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 HISTORY DEPARTMENT
 

 

How to Study History

by
Todd F. Carney
Southern Oregon University

(Copyright 1998, 2004 Todd F. Carney. This material may be used for instructional purposes without permission, but all commercial rights are reserved.)


1. What is History? History is a method of studying and evaluating past events, trends, and conditions. Professional historians (your professor and the authors of the history books you are reading) search for, compile, and interpret sources or traces of things past. What kind of things? Everything that was: the social, economic, political, cultural, psychological, even biological past. History is, therefore, among the most interdisciplinary of subjects.

History is also a method or process of thinking. History assumes things in the present are related to things in the past. Take, for instance, the problem of disproportionate poverty among African Americans in the United States. An historian will see the problem as primarily historical, the result of two and a half centuries of slavery, and almost a century and a half of institutionalized racism.

Poverty of inner-city Blacks, then, has a four-hundred-year history. An historian would conclude that nothing can be done about poverty in the present without an understanding of its deep, deep roots in the past. More to the point, nothing will be done by those who lack that understanding. All they will see are poor people who don't work.

History is, therefore, a method of thinking that can open the mind to an understanding of things as they really are, rather than what they appear to be on the surface.

 

2. What is Important in History?

First of all, let us understand right away that dates, the stuff of juvenile high school history study, are not very important at all. Time, however, is important. Dates are useful simply to keep events in proper order. Some dates (or at least some years) are very useful to know: 1776 for the Declaration of Independence, 1861 to 1865 as the years of the Civil War, and the like. When events and development move quickly, sometimes months or even single days are important, but not in and of themselves. Memorizing dates without understanding the significance of them and the events they fix in time is a useless exercise.

Are names important? Yes, because people are important. History is the study of people and the things they've done and the things that have happened to them. Some historians of social or economic developments, though, pay little attention to specific names because they deal with groups of people instead of individuals.

A political historian, however, could not understand much at all without paying close attention to individuals such as Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. A good rule of thumb is that if a person is included in your textbook, it is an important person and you should know his or her name.

So, what is important? Here are some important things in the study of history:

These five things suggest that a general knowledge of the significance of history is more important than specific details such as names, dates, and places. However, in order to understand significance, you need to know some "facts," bits of verifiable evidence of what happened in the past. That is, you need to know some names, dates, and places.

Think of history like a court case. Determination of guilt or innocence is the purpose of a trial, but the truth in court is established by evidence and by arguments made by lawyers based upon that evidence. Historians observe evidence of things that happened in the past and they interpret the meaning of that evidence.

 

3. General Suggestions for Studying History as a University Subject.

Consider adopting the following:

 

4. Specific Suggestions for History Study.

The chapters you read in the course textbook, as well as the lectures the professor delivers in class, are created by synthesis, the putting together of many pieces into a coherent and meaningful whole. To study these syntheses, you need to use the opposite process: you need to take them apart and examine each part to see how it fits into the whole. This mental process is called analysis.

Here is one good method of analyzing a passage from a history textbook. The following is a paragraph on developments leading to the American Revolution from America: A Narrative History (4th edition) by George Tindall and David Shi (W.W. Norton, 1996), pages 217-18:

Two events in June, 1772 further eroded the colonies' fragile relationship with the mother country. Near Providence, Rhode Island, a British schooner, the Gaspee, patrolling for smugglers, accidentally ran aground. Under cover of darkness a crowd from the town boarded the ship, removed the crew, and set fire to the vessel. A commission of inquiry was formed with authority to hold suspects (for trial in England, it was rumored, under an old statute passed during the reign of Henry VIII), but no witnesses could be found. Four days after the burning, on June 13, 1772, Governor Thomas Hutchinson told the Massachusetts assembly that his salary thenceforth would come out of the customs revenues. Soon thereafter word came that judges of the Superior Court would be paid from the same source and no longer be dependent on the assembly for their income. The assembly expressed fear that this portended "a despotic administration of government."

In order to analyze this paragraph, we need to take it apart and separate it into its important pieces. One way of doing this would be to extract and list the important terms and concepts. Here is how such a list would look for the paragraph above:

If you put each term at the top of an index card, you could then list the important points for each. The card for the Gaspee incident might look like this (handwritten, of course):

Gaspee (customs schooner) June, 1772

--British schooner on customs duty looking for smugglers.
--Ran aground off Providence, RI and was burned by colonists.
--A board of inquiry tried to find suspects.
--Consequences: British responded by paying colonial officials from customs duties, thereby taking control away from colonists.
--Significance: further deepened the tensions between colonists andBritish government.

