Last semester, a doctoral student at USF asked me, what were the methods of historians? I responded by talking in general about the uses of archival materials, publications, oral histories, multimedia, statistical data, all sorts of primary sources … and realized quickly that was not what the student meant or needed. What the student was hoping for was some methodical way of working with primary sources and a sense of what historians thought was acceptable and not.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The problem? Historians are notoriously (or famously) heterodox in how we work. As one friend said many months ago, many graduate programs have proseminars or supposedly theoretical introductions to historical work in the first year, and while they are supposed to address working with primary sources, in general they are about whatever the faculty member teaching one makes of it. In my case, many years ago, French historian Lynn Hunt led my entering grad-school cohort through many books on social theory, essentially a tour of social-science models commonly used by historians up through the anti-models of Hayden White and that ilk. It was a wonderful introduction to graduate study. But primary-source work? Like many professional historians, I acquired those skills in bits and pieces in different courses as I was required to work with them for papers. <\/p>\n
My impression has consistently been that historians learn a rigorous craft far more than the application of analytical techniques. (That doesn't mean that historians do not have analytical techniques, but we borrow many of them from other disciplines.) Michelle Lamont provided some confirmation of this impression in her recent book<\/a> on the evaluation culture of fellowships and grant programs. Historians she observed had the clearest consensus within a discipline of what good history looks like… but it was a matter of good craft rather than the type of reductionist perspective she attributed to economists and far from the professional angst of some other disciplines. <\/p>\n On the one hand, it is reassuring that an outside observer tells me something that is consistent with my own perspective on the field. But on the other hand, that craftwork practice creates some practical problems in terms of explaining what the field of history is and also in terms of setting goals for programs. The Lumina Foundation-sponsored programs to try Tuning in the U.S. gave me some clues to that with the comparison of program objectives for physics and history, and while I don't think we need the specificity of physics goals and objectives, I wanted something a little more meaty than the history program objectives I have seen for some places such as at Utah State University<\/a>. The faculty at Utah State have done a marvelous job of boiling down the temperament of historians. I'm just not sure that's enough.<\/p>\n Maybe we're stuck because we suffer from a blind spot in theory and methods, in part because historians are perhaps too-well socialized into that craftwork ethic and perspective. Someone who is drawn to broadly generalized theory is probably unlikely to be attracted to the specifics of history. And thus by selection bias, historians are willing to go a few steps from the concrete but not too many. As one friend put it, historians are most comfortable with the mid-level generalization. I rarely see history monographs present grand generalizations about human behavior in the abstract, but there are plentiful generalizations about bounded places and times. <\/p>\n Regardless of the cause, that blind spot leaves me unable to articulate exactly how<\/em> I do what I do. I can model it and provide examples, I can expose students to primary sources and conflicting interpretations and opportunities to practice making historical arguments (ideally with corrective feedback), but at least at the moment I cannot explain what it feels like to suspend judgment about potential significance of a primary source while listening<\/em> to the source (how I think of paying close attention to the ambiguities in voice). I cannot explain why and how I pick potentially relevant contextual clues out of my mental "ether" to juxtapose with events or primary sources. It feels a bit like making bricks from straw, something historians are practiced at with the limited extant sources we face. I cannot even state whether my internal sense of this fits the period<\/em> or this is an anachronism<\/em> is unique to me or common among historians. We talk and compare evidence, reasoning, and conclusions but not how we grasp at the internal mental straws. <\/p>\n In other words, we muddle happily with pretty good results, and in many cases we show students how to muddle well enough for them to follow, but we cannot clearly explain to others how to muddle along like us. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last semester, a doctoral student at USF asked me, what were the methods of historians? I responded by talking in general about the uses of archival materials, publications, oral histories, multimedia, statistical data, all sorts of primary sources … and realized quickly that was not what the student meant or needed. What the student was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,14,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-history","category-research"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-NG","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3080"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3133,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3080\/revisions\/3133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}