Where Should the Thesis Go in a College Essay?

Jonathan Rees

My 11th grade English teacher was named Joan Goodman, and she was very particular about how she wanted us to write our essays. The first sentence was where the thesis went. I’m sure she didn’t put it this way, but the second sentence was where you would repeat the thesis in different words in case the person grading it was too stupid to get it the first time you wrote it. The rest of the first paragraph was for elaborating on your thesis as you began to foreshadow what would appear in the body of the essay.
Ms. Goodman told us that her method was the same method they used to teach writing to the cadets at West Point. I’ve never checked into that, but I believe it because she was equally regimented in the way she drilled her model into our heads. Ours was not to ask why. Ours was just to do or . . . Well, maybe not die, but at least get a grade too low for us to get into the Ivy League schools to which we all aspired. I internalized her methods well and it served me well for a very long time, especially in history classes by substituting facts for quotes from the novel at hand.

As I don’t write college essays anymore, this structure no longer has a great impact on my own writing. It takes pages not sentences for me to get most of my arguments out, and thankfully the blog posts that I write, which are the length of some college essays, usually have no theses in them. (Otherwise, I doubt that I’d enjoy writing them so much.)

I do, however, subject my own students to the Joan Goodman/West Point writing model even if I pride myself in being a little less martial about it than she was. If you’re writing a paper that’s longer than eight pages, there’s no reason you can’t have one of those flowery introductions that most English teachers seem to love. You’ve got a lot of space to fill. The same thing goes for people who like to put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph. If it’s going to be a long paper, there’s no reason that you can’t elaborate on what the thesis means as well as the rest of the paper in paragraph number two.

However, when it comes to the four to six page papers that are the bread and butter of the upper-level undergraduate history course, I might as well be a drill sergeant. Even though I don’t remember Ms. Goodman ever explaining it this way, I have come to see the first sentence as the prime real estate in any college essay. It is not just the only sentence where a student can be assured of their professor’s undivided attention, it is the perfect place to set up for an explanation of what the student is thinking (which has always been my main criterion for grading).

A few weeks ago in my labor history class, I got the worst pushback I’ve ever experienced on this from one of my students. “I’ll give you your first sentence thesis, but next semester I’m going back to writing it the way I like it,” she told me. While I wish I had the quick thinking skills to compliment her on her newfound flexibility, my response was slightly different. “I don’t want you to write this way because I tell you so,” I explained. “I want you to write this way because you think it’s the best way to write.”

It’s at that point when I started singing. I don’t sing well, so I don’t do it often, but I do think it illustrates my reasoning (not to mention Joan Goodman’s) here well. Imagine an opera singer doing scales. They begin low, gradually get higher and end with a note that catches your attention. The problem with that in a writing context is that every note in a first paragraph should catch your attention. That’s the only way that anyone can make a complex argument well. A good first paragraph, in other words, should be all high notes.

In my experience, students who put their thesis at the end of the first paragraph think their heavy lifting is then over. Without explanation and elaboration, the thesis falls to the wayside for the rest of the paper and I’m left reading mostly book summary. Using the end of the paragraph thesis model is too often an excuse to stop thinking. Putting the thesis at the beginning forces them to explain what they mean in some detail before they ever get to the details of the history at hand.

I teach writing not just because I have to, but because I get better papers that way. This, in turn, makes my job more fun. So thank you Joan Goodman (as well as a few other excellent English teachers from the Princeton, New Jersey public schools). You’re why I take my students’ complaints that I secretly wanted to be an English teacher as the highest form of compliment.

Getting Students to Read . . .

Randall Stephens

Over at Times Higher Education Tara Brabazon wonders how to get underaduates to care about reading ("Bringing Them to Books," March 9, 2011). I enjoy Brabazon's snarky reports from across the Atlantic. This one is particularly witty and relevant.

"One short sentence chills the expectations of teachers," Brabazon begins. "A student, in reply to a tutorial question or query about an assignment, shrilly replies: 'I don’t like reading.' This is an ice pick through scholarly culture. It is naive. It is short-sighted. It is foolish. It is ignorant. Without reading, a student is trapped within the limitations of their own life, confusing personal experience with researched expertise. Reading builds a productive network of authors, approaches, theories and evidence." For Brabazon, "Reading is not meant to be liked or disliked: it is a way to understand the views of others." How should professors "support the act of reading," she asks. Brabazon describes her use of GoodReads, a social media site where readers across the world post reviews and comments about their books. "GoodReads enables students to comment on books, meet authors who are registered on the site and commence a dialogue with an array of interested groups." Sounds like a great idea.

In my classes I use other, rudimentary strategies. I usually give a very basic quiz on the day that a book is due in class. (Sounds awful, I admit, but it works.) The quiz is elementary, asking the most simple questions to ensure that students are at least reading the book that we will be discussing in class. In my experience students need to know that reading is not optional and the quiz tends to help.

Still, how can a professor "make" a student care about reading? I occasional begin my classes by describing a recent book--by a historian, sociologist, religious studies scholar--and then using that as a hook for the lecture of that day. I also start off classes by pointing out a history book or a newspaper article that connects the topic we are covering in the class with a current event or a larger historical theme. Maybe, just maybe, that will make students think about how reading and being informed makes their lives richer and more interesting.

We know that reading widely helps individuals develop as writers. So, I tell my students that if they want to fine tune their writing and become better writers, they should read opinion journals, newspapers, serious nonfiction, and the like. William Zinsser puts it well: "writing is learned by imitation." He suggests that students find a writer whose style they like. "Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course."

I'd be curious to know what carrots others use to attract students to the practice of reading.

Is Your Teaching Stuck in an Industrial Paradigm?

Jonathan Rees

A few weeks ago Heather Cox Richardson recommended a video embedded in a post on this blog. I’ve been kind of freaked out about what I heard and saw on it ever since. In it, among other things, Sir Ken Robinson (a guy who I can tell you literally nothing about other than the fact that he’s obviously much smarter than I am) suggests that education, as we know it, is organized along the lines that factories were during the mid-nineteenth century.

Time periods are divided by ringing bells. The instruction in particular subjects is neatly divided into different rooms. Children are brought through the system in batches based upon how old they are. This educational system that we all take for granted was conceived, Robinson suggests, in the image of factories in order to produce people to work in factories.