Cards for the other terms would further deal with the issues raised by the Gaspee incident. Note that the card for Thomas Hutchinson would contain the Gaspee, but since you would be running into his name in other places, you would add to it as you kept reading. If you keep your cards, you have a pretty good running reference and record of your study that will be invaluable when it comes time to study for the examinations. You will also have analyzed and examined each part of the whole of text.

The next paragraph in the text builds upon and extends the significance of the Gaspee incident significantly:

The existence of the Gaspee commission, which bypassed the courts of Rhode Island, and the independent salaries for royal officials in Massachusetts both suggested to the residents of other colonies that the same might be in store for them. The discussion of colonial rights and parliamentary encroachment regained momentum. To keep the pot boiling, in November 1772 Sam Adams convinced the Boston town meeting to form a Committee of Correspondence, which issued a statement of rights and grievances and invited other towns to do the same. Committees of Correspondence sprang up across Massachusetts and spread into other colonies. In March 1773 the Virginia assembly proposed the formation of such committees on an intercolonial basis, and a network of the committees spread across the colonies, mobilizing public opinion and keeping colonial resentments at a simmer. In unwitting tribute to their effectiveness, a Massachusetts Loyalist called the committees "the foulest, subtlest, and most venomous serpent ever issued from the egg of sedition."

This paragraph contains only one important term: committee of correspondence. But it also contains a great deal to explain the phenomenon of the committees and the intercolonial nature of them. Your card might look like this:

Committees of Correspondence

--First one in Boston, Nov. 1772 (pushed by Samuel Adams)
--Created to keep in touch with other towns on the subject of colonial rights and Parliament's apparent attempt to squash them.
--Spread across the rest of Massachusetts very quickly.
--Within five months, the Virginia assembly proposed a network of C. of C.s all across the colonies.
--The C. of C.s effectively mobilized public opinion (and alarms colonists loyal to the king).

Why not make a card on Samuel Adams? Because you would have already started one on him some pages back, but you can add his organization of the Boston Committee of Correspondence in 1772 to it. Do you need a card for the Virginia Assembly? Not really, since it was simply the colonial legislature of Virginia (actually called the House of Burgesses) and you would already know about the legislatures colonists had been allowed to elect for over a hundred and fifty years before the Revolution.

Notice something else about this paragraph: it is built step-by-step on the last one, taking the narrative of events further along in time. The paragraphs that follow discuss the Boston Tea Party (Nov. 1773), the Coercive Acts (April 1774), formation of the First Continental Congress (Sept. 1774), and events at Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts in April 1775 as the first shot in the War for Independence is fired.

An event or development follows on past events, and will itself lead to later ones. History of this kind reads very much like a novel or a short story. It is a narrative, and in the string of events put together by the historian is his or her interpretation of what caused things to happen.

When you read a paragraph like this, you will run across ideas that are not clear to you. In such cases, you need to do some thinking. Why, for instance, would colonists have worried that their governors and judges were going to be paid out of customs revenue rather than directly by their legislatures? Wouldn't they be happy that the burden of those salaries were lifted from the colonial taxpayers?

Maybe, but ask yourself what they feared. Ask yourself what value there may have been in having control over those salaries lie, not with British officials, but with legislatures elected by the colonial people. Paying someone's salary and having control over its amount means having some degree of control over the person. Colonial governors (appointed by the king's government), judges, and other officials had always before been paid by the legislatures and, to a great extent, could not afford to offend the legislatures too much.

A little bit of thought on issues like this can go a long way toward building your understanding of what you read. Why doesn't the author just spell everything out in the first place? In part, it is because to do so in all cases would make the book twice its size and not useable as a text. In part, it is because historians writing textbooks for university courses are writing for adult learners, and one does not spoon-feed adults. Lastly, authors know that learning is an active process, and that passive reading and remembering will not work.

You must be an active learner, and you must assume the responsibility yourself for learning and understanding the material. Your professor and the historians he assigns you to read will help you, but you must take the initiative yourself. That is the way of the real world.

One last thing: the paragraph above contains a word you might not be familiar with--sedition. What does it mean? Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (only $30 at the SOU Bookstore) says sedition is "(1) incitement of discontent or rebellion against a government, and (2) any action, especially in speech or writing, promoting such discontent or rebellion."

You will run across many words you do not know in the course of your reading. These words are not at all unusual, pretentious, or pompous--they are common in the vocabularies of educated people. You'll find them in newspapers, news magazines, and in other serious writings. Your employers will expect you to know them. You need a very good unabridged dictionary to help you learn them.

 

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