Wiesbaden in the Middle Ages and two volumes by Wolf-Heino Struck on the history of the city from 1806 to the end of the Duchy of Nassau were published. Martina Bleymehl-Eiler's dissertation, published in 1999, deals with the early modern period. Since the early 1990s, several accounts of individual aspects of the town's history have been published in the Stadtarchiv's publication series.