Sara Mayeux, a PhD candidate in history at Stanford, has posted a series of Model Paragraphs by historians and other writers, along with her insightful comments. Those aiming to improve their own writing will learn from her comments, and they may wish to try the exercise themselves.
In preparation for my fall courses, I have substantially revised my Examples of Critical Reading, adding several more examples and a taxonomy.
In preparation for my fall graduate research seminar, I have added a new page to this site: “Reverse Engineering for Historians.”
In January 2007, I posted a Thesis Statement Template, designed to remind students of the essential elements of a thesis for an analytical history paper.
Why did [person/persons] [do/say/write something surprising]? [Plausible explanation], but in fact [better or more complete explanation].
Though many works of history have theses that can be phrased in this manner, they only occasionally take this exact form. But I recently came across a published work that follows this formula almost exactly:
How did Syria come to this pass? While some observers see in recent events a parallel with 1989, with the break-up of the East European–style system introduced by the Baathists in the 1960s, this is no velvet revolution, nor is Syria like Jaruzelski’s Poland. The regime’s violence is not ideological. It is far from being the result of an emotional or philosophical commitment to a party that long ago abandoned its agenda of promoting secular Arab republican values and aspirations. The regime’s ruthless attachment to power lies in a complex web of tribal loyalties and networks of patronage underpinned by a uniquely powerful religious bond. [Malise Ruthven, “Storm Over Syria,” New York Review of Books, 9 June 2011]
I have added this passage to the Thesis Statement Template page.
Richard White ends his new book, Railroaded with an intriguing methodological claim:
Unlike economic historians, most historians have, until relatively recently, been reluctant to engage in counterfactuals on the seemingly incontrovertible grounds that what did not happen is not history. But I have come to think that the opposite is, in fact, true: we need to think about what did not happen in order to think historically. Considering only what happened is ahistorical, because the past once contained larger possibilities, and part of the historian’s job is to make those possibilities visible; otherwise all that is left for historians to do is to explain the inevitability of the present. The inevitability of the present violates the contingency of the past, which involves alternative choices and outcomes that could have produced alternative presents. To deny the contingency of the past deprives us of alternative futures, said for the present is the future’s past. Contingency, in turn, demands hypotheticals about what might have happened. They are fictions, but necessary fictions. So it is only by conceiving of alternative worlds that people in the past themselves imagined that we can begin to think historically, to escape the inevitability of the present, and get another perspective on issues that concern us still.
Ironically, Railroaded (though a very fine book in other respects) does not do a particularly good job fleshing out its counterfactuals, particularly the bit about “alternative worlds that people in the past themselves imagined.” Did Gilded Age Americans seriously consider trying to settle the West without any transcontinental railroads? Or with just one? Or with several under public ownership? Or without any public capital? White hints at all of these possibilities, but he does not explain whether there was a significant consituency behind any, or what the country would have looked like had they been pursued.
I do agree with White that we need to explore counterfactuals to understand what was at stake in any given debate. D. W. Meinig’s maps of a Greater and Lesser United States, for example, help me appreciate the gravity of the debates of the mid-19th century.
Welcome to the latest version of my teaching website. These pages originally appeared on my personal domain: schrag.info. In the summer of 2010, I moved them to their own domain, using a WordPress installation on a shared hosting service. In March 2011, that site was hacked, and in trying to fix the damage, I broke WordPress. So I have now moved the site to WordPress.com, in the hopes that it will be more resistant to both hacking and to my own bumbling. As of this writing, I have not yet migrated all the pages, but I hope to complete that task soon. Wish me luck!
In addition to seeking greater reliability, I hope to do more blogging on this new site, covering ideas about the study and teaching of history.
