How to adapt methods from works about different places and times
Sometimes the historian is the first to take on a specific topic, so there is neither a need nor a possibility to explain previous historical scholarship on that topic. In such cases, the historian can instead explain how other historians have written about similar cases drawn from other places and times.
In The Princeton Guide to Historical Research (p. 280), I note that many historians structure their works in three parts (plus an introduction and conclusion), allowing for a thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. I borrowed this idea from drama and cinema.
Now I learn from Elliott Kalan’s Joke Farming: How to Write Comedy and Other Nonsense that jokes can work the same way. He writes:
Let’s look at a joke from the all-time great stand-up Rita Rudner:
I broke up with my boyfriend. He wanted to get married, and I didn’t want him to.
You could break it down as “setup/punchline” structure, like this:
Setup: “I broke up with my boyfriend.”
Punchline: “He wanted to get married, and I didn’t want him to.”
Or this way:
Setup: “I broke up with my boyfriend. He wanted to get married,”
Punchline: “and I didn’t want him to.”
But to me, it feels more elegant to break down the structure like this:
Act 1: “I broke up with my boyfriend.” (establishing a premise)
Act 2: “He wanted to get married,” (bridge, providing new information)
Act 3: “and I didn’t want him to.” (payoff, with surprising, but logical, information)
It’s nice to think I have something in common with great comedians!
On February 17, 2026, Professor Carly Goodman posted the following query on BlueSky: “crowdsourcing for my MA students: do you have a scanning app you like for archives? I used turboscan and save documents as pdfs within box/folder folder system in dropbox that mirrors the archive’s system–but is there something newer/better that you do and that works?”
Note: for my own latest batch of archival research, the lovely folks at George Mason University Special Collections set me up with their CZUR scanner, which I suspect works better than any phone-based app, and you don’t need to worry about battery life. PDFs get saved on your laptop.
Great OCR, but may require a paid, Pro account for best results.
Replies to query lacked details, but people seem to like it.
“lets you size photos on your phone, save as pdf, name according to your system, and export to cloud storage”
“can mimic the structure of the archive on your phone and automatically upload to dropbox or whatever”
“automatically converts images to OCR ready PDFs”
Goodman’s own choice. Also integrates with Dropbox.
I’ve set up a new section of this website to share scripts and macros that I use in my research and teaching. Some I’ve written, some I’ve adapted from others, and some I’ve prompted AI to generate.
Here’s the list of the 36 history audiobooks I listened to in 2024.
On Bluesky, Caroline Dodds Pennock is asking for “a handout/model that they’ve used effectively to show students how to read an academic article?” I can’t post a PDF there, so I’ll post one here and send a link.
I have posted a list of the thirty-eight history-related audiobooks I listened to in 2023.
On June 29, 2023, Professor Anne Foster of Indiana State University posted a query on Twitter: “For all the #twitterstorians , what’s your favorite methodology article? Particularly interested in ones that helped you “get it” in grad school. Looking for inspiration/readings for my “intro to grad study of history” class.”
Having received dozens of helpful suggestions, she compiled them in a bibliography, which she has graciously permitted me to reproduce here:
Continue readingEvery few months history Twitter runs a thread about what software to use for note-taking. (See, e.g., threads recently started by Austin McCoy and J.Meléndez-Badillo.)
I wrote a whole chapter of The Princeton Guide to Historical Research on this topic, the gist of which is that historians have mostly abandoned our simple, easy-to-teach system based on 5 x 8 inch notecards, but we have yet to settle collectively on a computerized system to replace it.
Here are some more thoughts along those lines, and an explanation of the centrality of FileMaker Pro to my workflow for major projects.