For me, the idea that I’m doing anything along the lines of a factory is deeply disturbing. Had you asked me why I wanted to be a professor before I started graduate school, I might actually have said in order to be sure that I would never have to work in a factory. I study labor history in large part because I have such great respect for the people who did work so much harder than I do for much less reward. And yet, I don’t want my classroom to resemble a factory setting in any way!

Sometimes, though, I know that factory thinking raises its ugly head while I’m teaching. Whenever I get in one of those funks brought on by a large batch of uninspired answers coming from the students in front of me, I always imagine myself as Brian in that scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where he addresses all his new followers from a window.

“You are all individuals,” he tells them.

“We are all individuals,” they reply in unison.

“You are all different.”

“We are all different.”

“I’m not,” says a guy in the right foreground, just to be difficult.

How do we get more students to think for themselves, even if (like that difficult guy in the foreground) they don’t even realize that they’re doing it? Robinson, who’s mostly discussing secondary school students, seems to be suggesting that the best way to break the paradigm is to give up on standardized testing. Don’t measure output. Measure creativity. Create an incentive system in the classroom designed to foster creativity—the same kind of creativity that kids see in the new electronic media that surrounds them every moment of every day other than when they’re in school.

Leaving the current assessment craze in higher ed aside, trying to break the paradigm in the college history class seems like a much more difficult task than it would be for secondary schools, as the vast majority of the colleagues I know would already rather retire than ever hand their students a standardized or multiple-choice history test. We grade on composition, not memorization, but an essay produced as part of a system conceived along the lines of a factory probably isn’t the best possible essay it can be.

So what can you do to foster creativity in our students other than just shout “Be creative!” and hope you don’t get a response like “How shall we be creative, oh Lord!”? (That’s a variation on another Life of Brian joke there, by the way, but I can’t explain it on a family-friendly blog.)

Trying to make myself feel better, it wasn’t too hard to think of a few things I’ve already done that at least in theory promote this effect. For instance, I’ve tossed out the textbook this semester (and have been blogging about it here). You can’t get much more top down than most textbooks, with their declarations of what happened coming from an omniscient narrator with the voice of God. No ambiguity. No nuance.

But now I feel like I should be doing more. Robinson alludes to collaborative work and implies that more interdisciplinary instruction can be done, but alas doesn’t suggest how. So what are you doing to break down the education/industrial paradigm or have you (like me) not yet fully come to terms with the fact that you’re perpetuating it?

Jonathan Rees is Professor of History at Colorado State University - Pueblo. He blogs about history, academic labor issues and other matters at More or Less Bunk.

Reading Clothes, Hair Styles, Architecture, and More

Randall Stephens

I'm teaching a course this semester on American history from 1783-1865. I'd like to introduce the students more to everyday life than I have in previous years. So, I'm asking questions like: How did Americans behave, dress, eat, live, work, worship, and play? What can we learn from reading the material culture and the manners of, say, the Early Republic or the Age of Jackson?

A look at Jack Larkin's excellent The Reshaping of Everyday Life: 1790-1840 (Harper, 1989) seemed like a good place to start. The book is part of a series that examines the intimate and public lives of Americans in a given period. I read a couple of short passages to the class on Thursday. For example, Larkin says this of how Americans were greeting each other in the Jacksonian period:

Shaking hands became the accustomed American greeting between men, a gesture whose symmetry and mutuality signified equality. The Englishman Frederick Marryat found in 1835 that it was 'invariably the custom to shake hands' when he was introduced to Americans, and that he could not carefully grade the acknowledgment he would give to new acquaintances according to their signs of wealth and breeding. He found instead he had to 'go on shaking hands here, there and everywhere, and with everybody.'

All this will overlap nicely with a book that the class is reading--Leo Damrosch's wonderfully entertaining and insightful Tocqueville's Discovery of America (FSG, 2010). In Damrosch's telling Tocqueville was quite sensitive to the styles, cultural peculiarities, and attitudes of the Americans he encountered in his trek across the country in 1831 and 1832.

I have been doing some searches on-line for websites and resources for the teaching of material culture. I wonder if their is a one-stop site that would include bibliographies and short summaries of what material culture and style can tell us about a given era? What can we know about American men over the decades by looking at changes in facial hair? (That topic would certainly lend itself to an interactive graphic.) Or, as one student asked me several years ago: Why did men have outrageous mustaches and lambchops--like cats and walruses--in the 1850s-1870s and why did so few have the same in the 1920s and 1930s? I don't really know. For those later decades, maybe faces were supposed to look like the fronts of streamlined trains. What can we learn about men and women, children and adults, in the Jacksonian period by looking at the clothes they wore? How might we compare those styles with ones from today? Can we speak about the democratization of architecture, speech, or, as Larkin writes, physical greetings?

Students seem to have fun with these kinds of topics. I do as well, though, I know little about them. So . . . if anyone out there knows of some on-line resources to get at these kinds of material culture and cultural history questions, please let us know.

Stonewall, the Mafia, History, and Teaching

Heather Cox Richardson

A week or so ago, a group of high school sophomores asked me what the Stonewall Riots were. I could give the basic survey answer: 1969, New York, the spark for the gay liberation movement. The basics. But my young friends wanted to know more. What, exactly, happened, and why?

We went to the internet to poke around. And there, on some basic website, we found a throwaway line that went something like: “although the Stonewall Inn was owned by the Mafia . . .”

This was certainly news to me, so I wrote to ask Jennifer Fronc, author of New York Undercover, about it. She studies moral policing in communities and law, so I figured she might know why the Mafia owned a gay bar. She did. She answered:

The Stonewall Inn, and most gay bars in NYC at the time, were, in fact, owned by the Mafia (or at least petty criminals of Italian-American descent). The reason that they owned them was purely as a business venture--not out of some sense of civil rights or justice. The New York State Liquor Authority had very strict codes about dress and conduct in public houses, and you could easily lose your liquor license if your patrons did not abide by those codes. So, in the case of gay bars, the codes that affected the patrons were no same-sex kissing, touching, or dancing, and your patrons were required to wear 5 articles of clothing that corresponded with their biological sex (this was targeting drag queens but ended up nailing dykes much harder). So, what started happening is the cops would raid gay bars and frisk/strip search the patrons to make sure they were wearing the right clothes. Bar owners couldn't afford to pay off the police or get back their licenses after raids like this, so the mafia stepped in and started running the gay bars and paying off the local cops….

