On Footnotes and Doing History

Lisa Clark Diller

I recently picked up Anthony Grafton’s The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1999) in an attempt to find more coherent ways to talk to my students about citation and research. I have somehow never managed to read it before now, and I’m finding Grafton’s overt connection between what we are “doing” in history and how we document that work, to be extremely useful. As I think about what I need to do to prove to my reading audience that I know what I’m talking about, I have forgotten what a thin tissue evidence rests on—our assumptions regarding footnotes. The Footnote also contributes to the discussions we’ve been having on this site about conversations between generations of historians.

Grafton reminds us that “in documenting the thought and research that underpin the narrative above them, footnotes prove that it is a historically contingent product, dependent on the forms of research, opportunities, and states of particular questions that existed when the historian went to work” (23). The genealogies of scholarship so neatly mapped out by Dan Allosso last week can also be seen in the footnotes and bibliographies of individual works of scholarship. Who we think it important to cite, what range of sources were important (or available) at the time, and the family of historiographical ancestors we choose for ourselves all reveal our location in time and situate us on an ideological map.

Footnotes reveal our technical proficiency, but they do so within a particular context. While in grad school, I can remember discounting entire volumes of historical research because the footnotes were so “thin.” And one of my advisors at the University of Chicago would warn us to look with grave suspicion on any early modernist who cited too many printed sources. I’m less puritanical in my standards now. And Grafton has reminded me that: “No accumulation of footnotes can prove that every statement in the text rests on an unassailable mountain of attested facts. Footnotes exist, rather, to perform two other functions. First, they persuade: they convince the reader that the historian has done an acceptable amount of work . . . . Second, they indicate the chief sources that the historian has actually used” (22).

We sometimes still operate under the assumption that if we have all the “original sources” our argument will be solid. But what makes history interesting is all the various interpretations that we can develop from the same sources. It is part of why we revisit the same problems over and over again. Interpretation as well as sources give each of us our originality. This is decidedly not the same thing as saying that any interpretation of the documents is as good as another, but it is what keeps me from reading a scholarly tome and thinking that because the footnotes took up 37% of each page I read, no one need any longer do research on that subject. Grafton also reminded me to be careful in judging the scholarship of an earlier generation by the type or quantity of footnotes.

As I sweat through proper citation of digital works and decide how much to include or exclude from my own footnotes, I am glad to remember that this process isn’t simply about showing off my guild credentials. It’s also a way to “out” myself regarding my priorities and methods. The evidence I use won’t be considered equally sufficient for all time; but then again, I don’t expect to answer historical questions and decide their significance once and for all.

The footnote reminds me of the time-laden nature of my queries and verifications.

History and the Common Core Standards

Heather Cox Richardson

In early June, the National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers released the Common Core School Standards. Alaska and Texas opted out of the project, but officers of the other forty-eight states (plus two Territories and Washington D.C.) came together to design standards they hoped would provide uniformity and high standards to K-12 teaching across the nation.

While news reports have focused almost exclusively on the English and Mathematics standards in the CCSS, there are also suggested history standards. What is in them is significant.

The history standards are very short. Unlike many state curriculum standards, they do not specify content. Rather, they call for the development of critical thinking. They establish that students in middle school should be taught to distinguish the information in a primary source from opinions in secondary sources. They should also learn to “distinguish among fact, opinion, and reasoned judgment in a text.” In the first two years of high school, they should learn to identify key arguments in secondary texts, and be able to compare and evaluate the arguments of different authors by examining supporting primary evidence. A student leaving high school should be able to identify the central ideas of primary and secondary texts, compare them, and evaluate different arguments about the same historical event “by assessing the authors’ claims, reasoning, and evidence.”

It’s easy to see why Texas, with its politically charged State Board of Education, opted out. These standards are not so much bipartisan as nonpartisan.

But the CCSS also challenge Texas—and any states similarly inclined to skew history—by embracing another dramatic pedagogical change. The new emphasis on the use of primary documents in the teaching of K-12 history will drastically reduce the ability of any state to develop its own version of history. The rising cost of textbooks and the ubiquity of the internet mean that it is growing far easier and cheaper now to teach history directly from primary sources than from textbooks. This emphasis on primary sources shows up in the CCSS.

Indeed, the focus on primary sources, embraced by the CCSS, has already been a driving factor in the Texas curriculum debates. Late last year, the Texas legislature changed the way the state funds classroom materials. No longer are schools tied to the choices of the Texas Board of Education, the body that wrote the widely-castigated curriculum). Instead, while schools are obliged to buy at least a few of the books selected by the Board, they can use any allotted funds to buy digital material, or to gather material provided free on the internet to create a long-term stockpile of information for students.

