Resources for Writing a Historiography Essay

Welcome everyone. I'm Christopher Jones, faculty in History, and I'm Peter Van Cleve. I'm also a faculty in History and we're here to welcome you to this unit on historiography. So what you're gonna see um this is an introductory video, but a series of videos after this for help on how to write a historiography essay. And so Pete, why do we write his story? Why are, why are people being assigned to write historiography essays in the first place? Right? Because you must no, but um more, more practically and more seriously the act of his, his the process of his graphic thinking is something that makes history unique. Uh You know, every field does research, most fields have some kind of literature review where you're trying to figure out what is the knowledge about this subject at that time. History is unique in that we are interested in the longer term we're interested in the exploration of how was that knowledge produced. And then what impact does that knowledge mean for the present? Because as as historians, we recognize that production of knowledge is temporal, it matters if you're writing something in the 19 hundreds versus if you're writing something in the two thousands. And so historians pay close attention to the evolution of that knowledge. Yeah, I think that's great. And so, you know, one level we do historiography because that's what historians do and make, makes us distinct. But, but as you're getting at the real key about this is, it's also about how we understand knowledge and the creation of that knowledge. History is not only interested in what happened in the past, but historians recognize that what happened in the past was shaped um have whatever shaping that happened, but how we have narrated that past has changed. And so understanding that is essential to our own production of knowledge and figuring out how did we get to the point where um here are where the trends in the literature actually are. And so that look at the past, that sense of evolution over time is really crucial to what it means to be thinking about historical knowledge and how we fit within it, right? And, and also too that with that the the production of knowledge that we talked about, right also has a direct impact on the research that you do in in reality, right? You cannot write a history paper without primary sources, but you also can't write a history paper. As you learn the training of historians as you were becoming historians, you also can't write those history papers without knowledge of that. His gray, you need to recognize the works that you are standing upon right there. There's nothing new under the sun and it's incumbent upon you to figure out where do these conversations come from? What has been the evolution of those conversations? And then crucially once you know that you can then make an assertion, here's what I'm contributing to that conversation, which is exactly what we want you to do in your research papers. Yeah, exactly. And that, the point of this is, it helps you. Right? You do not have to reinvent the wheel. Historians do not start from scratch. We start by building on really smart people who've worked really hard in the past, understanding what they've done. And historiography is the key point of doing that. So we hope that the set of resources helps invite you into historiography. It's actually a very intellectually vibrant and exciting topic and we hope these resources help, make it easier for you to do that in your essays. 

Welcome to a lecture on historiography argument. So you've already seen videos about how to read some things to keep in mind. And here I want to talk specifically about what kind of argument are you gonna make in your historiography paper? And here I want to distinguish three types of arguments you might make using historical um sources. So the first type are research arguments. These are the ones you develop in your 5 91 classes. I'm not gonna talk about them much here, but they're typically based on primary sources and they're typically narrow in scope because you're answering a new question something someone hasn't looked at ideally with sources. People haven't um used a lot or at least that there's something new to say. So they're kind of smaller in scope, but you have all kinds of research classes on that. Um I don't wanna talk about that too much here. The second category though is really important. There's a category we can call historical synthesis arguments and the idea for this and this is a very common instinctive thing we might do. Um say you want to know what was really the cause of world War one, you might go out and read 10 books on that and then weigh the evidence, each presents and then come up with your own argument for why World War One happened about. Um, based on what those 10 books said or, you know, people debate about like, what's the proper period of the progressive era? Right? Does it begin in 18 95 or in 1900? Does it end in 1915, 1920 19 thirties? Right. So you could think about answering that question by reading eight works on the subject, seeing who makes the best argument and going along and doing that. That is not what a historiography argument is. Um And I wanna make very clear that that is not what you are up to right now. Instead, we're in this third category, which is historiography, arguments. And fundamentally, these are questions about how has a literature changed over time. OK. So again, this is the sort of overarching um emphasis for what goes on in the historiography essay, you're comparing multiple works and you're asking what makes them similar and different and particularly thinking about when they were published, how they build on, respond to one another and how they alter the development of a field. So let me give you six possible ways this could go and this is not a comprehensive list, there may be other things and when you read your works be open to what they are. Um But here's some that give you an idea on it. So one possible thing is people could change in the methods that they use. So for example, uh earlier works might have relied entirely on archival collections and later works may start to integrate oral history or they may start to integrate new digital methods. And that may open up new possibilities, new types of arguments and change the literature. That way there can also be shifts in schools of thought. It might be that works. Um In the nineties had a lot of discourse analysis, works from the seventies had a fair amount of Marxism in them and that that shifts over time in interesting ways. Side note watched the um lecture later on this page about changes in historiography over time to be attentive to those schools of thought. Um A third major category is who are the actors? Are historians starting to bring in different actors than were included before often. It's the case that older histories focused on great white men and that a lot of newer history has sought to expand the peoples whose stories have been sought to be told and should be included with it. So that's another possible category. Another choice is maybe that the