The Stonewall Inn was a frequent target of those raids, and there are 2 theories as to why they rioted that night, which was like any other: 1. they were just fed up and 2. the memorial service for Judy Garland had been earlier that night, and the men were drunker than usual. Although it was allegedly a tough dyke who threw the first punch at the cops.

For contemporary newspaper clippings, she sent me to an online exhibit at Columbia University:

This is, itself, one of those great connections in history (like Elvis and Nixon) that make it possible to survive January in New England. But it also raises for me two other issues.

First, it indicates the importance of a renewed historiographical interest in societal systems. In this case, the New York code dictating dress in public had huge implications for gay culture, suggesting that we must understand the legal codes in order to understand what happened at Stonewall. That code also clearly had big economic repercussions for business owners, suggesting that we cannot understand discrimination without looking closely at the economic systems with which it is intertwined.

There is a strong tendency among historians of America to see legal history, economic history, political history, and the study of similar systems as old-fashioned and reactionary, but it seems to me the very opposite is true. We can’t understand most aspects of social history completely without these systems factored in.

Second, the fact these high school students came to a neighbor who teaches history for information on Stonewall speaks to this blog’s on-going discussion of teaching. They asked me about Stonewall because they have a teacher who always has the answer to everything. They figured out in the first two days that she was often wrong, and their education has taken a fascinating turn. Rather than being turned off to history, the students have made it a game to learn everything better than she knows it. (The Stonewall question apparently came up when she tried to tell them that the “Stonewall Riots” had something to do with Stonewall Jackson.) Had she assigned them an essay on Stonewall, they likely would have grumbled and done as little as possible. But since they were doing it for themselves, they took their own time to find answers, and they didn’t stop with the job half done.

While making things up to drive students to try to embarrass us is hardly a model for how to teach, it does suggest that our job is less to have all the answers than to have enough answers just to whet curiosity, and then to make sure our students know how to keep learning. This, curiously enough, is the conclusion of a new study on learning conducted at the University of California.

[Thanks to Jennifer Fronc for her information, and for letting me post from her email.]

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching? Part III

Randall Stephens

Guess what? Many college students do not learn analytical and writing skills during the four years they spend in college. Students don't study. Courses are not demanding. Collaborative learning does not work like professors think or hope it does. . .

Or, so argues a new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press), by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. More and more students--more likely parents--are throwing down the cash for college. But the authors ask: "are undergraduates really learning anything once they get there?"

Last week the Chronicle highlighted Academically Adrift and the authors' controversial findings. (David Glenn, "New Book Lays Failure to Learn on Colleges' Doorsteps," Chronicle, January 18, 2011.) Arum and Roksa tracked 2,000 students at 24 four-year colleges. Thirty-six percent of these students who took the Collegiate Learning Assessment essay test showed no significant improvement from their freshman to senior year.

Arum and Roksa certainly have their critics. The study asked too few questions about collaborative learning, say some. Others say that the study, limited in scope, should not challenge the whole undergraduate enterprise.

But, overall, the findings should give us pause. "Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa don't see any simple remedies for the problems they have identified," writes David Glenn in the Chronicle. "They discovered more variation in CLA-score gains within institutions than across institutions, and they say there are no simple lessons to draw about effective and ineffective colleges." Still, Glenn points out that business and education programs in Texas colleges require that students "take only a small number of writing-intensive courses." The path of least resistance.

Are students today less likely to major in history when the workload is high and the perceived payoff is so low? ("So I'm going to spend all this time reading primary and secondary works just so I can be unemployed after four years of reading, writing, and reading some more?") Five years ago Robert Townsend noted in Perspectives that: "Information from the latest Department of Education (DoE) report (pertaining to the years 1997–98 to 2001–02) suggests that in the competition for students, history lost ground while the total number of undergraduate students at colleges and universities grew quite quickly." I haven't see more recent data, but I can't help but think that there are fewer majors today then there were 20 years ago.

Perhaps history departments could do a better job of emphasizing the portable skills students learn in the major. Why not stress in clear terms that history trains students to think critically and to write clearly? I have my students read Peter Stearns excellent essay, "Why Study History," for this very reason. They learn that history students gain: "The Ability to Assess Evidence. . . . The Ability to Assess Conflicting Interpretations. . . . Experience in Assessing Past Examples of Change." Stearns ably shows that "Work in history also improves basic writing and speaking skills and is directly relevant to many of the analytical requirements in the public and private sectors, where the capacity to identify, assess, and explain trends is essential." I've also had students read Heather's excellent post on this subject from our blog. She noted: "History is the study of how and why things happen. What creates change in human society? What stops it? Why do people act in certain ways? Are there patterns in human behavior? What makes a society successful? . . . . When you study history, you’re not just studying the history of, for example, colonial America. You’ll learn a great deal about the specifics of colonial America in such a class, of course, but you’ll also learn about the role of economics in the establishment of human societies and about how class and racial divisions can either weaken the stability of a government or be used to shore it up."

Sounds like a cure for the "I-learned-little-in-four-years-of-college" blues.

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching? Part II

Heather Cox Richardson

Randall asked a good question in his post wondering whether or not college and university professors are encouraged to improve their teaching. He has inspired me to blog about teaching issues in a more systematic way than I have before.

Today the topic that is consuming me is assessment. This is not a new obsession, either on my part or on that of the profession. We’ve talked about assessment for years. . . but what have we learned?

What, exactly, do we want our students to learn in our classes? Long ago, I figured out I should design my courses backward, identifying one key theme and several key developments that were students’ “takeaway” from a course. That seems to have worked (and I’ll write more on it in future).

But I’m still trying to figure out how to use assessments, especially exams, more intelligently that I do now. My brother, himself an educator who specializes in assessments, recently showed me this video (below), which—aside from being entertaining—tears apart the idea that traditional midterms and finals do anything useful in today’s world.

Shortly after watching the video, I happened to talk separately with two professors who use collaborative assignments and collaborative, open-book, take-home exams. They do this to emphasize that students should be learning the real-world skills of research and cooperation just as much—or more—than they learn facts. As one said,

facts in today’s world are at anyone’s fingertips . . . but people must know how to find them, and to use them intelligently. This is a skill we can teach more deliberately than we currently do.

These two people are from different universities and are in different fields, but both thought their experiment had generally worked well. One pointed out—as the video does—that the real world is not about isolation and memorization; it’s about cooperation to achieve a good result.