For history teachers, this means the ability to use primary sources in their classrooms, just as the CCSS recommends.

This pedagogical change has the potential to restore open inquiry to history. It is no accident that the Texas Board of Education fervently opposed the laws that set this change in motion, complaining that standards would slip if it could no longer regulate the curriculum that Texas schools could teach.

The states have steadily adopted the CCSS over the past two months. How the standards will be implemented—or even if they will survive in states that have not won Race to the Top grants—remains to be seen. But historians interested in the way schools teach history should probably be paying attention.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part V: Tips for Discussion Sections

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order Heather Cox Richardson describes the purpose of discussion sections and offers advice on public speaking and how to have a successful discussion.

Tips for Discussion Sections
Heather Cox Richardson

Discussions sections (in my courses, at any rate), are designed primarily to do two things. First, they give students an opportunity to explore in-depth material that pertains to the class, but which we don’t have the time to cover in lecture. Second, they give students a forum in which they can practice speaking and arguing in public.

My discussion sections are usually designed around a problem raised by the course material. This problem is identified in the “discussion question” part of the syllabus, listed for each week, near the readings. To prepare for discussion, do the readings and think about the question. How would you answer it? Why? What do the readings (or films) have to do with the question? What other ideas or issues have the readings raised? You should have a clear idea of what you are going to argue in class before you get there. If you are required to write your answer, remember to do so and to bring your response to class.

In discussion sections students can learn to present ideas and argue through problems. This is a critical skill that you really must have as you go out into the world. There is not a single profession you can choose in which this skill is not important. Almost no one is comfortable speaking in class at first, so don’t think you’re alone in being nervous about it. But wouldn’t you rather develop the ability to speak in public in a setting where your performance earns only about 1/12 of 20% of your grade in one of the many courses you’ll take in your college career, rather than at your first job, where your performance in meetings might well determine your employment status? There are tricks to making speaking in class easier (below).

History discussion sections are not supposed to mimic lectures, with a teaching assistant reiterating what the professor has said in lecture. The purpose of a history section is not to clarify the lectures (as is often the purpose of sections in science courses). History discussion sections have a different format, and a different goal. If you’re confused about lecture material, of course you should ask the T.A. if s/he can help, but don’t be surprised if s/he refuses to spend class time going over what has already been covered. S/he has a different agenda, set by the professor, and cannot spend large amounts of time going back over lecture material. If you’re confused and can’t find your way clear using the textbook or reviewing your notes, then visit your T.A. during his/her office hours.

Tips to Make Speaking in Class Easier:

Act. Of course you’re uncomfortable putting your ideas out there. Everyone is (including me!). But imagine how you would act if you weren’t nervous. Then do the act. Gradually speaking your ideas out loud becomes easier and more natural.

Learn the names of your classmates. Your college years are the time for you to meet new people and, yes, make contacts for the future. Can you imagine working with a colleague for three months without learning his or her name? Of course not. So why pretend that your classmates are so interchangeable that you don’t need to bother recognizing them as individuals? You may well end up meeting someone whose interests coincide with yours, or by whom you are impressed enough that when you need a graphic designer for your new start-up company, you know whom to call. At the very least, you won’t have to deal with the ridiculousness of referring to your classmates by pronouns after spending three months in their company.

Discuss things. Sections are not supposed to be a time to chat with the teacher. Discussions mean that you should talk to your classmates, while the T.A. acts primarily as a facilitator. This is not unlike a discussion of the last Red Sox game around the lunch table. You may not have something wildly original to say; actually, you agree with what the gentleman sitting two seats away just said. If that were the case, you wouldn’t sit there woodenly, watching other people talk. You would nod, or interject “I agree with Mike on that. The Red Sox should never have traded Clemens,” or in some other way indicate your interest in the conversation. If you’re not a fan, and the Red Sox discussion is losing you, you wouldn’t sit at the table silently. You would say: “Wait a minute. I’m lost. Who’s Clemens, and why is he so important?” Or you would even say: “I can’t get into the Red Sox. Baseball leaves me cold. European football is a far more important sport nowadays, since it’s followed by the entire world.” And if someone at the table wasn’t involved, you would ask him or her what s/he thought. Often, that would turn out to be the person with a slightly different perspective that s/he thought didn’t really fit the conversation and so was quiet, but when asked, made a point that got you to rethink the whole issue. This is exactly what should happen in classes, although the material should, obviously, be related to the week’s class material.

