I spent a lot of time over the last several weeks talking to students. This is important to me – I love teaching and supporting students in successfully navigating this field. I also remember what it was like as a student in a History class, not quite understanding what I needed to do and how. A lot of it felt mysterious, and, as historians, we don’t have great/clear language to describe what we do. I’ve been working on that over the last several years. Beginning with the work on Intro to History courses that I did with David Pace a while ago, we’ve been slowly building a conversation about what we do as historians (i.e. History Methods). These conversations with students, then, also help me think through these ideas and consider how to operationalize them into real, practical guidance for the work of doing history. I too, in other words, am still learning – figuring out how to articulate the what, how, and why of our work.
Below is a sort of summary of the things we end up talking about most in these workshops and conversations. These have mostly been conversations with advanced undergraduate and graduate students and reflect that. They are the topics that come up repeatedly, both in terms of student questions and in misunderstandings or assumptions in practice that we work through together. It’s important to identify these, so that we can work backwards – these things are the sort of bottlenecks that David Pace and colleagues from “Decoding the Disciplines” talk about. How, then, can we backwards design our processes to more clearly demonstrate what we do and how we do it, and help students build skills and capacities in the work of producing (not just consuming) history? Much credit to many friends and colleagues who help me think through these issues through their own work and/or through conversations and workshops where we seek to support students. Special h/t to Trevor Getz, Cate Denial, Kevin Gannon, Liz Lehfeldt, Elaine Carey, David Pace, and Robert Trent Vinson for their conversations over the last several years.
Don’t write your paper before you do the research. Start with a question rather than a statement, contextualize and refine that question in relation to the primary and secondary sources available to you, figuring out what the parameters of a reasonable project is. Your argument and the structure/organization of your paper should emerge out of the evidence.
Asking questions that are too big/broad highlight that you haven’t done enough work. Don’t go back over well-trodden ground unless you have something new and distinct to add to the conversation (a newly discovered body of evidence that overturns previous assumptions, etc). Instead think of existing literature as a foundation that you can build off of – they did the background work for you, now you get to explore more specific questions that emerge out of that broader story.
You can only tell stories where evidence exists. There’s some questions we cannot answer. There’s some questions whose answers may not be in the archives but may instead be in oral histories and other non-archival sources. And those might not be feasible for you to pursue in this moment.
Being curious is so important – when you’re curious you don’t assume you know what the answer is, you don’t dismiss evidence, you don’t get carried away by ideology or personal investment – you just follow where the evidence leads and you stay open to possibilities.
There are drawbacks and benefits to being an insider and being an outsider. Don’t dismiss either, but be aware of your own limits and blind spots. For insiders, it can be easy to take things for granted or make assumptions about what something means based on what appears to be some sort of immutable cultural or social practice. But EVERYTHING has a history and it likely was not always that way – keep contingency (at any particular moment it could have been different) and context (the specificity of the experiences of people in that time and place) in mind always and avoid reading the present back into the past. For outsiders, there are things we won’t be able to understand or interpret and some stories are not ours to tell. Or it might take us a long time to learn how to tell them. Think about what you are uniquely positioned to contribute and why and then remain humble. Truly embedding yourself in a culture – learning a language, listening deeply, observing carefully – can help but it takes time.
None of this is easy – it takes time. There are tools available that provide us with shortcuts but when you’re first starting it’s important to avoid using them whenever possible. Because you’re still learning. Reading every page of the newspaper rather than using the search function and looking for what you think you want to know is important. Because you don’t know what’s there, you don’t know the terminology people used, you don’t know how it was connected to other things that were happening that might otherwise seem (or you might assume are) unrelated. Embrace the time to dig deeply and read widely. Do the hard work now so that down the road you can use the shortcuts effectively.
Graduate school is where you develop the skills and knowledge that you will use for the rest of your life. Lay that foundation well and it will serve you well. Take short cuts and you’ll continue to struggle.
Read SO much more than you think. Read widely. Read on topics that are not directly related to your work. Read everything that is available. Avoid thinking narrowly about your topic. Historians’ strongest tools – continuity and change, agency and structure, cause and effect – encourage us to think about connections. When you’re willing and able to look beyond the obvious you often find real understanding.
There’s a difference between reading a book/article as historiography vs reading it as a secondary source. In the first, you are reading for argument and significance/contribution. In the second, you are reading for context and connection.
In any historical moment, no one could tell the future. And, as a result, they weren’t actively preparing for a future that they were sure was coming. They were navigating uncertainty at every moment. They only discover the future by living through it. Trying to understand what that experience was like is interesting. That is what we mean by contingency. You cannot read back into the past what we know happened in the future or what is happening in the present.
Don’t dismiss sources because of “bias”. All sources have perspective. That perspective doesn’t mean that you don’t take them seriously. Rather, it means that every source is both true and untrue to various degrees at the same time. It is true that x person said y thing to z person. Or it is true that a person did b thing. But their interpretation of the context in which they were operating might be limited or inaccurate. They might not have the full picture or might be operating on assumptions or stereotypes that shape misunderstanding. The key questions to ask about sources are – what CAN it tell us and what can it NOT tell us. Then you can consider what other research you need to do to move forward and increase your understanding.
Engaging with scholarship doesn’t just mean agreeing with it. You can disagree. But in putting forward your own arguments or making your own contributions be sure to recognize and build on work that came before you. Cite that work, acknowledge its contribution, represent it fairly. Don’t set up straw men or cherry pick quotations to justify your own arguments. If you disagree, do so fairly, grounded in evidence, supported by research. Do NOT misrepresent the work of others. And do not claim that you’re doing something for the first time when you’re actually standing on the shoulders of those who came before. Misrepresenting or dismissing the work of others is a fast way to lose respect.
Flashy is not the same as good. Resist the urge to be flashy. If you want to make an impact, do solid research that explores questions that resonate with people’s actual lives and embrace opportunities to think about how to apply your research. That does NOT mean that, as a historian, you should have all of the answers for how to solve, in my case, a development or urban planning problem, but it may mean that you can ask better questions that the practitioners who have technical knowledge and, as a result, can help shape a better end product. Being willing to talk to people in other fields and respect their contribution is key to doing this successfully. So is showing up in spaces where those conversations are happening.
Think about who you want to be as a person and let that guide how you show up in your work. My own personal advice and what I see in the best scholars/humans I know who have really shaped the field – Stay humble without selling yourself short. You can be proud without being pompous. Deal with your own issues rather than projecting them onto others. Be self-aware about your limitations as well as your strengths. Lean into what makes you special but create space for others. Show up/reach out. Show up for others, for community. And always be generous – share with others, give back to those who helped you, pass that generosity forward into the next generation.