period is debated, maybe people are actually making arguments that, hey, you know, actually we don't want to start World War Two in 1939 because if we take Asia seriously, it's starting earlier in the thirties or maybe we need to go all the way back to the Treaty of Versailles from World War One. or making other arguments like that about when events begin and end because when events begin and end has a lot to say about what their effects are. So look for whether people are sort of trying to change the period of how um things are studied. Another major category is to look at sources. So who brings in new sources and how does that affect the argument? And is there even any breakthrough in sources? So in some topics of study, there are archives that are newly discovered or some government records are officially classified for 25 or 50 years and then become open and allow people to say new things. Sometimes there's um uh new governments take over in countries and they decide to open the archives of the old ones that previously weren't being available. So sometimes in his particular historical moments, a bunch of new documents become available or this is kind of related to methods, new methods might make new sources available and that changes the stories historians can change in our understanding of those events. This last category of normative judgments is also there historians in many, many times may be writing either what we call sort of positive um or Dench stories like, right, this is a set of events where things got better or it got worse. Um Often we know history is complicated and there's always some good and bad. Um But historians may change over time and how they weigh the costs and consequences of that. And that's something that they debate and you may find your authors disagreeing about that. So these are six things you might look for. They're not the total, keep your historical senses on as you're reading your works for just what's going on. But hopefully this points you to some things you might pay attention to um as you're doing that. Now, let me give you two examples by former students of a type and I'm gonna move myself off the screen here so that this can actually be um read here. Um But Amy Kappen Hofer wrote on Brazil's church and state relationships during the country's military dictatorship from 1964 to 85. And she writes political scientists and historians who wrote shortly after the end of the military regime, often had to rely on official sourcess or public statements in the 19 nineties. Previously, secret documents detailing space, state policies, acts and repression allowed researchers to explore new topics in greater detail. Early works focused on the establishment and efforts of lay organizations in relation to the Catholic church. In these works, the government appeared as a foil but the works focused heavily on the church as those documents were more readily available works in the last 20 years. However, and that's a great historic graphic phrase works in the last 20 years indicating the change over time that's going on um have used an expanding source base in the opening of government records to challenge previous assumptions again, challenging previous assumptions, great historiography phrase and getting out what you want to and then expand their focus to more fully explore the regime's role in a 40 year period. Scholarship on the military regime and its interaction with religion in Brazil saw important changes in the sources available to historians, their methods used and conclusions reached. So it's a great job of laying out change over time pinning it particularly to sources and then showing how um showing how those new sources are gonna advance different arguments. And obviously, the arguments will have to come out in the paper. The one paragraph doesn't get everything, but it's giving you a sense of where we're going and what types of arguments or um Amy Evison wrote a paper on the 18th century transatlantic fur trade. And so she writes that during the 18th century, the European desire for a good felt hat represented much more than a sartorial choice. Instead, the existence of beaver hats embodied a complex relationship of Intercontinental trade, social cultural exchange and economic adapt adaptation that would change the face of North American indigenous history. Now we switch to really the historic gra claim in the last four decades, scholarship regarding the North American fur trade that occurred across the northern regions of modern day Canada in the United States has been focused on re centering indigenous agency within the historical narrative. And more specifically how questions of race and gender influence the structure and economic viability of trade relationships. So it's again, this particularly the switch to in the last four decades, this is what's been going on. So these are types of historical arguments um that we want you to be looking at and making. Now, the final thing I wanna say is that um you have an option to add your own gloss at the end of your paper. Now, the core task of the historiography paper is to properly pick a set of literature and assess it and track its change over time. Now, when professional historians write historial essays, particularly for publication, they usually conclude with this set of recommendations for how they think the field should develop. So most of the essay is backwards looking, understanding how a field has come to be how it is and characterizing its current state. Um But most published historiography end with look forward. And so people say things like, for example, well, history of capitalism would actually be really beneficial if it took more account of changes in environmental history and brought that in, or it might say this field has done well, but it is utterly neglected this group of actors that's overlooked. And the field needs to take account of these people and their experiences to really understand what's going on. Um often it takes the forms of this field to tackle neglected topics like X and Y. Um I wanna be very, very clear. You do not have to do this in your historiography paper. It is fine that your conclusion um simply offers a recapitulation of your paper that ties it together. It doesn't directly repeat the introduction, it says something new, but it is based on what you have found from your, um from your findings. That is fine for most of you. That's what um you're going to do and there's no problem with that. I just want to throw this out that if you do wish to, you can choose to have a conclusion that offers some reflections on what you think are the most encouraging trends in the field or note what you think might be missing or promising direction for future research. Um That's sort of the cherry on top if you're interested in engaging with it. So I hope this is helpful. Obviously, you'll hear some similar things in the other lectures about this, but I wanted to particularly highlight what does a historic graphical argument look like and what you might um what that might look like in your text. So, thanks for watching and good luck writing your paper.