Now, how can you participate if you’re really lost? Ask questions about what people say: “Carole, could you say a little bit more about that? I really don’t understand how this material shows that Andrew Jackson was operating for the good of the majority.” And in the rare instance where you’re caught out having not done the week’s reading? Pass the ball to someone else. “I’m not sure what I think about this issue yet. I’m interested in the approach Maya is taking, though, and I wonder what Oleg would say about it.”

Speak up in the first two weeks of class, even if it’s just to say, “I agree.” No one has any expectations about your behavior in the beginning of the semester and, even if you’ve never made a peep in a class before, no one will know that. You can start speaking up and people will just assume you’re comfortable speaking in class. If you wait much beyond the third week, though, it will get harder to speak with each passing class.

Remember, too, that you have a responsibility to your classmates in discussion sections. Because of the nature of sections, you need to pull your weight to enable them to learn. We’ve all been in discussion sections which are deadly because only two students have done the work and the rest sit like statues. That’s not fair to anyone, and there’s no way a teacher can save such a class, since it won’t work without the students doing their share. Your responsibility includes making a section work well. If someone is floundering, help. If someone never speaks up, include him or her in the discussion. If you find yourself talking too much, work to throw the conversation to someone else by asking what a classmate thinks. While there is an ultimate payback for this behavior in your better understanding of class material, there is also a more immediate one. Did you save a classmate who was lost? Next time you falter, s/he’ll help you. But if you don’t….

And yes, all these skills translate directly into the skill set you need for your career—any career.

Rules for Discussions:

No fist fights. (I had to put that in… and yes, I had one in a class, once, but not over the class material).

Comments of any sort that make your classmates or T.A. uncomfortable are never appropriate. This includes political statements, incidentally. You are always welcome to talk and even argue about politics in my classes, but you must be respectful of all opinions that are not hate speech. No attacks on fellow classmates; no blanket name calling, as in: “All ------s are idiots! They all think that….” No referring to a group with which a classmate identifies by a derogatory name: “babykillers,” “fascists,” or “treehuggers.” All statements need to be backed up with verifiable facts, not just talking points from a political party.

If you want to make general comments linking the week’s material to a different issue, fine, but you cannot try to turn the week’s discussion into a detailed fight over another issue unless the entire class has access to the same materials to which you’re referring and unless the entire class wants to have that particular discussion. If an issue needs clarification and a resort to outside materials, it needs to be deferred to the following week, when everyone has looked at the relevant materials.

Actual explanations of outside issues and how those issues might relate to the week’s material are always welcome.

What you wear can make your teachers and classmates uncomfortable. If you want to wear something that makes a statement because you want to take a stand, that’s fine. But don’t carelessly put on a shirt that makes a sexual statement or show up in clothes that would be inappropriate to wear to your job because you’re not thinking. How you dress does affect the way you’re regarded. It’s hard to take seriously a student who shows up in a shirt that celebrates drinking or drug use, and it’s downright offensive to have to deal in a professional setting with someone wearing a shirt that makes overt sexual comments (women are just as guilty of this as men are, by the way). Someone once told me that the more powerful you are, the less flesh you show. Think about it. When was the last time you saw Dick Cheney in ratty shorts and a “The Liver is Evil; it Must be Punished” t-shirt?

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IV: How to Read for a College History Course

In an essay on "Success" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear." Careful reading is difficult to master. Undergrads in history find it tough to get that kernel of truth buried deep in a document. Others search long and hard for the thesis in a haystack with little luck.

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order, Heather Cox Richardson gives advice to college students on close reading. She poses some crucial questions students should consider when they make their way through that microfilmed newspaper article, court record, diary entry, novel, census record, television program, or monograph.


How to Read for a College History Course
Heather Cox Richardson

There are two types of sources in history: primary sources and secondary sources. They should be approached very differently.

Primary sources are things produced at the time. Letters, photographs, census records, songs, movies, advertisements, newspapers, TV shows, paintings, emails, and books are all examples of primary sources. Primary sources tell historians about the world at a certain time, and how people who lived then saw their world.

When you read a primary source, you need to read every word very carefully. You want to figure out who produced the source, and for whom it was written. A letter from a Confederate prisoner of war to his elderly father describing the black Union soldiers who had captured him would be very different than the memo from the black soldiers’ captain commending their actions, and neither would exactly reflect what had happened. (Think about it—a letter to your grandmother describing a day of college life would be a very different thing than a letter to your best friend describing the exact same day and, again, neither would be one hundred percent accurate).

