Historiography
One of my favorite classes (which I’ve taught ten times at SFSU) is basically, a class in historiography. The formal title is: “Seminar in Historical Analysis” (a fine example of anodyne (boring) labelling) and it’s required for undergraduate History majors. In particular, in my class, I try to get students to understand: “What is History?,” “What are the different types of History?,” and “How do we think, read, and write like a Historian?”
When telling some friends the other night that I am teaching a course in historiography, their blank looks engendered my explanation that “historiography” is the study of how to think/write about history. Historiography, however, is a bit of an unwieldy word. Stated differently, if (lower case) history is the sum of everything that has happened to people so far in the world, then (to paraphrase William Cronin) “History [upper case] is the stories we choose to tell about history [lower case],” and historiography is the study of how we write (and read) (upper case) History.
It's an important aspect of my profession. Historians need to reflect on what we’re doing and why and to consider the various ways we have done it and can do it. To be sure, it can be carried to extremes and edge into pseudo-philosophy and navel-gazing; but there are many useful things about history to consider before we go too far.
It’s beneficial for both writers of History and (for most of you) readers/absorbers of History to be aware of what we’re doing. Indeed, one of the essential purposes of History is to get folks to think critically about the past and to realize that the stories we hear are at root, just stories; sometimes false, usually ‘spun,’ and always incomplete. I recall that when I re-started in school, I believed History was pretty much all set. Sure, there were always the odd documents discovered and the events of my lifetime (e.g. the “Cold War”) were becoming “history.” I knew that there were many parts of history that I didn’t know anything about, but I was confident that somebody did and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading about the T’ang dynasty or what life was like in 19C California. But I was, as it turned out, only scratching the surface of my ignorance. I had no real idea, for example, about revisionism: the recasting of interpretations of what had happened, or the ways in which new information about the past was being discovered and created (e.g., using the personal property lists in 18C wills to determine the spread of books and literacy).
More importantly, I had no appreciation of the way in which people in the past thought differently (the French term is “mentalité”); nor of how the way we think is the product of historical contingency rather than an obvious “fact.” I didn’t understand that when the “Founding Fathers” used the words “happiness” or “liberty,” what they had in mind was quite different than how I might use those terms. Or that my perceptions of human “progress,” American “greatness,” and the obviousness/necessity/benefits of science and rationality were all the products of how our self-congratulatory culture constructed its stories about the past.
Next month, I will be presenting my thoughts on all this in a class for more senior adults. It’s called “Getting More Out of History,” and it will draw on the work, materials, and ideas I’ve developed over my years as a History student, researcher, and teacher; some of which have been featured on these pages over the past few years). There will be echoes of my class for undergraduates, but no mandatory readings, no mandatory reflection papers, and (absolutely) no primary source-based research papers required.
A lot of folks I run into tell me (not coincidentally) that “I’ve always been interested in History…but after all the ‘names-and-dates’ stuff in high school, I never went back.” Others do, dipping into popular treatments of the revolutionary era, biographies, historical fiction, or well-written targeted studies by scholars on areas of particular interest. There are big audiences for streaming videos and PBS specials, ranging from Ken Burns to the History Channel. Journalists and politicians subject us on an ongoing basis to their own interpretations of history, usually more interested in a glitzy story or in supporting their policy predilections than in coping with the ambiguities of the past (it’s a problem that’s getting worse!).
My goal is to ease these amateur historians (by no means a pejorative term) a bit out of their comfort zones and charge up the “critical thinking” parts of their history brains. One of the worst legacies of the way most of us were taught history in high school or intro college courses is that were presented with a story and told “this is how it was.” We were rarely taken ‘behind the curtain’ as it were, to see the choices that were being made in what story we were given or why those choices were being made. There are a bunch of ways, for example, to interpret the causes or outcomes of the American Revolution or the bitter fights—political and cultural—that characterized the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. There are easily a half-dozen debatable theories about how World War I started and most Europeans would not recognize the narratives with which we Americans are presented as the stars of that particular show.
“history” (i.e., how people have actually lived and thought for the past thousands of years) is immensely complicated and contradictory. It stands to reason, therefore, that “History” (i.e., the ways in which we think, read, and write about that “history,”) should also be complicated and contradictory. Indeed, wrestling with those complications and contradictions—grounded in our best efforts to see “what actually happened”—is precisely what History should be about.
So, for a few hours, we’ll float some ideas and examples and (hopefully) unsettle a few pre-conceived notions about simple stories about the past; making the best use of “history,” “History,” and a historian as we can.
