Historians' (and our?) habits of thought

The December issue of Perspectives on History, published by the American Historical Association, has a fascinating column by president Kenneth Pomeranz, who teaches at the University of Chicago. He thinks that historians have more to offer than just background knowledge about the past -- that they have ways of thinking that may be distinctive and certainly can be useful elsewhere. I'll just list them here (read the whole thing!) so that we can ask ourselves the question: How much do we think in these ways?

Historians, he says,

* add context as they add sources. (Why here? Why now? What do other sources say?)

* juxtapose a variety of materials and consider them together.

* notice how things change over time, and what difference it makes when some things change faster than others -- in other words, short-term changes and long-term changes may not move in the same direction. (Pomeranz's example is how railroads for decades actually increased the demand for horse travel.)

* consider when and how to simplify and generalize without oversimplifying.

No moral here, just food for thought.


Harold Henderson, "Historians' (and our?) habits of thought," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted  26 December 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : viewed [date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Don't confuse me with the facts!

Writing over at the American Historical Association's blog AHA Today, Allen Mikaelian considers the implications of Jonathan Gottschall's book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human for historians (including, IMO, genealogists):

Facts have little to do with being human, when compared to all that story has accomplished. The public’s inclination toward an engaging story over and above things that historians value, like contingency and complexity [not to mention evidence -- HH], isn’t just a matter of personal choice or intellectual laziness—it’s a successful, hard-wired evolutionary adaptation that allowed societies to be built and genes to be passed on.

That gulf separating the careful historian from a general reading public has deep and functional roots. Historical thinking, if Gottschall is right, is not just an “unnatural act,” it’s the kind of thinking that would have, in the wilds from which we emerged, gotten us killed (or at least kicked out of the gene pool).

By all means read the whole thing. Mikaelian goes on to discuss some new attempts in history teaching to get students acclimated to other important aspects of historical thinking in addition to good storytelling.

I'm perfectly happy to commit the unnatural act of trying to think about evidence as well as story. But as genealogists -- who in this context are also public-oriented historians -- we need to be sure we don't lose sight of the stories, and our audience.



Allen Mikaelian, "Historians vs. Evolution: New Book Explains Why Historians Might Have a Hard Time Reaching Wide Audiences, Getting a Date," AHA Today, posted 9 May 2012 (http://blog.historians.org/articles/1650/historians-vs-evolution-new-book-explains-why-historians-might-have-a-hard-time-reaching-wide-audiences-getting-a-date : accessed 16 May 2012).

Jonathan Gotschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

Harold Henderson, "Don't confuse me with the facts!" Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 18 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Is your source in Google Books under a wrong name?

Those with better sound quality than mine will want to listen to a YouTube snippet embedded in David Walsh's report from the American Historical Association conference in San Diego. In it, Prof. Paul Duguid of UC Berkeley's School of Information criticizes GoogleBooks for mishandling "metadata," or in plain language, getting book titles, authors, and dates wrong. (Commenters please add or correct if I have missed anything pertinent due to poor audio.)

There are big-picture policy reasons to be worried about this (primarily that Google may already have squeezed out any significant competition, and their scanning may be the definitive one), but from the practicing genealogist's worm's-eye view, the moral is to treat the Google One just like any other source: prone to error. Look for variants, mistakes, and alternative ways of searching.