Welcome to this lecture as part of our effort to produce some information, helpful to writing historiography essays on structures. I'm Professor Christopher Jones and I hope you'll find this useful as some information to think about how to organize your historiography essay. And it really boils down to butchering Hamilton uh butchering Hamlet, excuse me to lit review or not to lit review. That is the question. And so I wanna argue there are two dominant approaches to writing a historiography essay that you're likely to use. It's possible as mentioned at the end that you have a different one. And that may be OK, but most fall into this category. And so the real question fundamentally is, do you have a standalone lit review section or do you integrate it into your whole essay? And when I talk, talk about the lit review, I'm talking about the one paragraph summary of each work that is referenced in another lecture in the series that I encourage you to watch. So, I'm gonna argue there's a simpler and clunkier approach that you should not feel sad to use and I encourage you to start with and a more elegant approach that is harder to implement, is not necessary, but is something to consider as you go along. So the simpler approach and here I'm gonna assume that most historiography essays review a set of literature and find a few different thematics on it. Um Sometimes there's one overarching thematic that pulls through and guides everything, but often it's a sort of series of two or three themes that you're gonna look at. So I'm gonna assume that structure. But I think with what saying, you'll be able to see how you would adapt it, even if you had um a different number of body sections. So like any essay, you're gonna have an intro and conclusion, nothing I'm talking about here affects that. What I'm talking about is the body here. And so the simpler approach is to have an introduction and then have your first section be a literature review. And in the that literature review, you are say you have six works under consideration or eight works under consideration. You are just gonna say this essay is built on analyzing these works and you're gonna put them in order of their publication date from oldest to most recent and you're gonna write a one paragraph summary of each of them. Um And it's just gonna be sort of stand alone one after another um presented clearly. Then when you say get to theme one, you're gonna talk about how theme one is illustrated in your 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th work. For example, when we do a historiography essay, it's not, it's not always the case that every theme has every work. So you would write theme one with 1,2,4, and five, you'd write theme two with works 2,3,5, and six. And perhaps teams, theme three would have 1,3,4, and six. And in each of those, you'd be just looking very specifically at what that theme was. And then you'd conclude, conclude there's a more challenging but also more elegant approach if you can pull it out. And this is to drop the lit review sec- section altogether and just be sure that you introduce the one paragraph essay describing the work each time a new work is introduced into your analysis. So it's gonna be a little complicated, but I'm gonna try and like talk through how it works and I'll give you a couple examples on the next two slides. But say you write your introduction and then you go to theme one and in theme one, you're talking about books 1,2,4, and five. And so each time you introduce a theme, it would get a paragraph description and then you would move to analyzing the narrower theme. So the one paragraph description is the whole book, the things we talked about in the other lecture on that essay uh on the one paragraph um summary that goes in your essay. So when you get to theme one, you say Author X is important to theme one. Here's a description of Author X's work. And then after that, you get into the more specific work of how Author X deals with theme one. And then you'd say, but author two has a different take on theme one. Author Two's book, give the one paragraph description and then say to the particular theme one, here's how Author Two works on it. Now say you do that and the first theme, every par-, every essay is going to be newly introduced or every sorry new work that you're studying is gonna be newly introduced. And so you're gonna need a one pair of description on it. Now when you move to theme two, you'll see here that you have already introduced books two and five in the theme one section. So when you move into theme two, you can talk about theme two. And when you mention work two, you no longer need to give the paragraph description of work two, work two because you already did it. So you can move directly into your analysis of how work two integrates with theme two. But then you transition to the third work and you have not described the third work. So before you can analyze theme two, in regard to that third work, you need to introduce that with the magic summary paragraph. Um then you move to theme five and you have already introduced theme five. So