Why was the document—or film, or canvas—produced? When James McLaughlin wrote his book My Friend the Indian (1910) was he trying to excuse his role in the murder of Sitting Bull? When Frank Triplett wrote The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882) was he attacking the Republican government that controlled Missouri and the rest of the nation in the 1880s? The answer to both of these questions is yes, and as a result both authors strongly slanted their telling of events. No one produces anything without a bias, so you need to know the author’s agenda when s/he produced the source, to give you some sense of what can and can’t be learned from the document. McLaughlin is fairly reliable about mid-nineteenth-century Lakota treaties, while Triplett is reliable only for giving us an excellent picture of how ex-Confederates perceived the postwar Republican government.

When and where was the primary source written? A Southern version of Reconstruction written in 1868 would be dramatically different than one written in 1890, just as a letter to a friend about an exciting new job would be very different after five years of overwork, underpay, and an eventual sacking during a downsizing, even though both letters were about the same job and were written only five years apart.

Finally, a question most students have trouble answering: What does the source say? What can we learn from it about the time in which it was written? This will be much easier to decipher once you know the “who, when, where, and why.” Think, for example, of Jimi Hendrix’s famous version of the Star Spangled Banner performed at Woodstock in 1969.

Without any context except a knowledge of rock and roll history, his version has meaning for guitar fans, but someone who had never heard of Hendrix, or the song, or the era would probably dismiss the piece altogether as “a bunch of utter garbage,” as a student once called it when we listened to it in class. With a knowledge of the history of the song as the nation’s anthem, Hendrix’s position as America’s premier guitarist at a time when African Americans and Native Americans were demanding rights in the nation, the context of the Vietnam War, and both domestic and international challenges to America’s stratified society, and the story of Woodstock, it becomes a vital piece of America’s history.

Secondary sources are things written after the period, which analyze primary sources to make an argument about how we should interpret the events of the past. In history courses, secondary sources will usually be books or articles, but they can also be documentaries or websites.

You read a secondary source very differently than you do a primary source. Your goal in reading a secondary source is to discover the author’s argument, and to see what evidence s/he marshals to support that thesis. Once you have a handle on the argument and its evidence, you need to analyze whether or not you buy the argument, and why you’ve taken your position.

To read a secondary source, begin with the introduction, even if the professor has not assigned it and has asked you to read only a chapter or two of the book. Historians tend to say what they’re going to say, then to say it, then to say what they’ve said. Introductions almost always lay out the argument of the book. Once you’ve read the introduction, skip to the conclusion, looking again for the argument of the book. In the conclusion, an author usually summarizes the book’s thesis. Stay in the introduction and conclusion until you are certain of the book’s argument.

Once you know what an author is up to, read the body of the book. The most efficient way to do that is to read the introduction and conclusion of each chapter, to see how the argument progresses, and then to go back to the beginning of the book and move through it, reading the topic sentence of each paragraph. By now you should have a very clear idea of how the book works and how the argument develops. You can now go back and read the book to see how the author uses evidence to support his or her points. Check footnotes sometimes, especially if something seems forced. Is the source a solid one, or does it seem insufficient to support the point it makes?

This is a different way of reading than you are accustomed to, and it will seem awkward at first. It’s worth developing the skill to do it this way, though. This is by far the most efficient way to read secondary sources in history (and many other subjects), and will give you the best command of the material in the shortest time. Remember, what matters is not how many hours you spend reading, but whether or not you actually understand what you read. A student once told me proudly that he had taken all day Saturday and Sunday to read every single word of a book I had assigned although he didn’t understand any of it. Personally, I can’t think of a more thorough waste of a weekend. Please recognize—as he didn’t—that simply passing your eyes over the letters on a page is not a good use of your time.

Once you have command of the book, think about it. Do you agree with it? Did the author make his or her point by using factual evidence that supported the conclusion? If not, what seemed wrong? Did s/he make a sweeping argument about nineteenth-century American society and use evidence only from a few decades? Did s/he put into footnotes critical information that contradicted the argument in the text? Does the argument seem radically different than prevailing thought? Does it appear forced, without adequate and believable sources? Does it seem to make assumptions about the past in order to fit a specific theory? Or does the book seem to make a solid argument about the past that illuminates the way society works? Do you agree with the argument? Does it change the way you think about things?

Thinking about a book doesn’t have to take place at a desk. It’s a good way to take up time when you’re walking somewhere, or doing repetitive exercise, or even going on long drives. Make thinking about your studies part of your life. This, too, will be a habit that takes some effort to acquire, but will stand you in very good stead in the future, when you’ll have work issues that require more thought than you can give them during work hours.

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.