The other said she had had doubts about the exercise because she had worried that all the students would get an “A.” Then she realized that it would, in fact, be excellent news if all her students had mastered the skills she thought were important. When she actually gave the take-home, collaborative assignment, though, she was surprised—and chagrined—to discover the same grade spread she had always seen on traditional exams. She also saw that some of her student groups had no idea how to answer some very basic questions, and that she would have to go back over the idea that history was not just dates, but was about significance and change.

And that is maybe the most important lesson. The collaborative exam revealed that there were major concepts that a number of students simply weren’t getting. So she can now go back and reiterate them.

I’m still mulling this over, but I do think I’ll experiment with collaborative assessment techniques. Historians have some advantages doing this that teachers in other fields don’t. We can ask students to identify the significance of certain events, to write essays, and to analyze problems. With the huge amount of good—and bad—information on the web in our field, though, we could also ask students to research a topic, then judge their ability to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate sources (something that might have helped Joy Masoff when she was writing her Virginia history textbook).

As I’ve been thinking this over, a third colleague has inadvertently weighed in on it. He discovered students had cheated on a take-home exam, working together and then slightly changing each essay to make them look original. At least an assigned collaboration would eliminate the problem of unapproved collaboration!

Teaching: An Imaginary Course on Very Cool Books

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, I killed some time creating an imaginary American history course. Its theme was not an investigation of some specific period of time. Instead, it was historiographical . . . in a peculiar way. It covered all the books that were revelations to me early in my career.

My course was chronological through my study of history. It started with Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a book that has been criticized from every direction and yet still seems to me to have gotten the most important part of a book right: it tried to answer a crucial question that sits at the heart of the conception of America. How did men who owned human beings come to espouse a philosophy of human freedom?

The next, obvious, book for my course was Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, a book I’ve cited so many times it’s the one citation I know by heart. The idea that political ideology was a world view created from ideas and experiences was such a revelation to me that I have spent my life studying it.

Richard White’s Middle Ground held me so spellbound that I read the entire thing standing up in the middle of a room; I couldn’t take the time to sit down on the couch ten feet from me. Who knew that you could look at American History from a completely different geographic perspective and tell a story that made sense—even more sense—than one told from the coasts?

I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in that same house, reading it cover to cover through the night during a week when I was the sole caregiver for a toddler and an infant—a good reflection of the significance of the book, but not a good decision for an already sleep-deprived mother. That anyone could weave such a textured portrait of colonial life out of the jagged threads of jotted phrases proved to me how much could be done in history, if only one had imagination and dogged determination.

At this point, though, my enthusiasm for my course slowed. The problem should be easy to see, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it until I actually taught White’s Middle Ground in a historiography class once. These books were such classics from the minute they appeared that their ideas have been incorporated into our general understanding of the past. While I was wildly excited about Middle Ground, my students remained unmoved. Finally, one of them explained that while the book must have been a revelation when I read it, they had never known any historical world in which what he wrote wasn’t common knowledge. They couldn’t get excited about something that was to them, as she explained, “wallpaper.”

So I went back to the drawing board for my fantasy course. This time, my “classics” would either be newer, or less widely known.

Elliott West’s Contested Plains makes the cut easily. It’s a thorough portrait of the relationship of humans to the environment through a close study of the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s, but West doesn’t stop there. His larger point is the immense power of ideas, and he steps out of the safe tower of the academic historian to suggest that it is imperative for humans to imagine new ways of living together.

Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley is still my favorite example of just what strong narrative technique can do to illuminate history. His rip-roaring portrait of the search for just why Leon Czolgosz murdered the president does more to bring the late nineteenth-century to life than almost any other book I can think of. Hey, he even explains that Czolgosz was pronounced “Cholgosh.” For that alone, the book belongs on a list of classics.

Like American Slavery, American Freedom, Bonnie Lynn Sherow’s slim volume Red Earth asks the right question. If Indian, black, and white farmers all got land in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, and if they all lived under the same laws, why did the white farmers end up with all the land? Her careful, detailed study of the answer to that question has a number of surprises, and complicates our picture of race in America.

OK, here’s a surprise one: Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln is about archaeology . . . mostly, sort of. Mazrim is an archaeologist, and he puts the archaeological record back into his investigation of the human history of the Sangamo region of Illinois. The book combines history with an explanation of how archaeologists work and the meaning of what they find. And Mazrim has an unerring eye for the great anecdote or piece of evidence. Who knew a book about dirt in the Sangamo region could be a page-turner, but it is.

I’m going to leave this here, with four old classics and four new ones. But I’m not going to drop this idea (there is, after all, always time to kill). Other suggestions for books that introduce new ways to look at the historical world are most welcome.

Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Professors Teaching?

Randall Stephens

Academics are, by nature, hand wringers. We worry about the decline in the humanities. We worry about grade inflation. We worry about the troubles of academic presses. Once in a while we worry about the state of teaching. Or, to paraphrase our former president, "rarely is the question asked: is our professors teaching"?

Quite often the appraisal of teaching is negative, though academics and non-academics offer different points of view. In the popular imagination, the old stereotypes persist, as Anthony Grafton points out, with tongue firmly in cheek:

We don’t teach undergraduates at all, even though we shamelessly charge them hundreds of dollars for an hour of our time. Mostly we leave them to the graduate students and adjuncts. Yet that may not be such a bad thing. For on the rare occasions when we do enter a classroom, we don’t offer students close encounters with powerful forms of knowledge, new or old. Rather, we make them master our “theories”—systems of interpretation as complicated and mechanical as sausage machines. However rich and varied the ingredients that go in the hopper, what comes out looks and tastes the same: philosophy and poetry, history and oratory, each is deconstructed and revealed to be Eurocentric, logocentric and all the other centrics an academic mind might concoct.*

Across the water, historian and filmmaker Tariq Ali and and Harvard historian and teledon Niall Ferguson speak to the BBC about what they see as the abysmal state of history teaching. (Hat tip to the AHA.) Students stop pursuing history in England at an early age, says Ferguson. And what history is taught is "too fragmentary." Ali agrees, saying that what is presented is, basically, "worthless," and hobbled by a chasing after so-called relevance. They both argue that the old anachronistic, triumphalist, island history of Britain, should be avoided, but students need a larger narrative. "It could hardly be worse than what is going on in schools today," concludes Ferguson.