One of my favorite classes (which I’ve taught ten times at SFSU) is basically, a class in historiography. The formal title is: “Seminar in Historical Analysis” (a fine example of anodyne (boring) labelling) and it’s required for undergraduate History majors. In particular, in my class, I try to get students to understand: “What is History?,” “What are the different types of History?,” and “How do we think, read, and write like a Historian?”
When telling some friends the other night that I am teaching a course in historiography, their blank looks engendered my explanation that “historiography” is the study of how to think/write about history. Historiography, however, is a bit of an unwieldy word. Stated differently, if (lower case) history is the sum of everything that has happened to people so far in the world, then (to paraphrase William Cronin) “History [upper case] is the stories we choose to tell about history [lower case],” and historiography is the study of how we write (and read) (upper case) History.
It's an important aspect of my profession. Historians need to reflect on what we’re doing and why and to consider the various ways we have done it and can do it. To be sure, it can be carried to extremes and edge into pseudo-philosophy and navel-gazing; but there are many useful things about history to consider before we go too far.
It’s beneficial for both writers of History and (for most of you) readers/absorbers of History to be aware of what we’re doing. Indeed, one of the essential purposes of History is to get folks to think critically about the past and to realize that the stories we hear are at root, just stories; sometimes false, usually ‘spun,’ and always incomplete. I recall that when I re-started in school, I believed History was pretty much all set. Sure, there were always the odd documents discovered and the events of my lifetime (e.g. the “Cold War”) were becoming “history.” I knew that there were many parts of history that I didn’t know anything about, but I was confident that somebody did and I just hadn’t gotten around to reading about the T’ang dynasty or what life was like in 19C California. But I was, as it turned out, only scratching the surface of my ignorance. I had no real idea, for example, about revisionism: the recasting of interpretations of what had happened, or the ways in which new information about the past was being discovered and created (e.g., using the personal property lists in 18C wills to determine the spread of books and literacy).
More importantly, I had no appreciation of the way in which people in the past thought differently (the French term is “mentalité”); nor of how the way we think is the product of historical contingency rather than an obvious “fact.” I didn’t understand that when the “Founding Fathers” used the words “happiness” or “liberty,” what they had in mind was quite different than how I might use those terms. Or that my perceptions of human “progress,” American “greatness,” and the obviousness/necessity/benefits of science and rationality were all the products of how our self-congratulatory culture constructed its stories about the past.
Next month, I will be presenting my thoughts on all this in a class for more senior adults. It’s called “Getting More Out of History,” and it will draw on the work, materials, and ideas I’ve developed over my years as a History student, researcher, and teacher; some of which have been featured on these pages over the past few years). There will be echoes of my class for undergraduates, but no mandatory readings, no mandatory reflection papers, and (absolutely) no primary source-based research papers required.
A lot of folks I run into tell me (not coincidentally) that “I’ve always been interested in History…but after all the ‘names-and-dates’ stuff in high school, I never went back.” Others do, dipping into popular treatments of the revolutionary era, biographies, historical fiction, or well-written targeted studies by scholars on areas of particular interest. There are big audiences for streaming videos and PBS specials, ranging from Ken Burns to the History Channel. Journalists and politicians subject us on an ongoing basis to their own interpretations of history, usually more interested in a glitzy story or in supporting their policy predilections than in coping with the ambiguities of the past (it’s a problem that’s getting worse!).
My goal is to ease these amateur historians (by no means a pejorative term) a bit out of their comfort zones and charge up the “critical thinking” parts of their history brains. One of the worst legacies of the way most of us were taught history in high school or intro college courses is that were presented with a story and told “this is how it was.” We were rarely taken ‘behind the curtain’ as it were, to see the choices that were being made in what story we were given or why those choices were being made. There are a bunch of ways, for example, to interpret the causes or outcomes of the American Revolution or the bitter fights—political and cultural—that characterized the post-Civil War Reconstruction era. There are easily a half-dozen debatable theories about how World War I started and most Europeans would not recognize the narratives with which we Americans are presented as the stars of that particular show.
“history” (i.e., how people have actually lived and thought for the past thousands of years) is immensely complicated and contradictory. It stands to reason, therefore, that “History” (i.e., the ways in which we think, read, and write about that “history,”) should also be complicated and contradictory. Indeed, wrestling with those complications and contradictions—grounded in our best efforts to see “what actually happened”—is precisely what History should be about.
So, for a few hours, we’ll float some ideas and examples and (hopefully) unsettle a few pre-conceived notions about simple stories about the past; making the best use of “history,” “History,” and a historian as we can.
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