you can go directly into um how work five, excuse me introduces theme two. But then you're introducing work six, which you haven't done anymore. So you have to give the paragraph background on work six bef- before, before you get into that theme two. And then when you get to theme three, you've already covered every book. So you can just go directly into your analysis of theme three. All right, let me give you a couple examples of how this might work. So if you're on theme one, you can say the first theme of this essay is the increasing use of nontraditional archives. This analysis begins with Joe Schmo's 1975 book "History is Good". And then you would write the one paragraph description of Joe Schmo's "History is Good". Now you transition into what your theme one is. And so you'd say Schmo's book was based on a narrow archive consisting of the papers of elite white males. And now here you would go into the very specific analysis of Joe Blow or sorry Joe Schmo and his archives and how that goes. Um All right, now you've set up Schmo and how it goes. Now we switch and we say, but in 1983 Jane Blayne made an important contribution to the field with her work "My history is better". And so first you'd offer a one paragraph description of that book and then you'd move back into theme one. And so then you'd say Blayne expanded the archives considered by historians of this area, by integrating a series of unpublished journals written by non elites. And you would go on to describe them, right? And that gives you a sort of pattern for what that would look like. What you have to do in this model is just keep in mind every time a work is first introduced, you have to step back and give that paragraph summary and then step back into the more specific analysis you're doing. Um So then let's say we move on to um theme two. So we're going into theme two and it starts with Jane Blayne, who we've already done. So we're gonna say the second development in this literature concerns the rising interest in the agency of consumers. So Jane Blayne advanced this point by arguing that female consumers shape the nation's economic development. And we can just go right into how Jane Blayne has thought about female consumers and how that has expanded what this literature was paying attention to. We don't need an overview because that was already done in the first one. Now we go to George Porge who's the third author. Um and George Porge has not had his work described late. So we say George Porge built on Blayne's insights and his 1992 monograph, historiography is the best. Um which is why you're watching this because historiography is the best. So but we haven't introduced him. So now we need a one paragraph description of his book and then we can move back to the thematic and say Porge shared Blayne's interest in consumers but sought to emphasize it was urban consumers whose decisions were most consequential. So we're focusing on theme two but providing the background when we need to. All right. So a few final reflections on this, you are going to find it easiest to at least write your first draft in the lit review format, just get those paragraphs right and get your analysis of the themes clear. Um And if you're confident in your writing and your essay is going well, that's when I would encourage you to try layering in pulling, pulling out that section and gracefully layering those paragraphs in where your authors are first mentioned. But this is not necessary. I wanna say that it is not a requirement that you do so. And my third point here is it's better to be a bit clunky with very clear analysis than to try and get really clever with your writing and have the arguments lose their clarity, their traction and their impact. So better to be clear and clunky than elegant seeming and messy. The second point here that I want to emphasize is if you use the integrated approach, your sections will not be the same length. Your first section will probably be the longest because it will have the most paragraph summaries your second, middle length and your third even shorter. In general, we want papers to have balanced lengths but that is not a problem for historiography essay if the difference in lengths between the sections deals is mostly derived from how many descriptions of the book contents they have. I would say it's important to try and have the amount of analysis of each theme be roughly equivalent between the sections. Now, it's not going to be the same, but, you know, an essay that had five pages of analysis on theme one and a page and a half on theme two and a page on theme three would not be very balanced. An essay that had three pages on 1,2 on the next and 2.5 on the other that's, you know, fine and normal within that. My final note here is if you can imagine a structure that's different than these two that you really want to use for your essay, it's entirely possible that's fine. You may want to consider running it by your professor first just to be sure. So I hope this is helpful on thinking through um organizational structures for your essay as you write your historiography.