How does history teaching fare in America's colleges and universities? Are teaching awards more than a feather in the cap? Do promotion and tenure committees value persistently good evaluations and commend teaching effectiveness in the same way that they reward scholarship? Do peers sit in on classes and make assessments? Do departments do anything when a professor continues to receive poor teaching evaluations one semester after another?

Nearly ten years ago Daniel Bernstein and Richard Edwards proposed that we need more peer review of teaching in the Chronicle. "[I]f educators are going to sustain the progress made, we will need to move toward a more rigorous and objective form of review," they wrote. "The goal of peer review has been to provide the same level of support, consultation, and evaluation for teaching that universities now provide for research." I can't imagine what the results of such efforts have been. Certainly, peer evaluation can turn into a messy, political business.

Does graduate training in history prepare men and women for classroom success? Budding historians spend far more time in graduate school working on research, parsing theory, and getting the historiography down. Less time is devoted to developing teaching skills and, at least as it was in my case, there is not much mentoring on teaching. (Most grad students I encountered came prewired with an interest in teaching. So, that was a plus.) Could graduate training be better oriented to prepare good history teachers? What would that look like?

Screening the Past: Films for the Second Half of the Western/World Civ Course

Randall Stephens

I've compiled a list below of films that I use for a course I'm teaching this semester, The West in the World since 1500. I usually use short selections from these. Roughly 15 minutes of film for a 1 hour and 15 minute class seems to work well.

Most of the documentaries and features included below use historians as commentators. Many contain archival photos, paintings, and prints; artful dramatizations; and vintage film footage.

A DVD search on the WorldCat site can usually yield movies on a wide range of subjects. (Though I've been surprised that there are not enough good ones on 17th-century topics: European wars, absolutism, colonial encounters, advances in science . . . I'd also like to find more history docs on Africa, Asia, and the Middle East . . .)

In the past I have included embedded video segments in the PowerPoint presentations I use for lectures. (The free software Handbrake is the best I've found for ripping DVDs onto my MacBook. It's easy from there to put them into a presentation. See also this tutorial on how to download and embed YouTube videos into a PowerPoint slide. I have not tried this, so I'm not sure how well it works.) I've not been entirely happy with the quality of ripped videos, and the size of the files makes them a little impractical. YouTube or a simple cued-up DVD works much better for me.

In the list below I've thrown in a number of DVDs that I've not been able to use in class. (Far more feature films could be added to this, too.) In chronological order:

Luther (2004).

Martin Luther (PBS, 2003).

Empires: Islam: Empire of Faith (PBS, 2001).

Conquistadors (PBS, 2001).

The Return of Martin Guerre (1984).

Classical Destinations (Sky Arts, 2006), YouTube clip of Versailles, Louis XIV, and Paris.

Versailles (2004), YouTube, multiple sections.

Vatel (2000), see trailer.

Girl with the Pearl Earring (2004).

John Adams (HBO, 2008).

The French Revolution (History Channel, 2005), entire film can be watched in sections on YouTube.

Egalité for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution (PBS, 2009).

The Lost Kingdoms of Africa (2010).

Slavery and the Making of America (PBS, 2004).

Amazing Grace (2007).

Charles Dickens (Biography, 1995), watch instantly on Netflix, if you have an account.

A History of Britain (BBC, 2000), I use sections from episodes on Industrialization. See YouTube clips.

Guns, Germs, and Steel (National Geographic, 2005), I use part of the last episode, which can be watched instantly on Netflix.

The Young Victoria (2009), watch instantly on Netflix.

China's Boxer Rebellion (History Channel, 1997).

The Last Emperor (1987), watch instantly on Netflix.

East Wind, West Wind: Pearl Buck, the Woman Who Embraced the World (1993).

The Great War (PBS, 1996).

Influenza 1918 (PBS, 1998).

Matisse Picasso (2008).

Sigmund Freud: Analysis of a Mind (Biography, 1997).

The People's Century: Red Flag, 1917 (PBS, 1997),

The War of the World: A New History of the 20th Century (PBS, 2008).

The Crash of 1929 (PBS, 2009).

Nanking (2008).

Europa Europa (1990), watch instantly on Netflix.

Downfall (2005).

Frontline: Memory of the Camps (PBS, 2005).

CNN: Cold War (1998), I use an episode on the iron curtain and the red scare.

1968 with Tom Brokaw (History Channel, 2008).

About the United Nations: Decolonization (1999), not an easy one to track down.

The Road to 9/11: A Brief History of Conflict in the Middle East (PBS, 2006).

See also, "Some Films I Use for My Colonial History Course"; "Dancing about Historiography: At the Movies with a Methods Course"; and the March 2008 issue of Perspectives Online, which was devoted to film.

Some Films I Use for My Colonial American History Course

Randall Stephens

I've mentioned on the blog before that I like to use short film clips (10-15 minutes) for many of the classes I teach. I suppose it works better for some courses--America in the 1960s--than others--History Methodology. But thanks to long-running programs like American Experience, Nova, POV, History Detectives, etc, there's much, much out there.

You just have to be willing to do some hunting, inter-library loaning, and some screening. Below are documentaries and features I've found useful for my Colonial America course. Browse the list and I'm sure you'll think of others that could be included. (In the future, I'll post a list from my class on The West in the World since 1500.)

Films for the Colonial American History Course

The Mystery of Chaco Canyon (1999) (Narrated by Robert Redford. Though a more interesting, up-to-date take on Chaco is in the 2010 nat geo adaptation of Jared Diamond's Collapse.)

Native Land: Nomads of the Dawn (1996)

We Shall Remain, Episode 1 (WGBH, 2009) (Contains great material on the first contact between English settlers and Indians. Also includes a good overview of King Philip's War. I combined it with a reading from Jill Lepore's Name of War. Watch the full program on-line.)

The Magnificent Voyage of Christopher Columbus (WGBH, 2007)

Surviving Columbus: The Story of the Pueblo People (KNME, 1992)

Luther (2003) (A good feature film to teach students a bit about the Reformation.)

The New World (2006) (I can think of no other film that more beautifully, graphically presents the Jamestown story. One reviewer called it a visual poem. Good description.)

Nova: Pocahontas Revealed (WGBH, 2007)

Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower (2006)

The Story of English: Muse of Fire (WGBH, 1986) (One of my favorite documentaries from PBS. Excellent summary of the development of the southern accent [West Country] and the Boston, dropped-r accent [East Anglia].)

American Visions: The Republic of Virtue and The Promised Land (1996) (This is the crusty Aussie art critic Robert Hughes's epic series on American art. Contains a discussion with David Hackett Fischer on Old Ship Church in Hingham and an examination of 17th-century decorative art and architecture. Goes along very well with Fischer's Albion's Seed.)

Colonial House (2004) (How well would the typical college student fare in a 17th-century setting? One word, bathroom.)

God in America, Episodes 1 and 2 (WGBH, 2010) (Will be using this when it comes out. Have seen the pre-release version of the first two episodes. Tremendous. Includes accounts of the Pueblo Revolt, the trial of Anne Hutchinson, George Whitefield and the GA, and more. When this airs on PBS Oct 11-13 the full program will be available on-line.)

500 Nations: Cauldron of War (1994)

Slavery and the Making of America (WNET, 2004) (I use episodes 1 and 2: The Downward Spiral and Liberty in the Air for the colonial course.)

Tom Standage interview on his History of the World in Six Glasses: CBS Sunday Morning (2005)

The War that Made America (WQED, 2006) (French and Indian War series.)

Scientific American Frontiers: Unearthing Secret America (Alan Alda's tour of Jamestown and Jefferson's Monticello. Great perspective on how archeology informs history.)

New York: The Country and the City, Episode 1, 1609-1825 (1999)

Benjamin Franklin (2002)

Thomas Jefferson (1997) (Ken Burns's doc.)

John Adams (HBO, 2008)

Liberty! The American Revolution (KTCA, 2004)

Founding Brothers (2002)

Representing Empires (to Students)

Heather Cox Richardson

This simple graphic depiction of France, England, Portugal, and Spain from 1800 to the present strikes

me as a useful way to start a class on modern world history. It could also work in a class on colonial or modern American history—less so for a nineteenth-century course on the U.S.

The growth and conflicts and jockeying of the dots are interesting enough, but when the video gets to the 1960s, the explosion is so dramatic any student can see just what a world watershed the mid-twentieth century was.

For a single country, see also this animated history of Poland. HT to Ralph Luker at HNN

Goodbye to Teaching

-
See Wellesley College historian Jerold S. Auerbach's description of the joys and sorrows of a last year of teaching. Love what he calls that final year!

Jerold S. Auerbach, "Victory Lap," Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2010.

"As the end approached, I was frequently reminded of my own best college teachers who, in their varied ways, had burrowed under my intellectual skin. . . .

I wanted at least part of my final survey class to be open and spontaneous. In brief concluding remarks, I referred to the pleasures of uncovering the past while trying to make sense of it to students in their very different present. Then we had a delightful conversation. Inevitably, a student asked where I was during the 1960s, and what I had done to save the world. . . .">>>

The Western Tradition . . . Continued?

Heather Cox Richardson

When I teach the American West, I always

start the weeks on the American West as entertainment with “When the Work’s All Done This Fall,” the first cowboy song recorded by Carl T. Sprague. Appearing in 1925, it sold close to a million copies and remains a favorite old time western song.

I had always thought the poem on which the song was based reflected late nineteenth-century America, with its quick deaths, poverty, and sentimentality.

So imagine my surprise this summer, when I heard modern western songwriter Slaid Cleaves doing “Horses Quick as Dreams.” This seems almost to be an updated version of the classic song:

Is the song simply part of a musical tradition? Or is it a reflection of modern American culture?

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.

"I hate history": Thinking of Ways to Get the Average, History-Hating Student Interested in the Study of the Past

Randall Stephens

I'm gearing up to teach a large West in the World since 1500, civ-style class. As usual, I know there will be dozens of students enrolled who care not a fig for history and think historical knowledge is, at best, useless trivia. "I'm a business major. Why do I need to know all this?" My work is cut out for me, as it is for other professors who will be teaching similar gen-ed classes in the fall.

I like to start off course like this with a general "Why study history" lecture. We study the past to know who we are and to know how history still shapes the present, I tell them. History is also our collective memory. Just as we think it is not best for a person to have amnesia, we also think it is best for a society to have a collective memory. I also usually touch on the chief contributions historians have made to our understanding of what it means to be human. And, I spend some time looking at the very different views various historians have concerning the same events.

This year, though, I was thinking about doing something a little different. I plan to pose some general questions/head-scratchers that might get them thinking historically about why things are the way they are and why history matters. So, for example:

In 1931 the historian Carl Becker said: "If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history." Do you have a family history? Do things that happened in your family in the past still shape how you interact with your mother, father, sister, brother, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles?

Show the students a map of the world. Ask: Why is it that the northern hemisphere has tended to contain the wealthiest countries in the world? What light might history shed on that development? Explain Jared Diamond's thesis.

Read them a mid-19th century law on the status of women as dependents. Ask: How do we got from that point A to point B today?

Draw a long timeline, spanning back 200,000 years, the starting point of modern humans. Ask: Why it is that only relatively recently--roughly 5,000 years ago--humans began to record their history?

The historian Mary Beard says that most people today would find the "brutality toward other human beings" in the ancient world to be abhorrent. Throughout most of human history slavery and rigid social hierarchies were taken for granted. Ask: Why do modern western societies value equality and humanitarianism?

Show students some maps from the early modern era and some from the modern era. Ask: What accounts for the fundamental differences in how cartographers drew these maps? What might history tell us about the changing perceptions those in the West and those in the East had of the world?

Quote Johann Gottfried Herder: "History is geography." Ask: Is history shaped or controlled more by geography than any other force? Why or why not?

Does history have a direction? Are we heading "somewhere"? Is society getting better? Is society getting worse? How could we know one way or the other?

Needless to say . . . I'm still thinking through these.

Sailing through California History

Randall Stephens

I've taken students on the occasional field trip to Boston. I've never sailed up the coast with them. (It's hard enough for me to navigate the cow path streets of Beantown.)