Welcome to this lecture on writing historiography essays and particularly the one paragraph summary. I'm Professor Christopher Jones and this is part of an effort several of us are collaborating on to help provide some advice on writing historiography essays, which is an important genre for historians, but one that's not always familiar. So we want to talk in these various lectures about ways to make it better. So this one is focused on the one paragraph summary of each work under consideration in your historiography essay. And so why are we doing this? You need to have a one paragraph summary of each work to explain the book or article clearly to a historian who has not read it. So we'll often talk about writing in a way that's accessible to nonspecialists. The historiography essay is a specialist genre and we write it to other historians primarily. So what you want to think about for your audience is some other historian think about it as one of your peers in your class, someone who knows about history and what historians do, but doesn't know the specific work that you've read. And so you're seeking to both demonstrate your understanding of the work, but also in a really compact format brings someone else up to speed. So they at least understand the broad contours of the work you're discussing to make sense of the specific arguments that you're doing. So there's a kind of a formula for doing it and it's not always easy to write, but sometimes having a formula helps things become a little easier. So when you're doing this, want to think about, I'll start with my last bullet point here. But you wanna think about 4 to 7 sentences and about 90 to 150 words is your length. And you wanna start with the classic journalist questions. Who, what, where, when, how, right. So who wrote the book? When? What's its title? And then we wanna layer in the key things historians think about. So what is the main argument or contribution of the book? What methodologies is the historian drawing on? Is it a social history, cultural history, intellectual history, a combination of them. In particular, historians pretty much always care about what kind of sources the author uses to build their argument. Now, the key challenge of this paragraph is that of course, you cannot cover everything. So you're gonna have to be very selective. But the goal is to provide just enough information that it gives a sort of orientation to the work to the reader so that they help um can help understand it. And again, even the professor in your class may not have read all the works you do. And certainly when you take a historiography to the Capstone, you're gonna be sharing it with faculty members who likely will not have read those works. So these summaries are really essential. So let me give you a couple examples of what this could look like in practice. So here's a paragraph about a book I know and use that's unlikely to be one that you have come across. And so I'm starting with a very factual beginning of the description, the Pricing of Progress. The title written by E like Cook in 2017, analyzes the rising use of economic indicators as a way Americans understood themselves and their society from the early 1700s into the first decades of the 20th century chronology is crucial to historians who try to get in there. So then I moved quickly to that Cook's argument is that the spread of financial calculations during this period encouraged Americans to apply capitalist logics to matters of everyday life that had previously escaped market logics, including questions of community life and social value. Now I'm moving a little quick to methodology. Integrating the history of statistics with the history of capitalism. Cook bases his arguments switching to sources on the writings of economists, government reports including census data and he gives particular emphasis to periodicals, including newspapers and financial trade presses. So that's 110 words, it's really concise. It doesn't tell you everything about the book. It's not a book summary, it's not a book report, but it's trying to give some key points that give the person an access to at least some of what's going on. A second example, if you took 640 you may have read some of Jeremy Hopkins um from Herodotus to H net. So here's what it might look like in a work you might be familiar with. So Jeremy Popkin from Herodotus to H-NET is a synthetic analysis of historiography trends in the Western academic tra tradition since the time of the Ancient Greeks first published in 2016. The book's main contribution is to lay out the major shifts in how historians have approached their craft. Written largely for students is an introduction to historiography, he book covers topics such as religious historical traditions. The rise of professional historical practice in the emergence since the 1960s of new methodological approaches including social history, cultural history and the greater inclusion of women and minorities. Popkin draws almost exclusively on secondary sources to describe what he calls a quote meta discourse among historians about how to best narrate the events of the past. So I want to flag a couple of things in here. One powerpoint is not good about footnotes. So I've used inline citation, make sure you follow proper citation practices on your paper. I also included one quote here, but I want to encourage you not to quote heavily. This is a very dense condensed paragraph and bringing in quotations is gonna kind of end up loading it and making your job harder. So if you have a couple select really short quotations, it's ok and, and it might even enhance it, but do not feel obliged to do so. And I think if you're on the fence about it, I encourage you right with your own words first. And a third example, some of you may have also engaged with "Silencing the Past". So an example on this would be a 1995 anthropologist Michel-Rolph Troulliot published "Silencing the Past" since it's not a historian, it's probably worth mentioning where they come from. And this is an exploration of the craft of history with a focus on how power shapes the production of history, a thematic collection of essays covering specific historical moments such as the Alamo or the memory of Columbus's landing. It's the most evocative chapters deal with the Haitian revolution. A moment  Troulliot labels as a quote unthinkable history as Western historians were both unable and unwilling to maintain an accurate accounting of the slave revolt. And again, we wouldn't want a footnote for that quotation through the history of Haiti. Haiti and its neglect by historians, Troulliot articulates a central concept of silencing and the unequal distribution of power that causes some narratives to be elevated, while others are silenced, relying on secondary sources to pinpoint the moments from fact creation to publish monograph, Troulliot's work challenges the historical profession to more carefully consider how power contours, the information they know and the stories that they tell. So again, this is another example of how it could work. Perhaps with a, a work you might be familiar with to see how it goes. There's no one right way to do this. Just keep in mind those big questions. But the key point about this again is assume your reader has not read the work and so you need to provide a background to them. And if you write paragraphs like this, it will help people get that. Thanks for listening and good luck writing your essay.