Rick Kennedy, professor of history at Point Loma Nazarene University, spent ten days on a sailboat this

May, teaching California history to eight students. (I interview Kennedy in the Youtube video here. We talk about how he teaches the class, the curriculum, and the experiences of students.) The class sounds like a blast. According to Kennedy's syllabus:

The course is not like a classroom course; rather, it is an extended fieldtrip. As such it strives to enhance a student's attentiveness to surroundings and ability to see layers of history at particular sites. On walking tours we want to have a heightened awareness of human history in geography, architecture, and town planning. The sailing will encourage awareness of the wind, currents, and tides that, in the past, had much influence on human hopes, plans, and accomplishments. Fieldtrips should help us learn to see the historical evidence that surrounds us, to read the ways topography pushes people in certain directions, the ways architecture proclaims intentions, and the ways a point jutting into the Pacific draws sailors to its lee.

We read and write too. We center the class on a great classic: Two Years Before the Mast, written by a student who sailed away from college in order to go to California in 1835. The book describes California during an era of political instability when a small number of Californios were trying to figure out what to do with a hard-to-get-to but increasingly desirable land.

The class is largely, but not exclusively, designed for those thinking about careers in teaching or tourism (parks, museums, and historic preservation). Emphasis throughout the class is on methods of thinking about local history that help us understand larger issues of world history, European history, American history, Native American History, missionary history, and varieties of cultural history. We also look for opportunities to cross disciplines into navigation, astronomy, and cartography.

Sign me up, prof!

There's much this class can accomplish. I was particularly interested in how a course like this can get students to think about the hardships and day-to-day lives or those who have gone before us. Sailing up and down the coast was a common enough experience for Californians. Re-enacting that, I think, gives history students new insight, even empathy.

Now, if I can just master that tiny sailboat on the Charles River . . .

Dispatches from the Historical Society Conference, Day 1: History for the Non-major

Randall Stephens

It is hot in Washington, DC. I flew into our nation's capitol on Wednesday and wilted immediately. The heat and humidity, the residue of a former swamp, didn't keep away historians who came to explore the present and future of historical inquiry. On Thursday I attended a few wonderful sessions that explored some of the basic themes of the 2010 Historical Society conference, held at George Washington University, and organized by Eric Arnesen.

The panel on "Historical Inquiry Outside the Traditional Undergraduate History Classroom" considered "past inquiry" outside of the typical history classroom. The question of: Who are we teaching, how are we teaching them, and why? animated the session.

John Thomas Scott (Mercer University) used the term "past" rather than "historical" to indicate the interdisciplinary nature of honors courses and general classes populated by non-history majors. Scott and other panelists looked into the possibilities and perils--perils for historians at least--of working more broadly and reaching out to a larger audience.

How does one get students to think historically about any number of subjects? In what ways do courses primarily taught for non-majors differ from typical history classes?

Sarah E. Gardner (Mercer University) spoke about some of the classes that make up Mercer's honors program. Baseball and American culture, a real draw, includes a class trip to a Florida spring training camp. Gardner teaches a course on Gangster Films in the 1930s. These classes tend to use primary sources. Student engagement with documents, she noted, has been key. Gardner pointed out that these classes typically leave out historiography and the widely differing views of historians. She ended by considering some of the downsides of this omission: There will be some lack of contextualization and argument, among other things.

Doug Thompson (Mercer University) related the institutional dynamics of Mercer and talked about how various disciplines engage a critical question or problem. Mercer's Great Books program, Thompson said, is a major recruitment tool. Great Books curricula ranges over historical material but is not bound by the rigors of the historical profession.

John Thomas Scott rounded out the panel by speaking about the research projects honors students and non-majors complete as part of Mercer's program. He highlighted the proliferation of on-line resources in the last 15 years. That has made it possible for undergrads, even at a smaller liberal arts university like Mercer, to do quality research. (Undergrads have countless journals, newspapers, and original sources at their fingertips.) Scott also focused on how Mercer faculty encourage undergraduate publication and paper presentations. Mercer publishes a couple of excellent in-house undergrad research publications that showcase student work.

There were several intriguing threads that came out during the Q and A. One that struck me was a conversation about what a non-history major really should or shouldn't know. Katrin Schultheiss (George Washington University) asked what an engineering major really needed to know about in depth historiographic debate. In this case, are basic skills history teaches more important? How does history content fit in with that, too? It left us with much, much to consider.

William Zinsser on Writing

Randall Stephens

A couple weeks ago, I posted selections from a Historically Speaking roundtable on "How to Teach the Writing of History." The roundtable included insightful essays by Stephen Pyne, Jill Lepore, Michael Kammen, and John Demos.

I was reminded of the roundtable as I read William Zinsser’s wonderful American Scholar essay, “Writing English as a Second Language.” (The piece was originally a talk he gave at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.) It might seem unrelated, based on the title. But, Zinsser offers up a wealth of wisdom on how to write clearly and effectively. History majors and even well-established historians should heed it.

An editor, writer, and teacher Zinsser has much experience teaching foreign students the craft of writing. “What is good writing?” he asks. What counts as good writing in one language may be bad writing in another. So what is good English? he wonders. “It’s not as musical as Spanish, or Italian, or French, or as ornamental as Arabic, or as vibrant as some of your native languages. But I’m hopelessly in love with English because it’s plain and it’s strong.”

Zinsser cautions readers against “pompous” Latin “nouns that end in -ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in -ent—like development and fulfillment.” Instead, he advises, use plain, direct “infinitely old Anglo-Saxon nouns that express the fundamentals of everyday life: house, home, child, chair, bread, milk, sea, sky, earth, field, grass, road . . .” Simplicity is his motto.

He also warns against the pitfalls of passive voice. This is a real problem for history majors, who, I suppose, assume that passive voice and complex, tangled sentences lend their writing an air of authority or intelligence. Zinsser produces a great example to make his case. He highlights the clear specific prose of Thoreau’s Walden Pond. He then revises the passage with passive voice. “A decision was made to go to the woods because of a desire for a deliberate existence . . .” Ugh. Most will get the point.

Finally, and I think this is a terrific observation, Zinsser notes that good writers need good examples. It’s unlikely that a student will learn much if he or she doesn’t read much. “We all need models,” Zinsser writes. “Bach needed a model; Picasso needed a model. Make a point of reading writers who are doing the kind of writing you want to do. (Many of them write for The New Yorker.) Study their articles clinically. Try to figure out how they put their words and sentences together. That’s how I learned to write, not from a writing course.”

History majors who want to learn how to write well should read those historians whose writing they admire. (Michael Kammen made this point in his contribution to the roundtable in Historically Speaking.) Read those historians whose work has stood the test of time. Why do so many still read the work of Francis Parkman, Arthur Schlesinger, Richard Hofstadter, or Barbara Tuchman? I also tell students to take cues from essays in the TLS, Harpers, the Atlantic, or the New York Review of Books. Observe how a reviewer or essayist sets up a piece. How does a writer vary his or her sentences? How does the writer craft an argument? Come to think of it, a set of questions for students to mull over would be useful.

Teaching the Writing of History Roundtable in January Issue of Historically Speaking

Randall J. Stephens

Graduate students know the drill well. Bulking up on historiography for qualification exams is a time-honored tradition. Who argued what, when, where, and why? What are the contours of the field or subfield? What did the transition from the orthodox position to the revisionist and then post-revisionist schools look like? Graduate students pore over books in dusty libraries and stare, red-eyed, at digitized articles.

Those who train historians pay a great deal of attention to arguments and counterarguments, theses and antitheses. In graduate and undergraduate research seminars professors also stress the importance of analyzing evidence, applying theoretical models, and making a plausible case. But is the same amount of energy and study devoted to the writing of history? “Without the imaginative insight which goes with creative literature,” wrote English historian C.V. Wedgwood, “history cannot be intelligibly written.”

In the lead piece of a roundtable on "How to Teach the Writing of History" (Historically Speaking [January 2009]), Stephen Pyne discusses the importance of train historians how to write and offers useful examples of pedagogy. His remarks are followed by reflections from Michael Kammen, Jill Lepore, and John Demos. I post excerpts from each here.

[The full forum will be available at Project Muse. Subscribe to HS to read more.]

HOW TO TEACH THE WRITING OF HISTORY: A ROUNDTABLE, Historically Speaking (January 2009)

Riding the Melt*
Stephen J. Pyne

History is a book culture. We read books, we write books, we promote and award tenure on the basis of books, and at national meetings we gather around book exhibits. We’re a book-based discipline. But we don’t teach how to write them. It’s an odd omission. We accept statistics, geographic information systems, languages, oral history techniques, paleography, and other instruments as legitimate methodologies; we don’t accept serious writing. Good writing seems to mean using the active voice, not confusing “it’s” with “its,” and where possible, shunning split infinitives. We obsess over historiography, note the distorting power of literary tropes, and list the fallacies of historical arguments, but don’t understand the medium that carries our message. Literary craft remains a black box, like the software running our laptops. Yet we cannot avoid words, and careers rise and fall on the basis of what we publish; we just don’t explain how to transmute research into texts. The kind of writing we do doesn’t even have a name. So while many practitioners seem keen to unpack texts, few seem eager to teach how to pack them in the first place.

Why? It may be that the simple production of data has become a sufficient justification for scholarship. . . .

A few years ago, on a stint as a visiting professor, I was asked to lead a morning seminar on writing. That sparked my amorphous concerns into a desire to offer a graduate course that would address the theory and practice of making texts do what their writers wished. It would be English for historians, as we might offer statistics for ecologists or physics for geologists. It’s been the best teaching experience in my career. . . .

* An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Chronicle Review, July 12, 2009.

Historians on Writing
Michael Kammen

Historians distinguish themselves in diverse ways, yet relatively few are remembered as gifted prose stylists, and fewer still have left us non-didactic missives with tips about the finer points of writing well. Following his retirement from Cornell in 1941, Carl Becker accepted a spring term appointment as Neilson Research Professor at Smith College. Early in 1942 he delivered a charming address in Northampton titled “The Art of Writing.” Although admired as one of the most enjoyable writers among historians in the United States, Becker’s witty homily for the young women that day concerned good writing in general, and his exemplars ranged widely. He cited Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, for example, because “the author’s intention was to achieve a humorous obscurity by writing nonsense. He had a genius for that sort of thing, so that, as one may say, he achieved obscurity with a clarity rarely if ever equaled before or since.” . . . .

. . . Samuel Eliot Morison, who took Parkman as his model, lamented that American historians “have forgotten that there is an art of writing history,” and titled his homily “History as a Literary Art.” Subsequently Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., George Kennan, and C. Vann Woodward also provided instructive essays explaining how and why historical writing might flow in a creative manner that can engage the general reader. . . .

How to Write a Paper for This Class
Jill Lepore

I have got a handout I’ve been using for a while now. It’s your basic, How to Write a Paper for This Class. Everyone’s got one of these handouts. Pyne’s new book amounts to a handout that might be called How to Write a Book for This Profession. I’m glad he’s written it and can’t think of much he’s said, in this excerpt, that I’d disagree with, except that I happen to think that learning how to write essays is just as important as, and maybe more useful than, learning how to write books. I am not convinced that books ought to be the measure of merit in our profession. Nor am I convinced that all historians ought to write books— and, in any case, not all do. Everyone has got to know how to write an essay, though. That quibble aside, I certainly don’t dispute Pyne’s premise: historians generally don’t care much about writing, and they should, although a surprising number believe, pretty fiercely, that they shouldn’t. . . .

Response to Stephen Pyne
John Demos

My first reaction on reading Stephen Pyne’s essay was “hooray!” And so was
my second. And my third. Without much recognizing it, historians have—for several generations now—downgraded the writing part of their task. Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macaulay, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down. What “good writing” has come to mean, in the minds of most historians, is clear and effective communication: getting your point across.

It ought to mean so much more. Pyne is absolutely right to spotlight the importance of evocation alongside exposition, and voice as much as thesis. . . .

I believe, however, that Pyne is mistaken in one respect: his insistence that history be sharply distinguished from fiction. No boundary line divides the two; at most there is a wide and nebulous borderland. Open any work of history, even the most conventional sort, and you will find statements that involve a degree of “making it up.” We are always filling little holes in our evidence with bits of inference or outright invention—whether we acknowledge this or not. (And better, for sure, if we do.) . . . .

P.S.: Robert Townsend has alerted me to an interesting piece he wrote at the AHA blog back in 2008: "From the Archives: Why Can’t Historians Write?" He discusses the perennial conversation about bad writing within the profession. A 1926 AHA report, linked to the post, reveals similar concerns from yesteryear. "Instead of the current bugaboo of postmodernism," writes Townsend, "the authors blame the scientific pretensions of their day for elevating 'Facts' over a more 'humanized' form of writing. And where errant politics is blamed, they cite the excesses of commercialism and the nationalistic sentiments marked by First World War."