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.]

Genealogists and Historians, Together Again?

Jacqueline Jones, who worked along with Mark Lowe, CG, and others on the Lionel Richie segment of Who Do You Think You Are? wrote about her experience in Perspectives on History. I cringed when I saw the title ("A Historian among Genealogists") but she was positive:

My work with the WDYTYA producers and with Lionel Richie reminded me that information about specific family trees holds mass appeal. Genealogical excursions back in time, combined with scholarly analysis of the time period in question, can produce powerful stories that reveal great deal not only about particular families, but about the great drama of human history. Such collaborations, carried out in a  spirit of mutual respect, could very well prove fruitful for the historical enterprise, and for everyone involved.

Jones is the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas and the Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History at the University of Texas at Austin.



Jacqueline Jones, "A Historian among Genealogists: Working on Who Do You Think You Are?," Perspectives on History vol. 51, no. 1 (January 2013): 9-10.

Harold Henderson, "Genealogists and Historians, Together Again?," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 15 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Cronon on Teaching

Historian William Cronon once again hits the bull's-eye as he argues that teaching is no less important than research.

"Our students require us to come back from the outer edges of our discipline to show them the core assumptions without which we would never find those edges. . . . Perhaps most of all, they bless us with their confusion and boredom, instantly revealing to us . . . the places where something we've said or done is in fact confusing and boring."

Read the whole thing...


William Cronon, "And Gladly Teach," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 9 (December 2012):5-6.

Harold Henderson, "Cronon on Teaching," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 21 December 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

The Downside of Search and Scroll

University of Wisconsin historian and AHA president William Cronon dives deep into the meaning of technology -- from physical scrolls to printed books to Google and Amazon -- in an amazing and unsettling essay in the new issue of Perspectives on History. He is no armchair critic hiding in a moldy library, and we will be hearing more about his "20-year effort to build digital libraries on handheld devices, and how frequently I've had to reformat public-domain e-books from .txt to .lit to .html to .doc to .pdf to .mobi to .epub, with no hope of retaining my own annotations in the process."

Another angle:

Can physical books come close to competing with computers when it comes to search? Of course not. But when one wants to relocate a piece of information in a particular context, and when one remembers that context better than the information itself, then it can be surprisingly difficult for search alone to recover what one wants.

How do disciplines the depend not just on details but on context reap the advantages of new hardware and software while minimizing the problems they create? Cronon doesn't have the answer but he knows there's a question.



William Cronon, "Recollecting My Library...and My Self," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 8 (November 2012), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1211/Recollecting-My-Library-and-My-Self.cfm : accessed 19 November 2012.


Harold Henderson, "The Downside of Search and Scroll," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 20 November 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Are We Reading Too Fast? And a Chicago Antidote

University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon worries about some aspects of today:

I embrace and celebrate the digital age. I believe historians should use blogs and tweets, Wikipedia entries and YouTube videos, web pages and Facebook postings, and any number of other new media tools to share our knowledge with the wider world. But I also celebrate complicated arguments that need space to develop and patience to understand. And I love long stories that can only unfold across hundreds of pages or screens. What I most fear about this new age is its impatience and its distractedness. If history as we know it is to survive, it is these we most need to resist as we practice and defend long, slow, thoughtful reading.

Perhaps there will be room to maneuver a bit even within those confines. Cronon asserts that "the most effective blogs are typically one to three paragraphs in length," but the most popular post by far in the last month on this blog was a full six paragraphs long.

Meanwhile, anyone with the slightest interest in Chicago or Midwestern history can dig into Cronon's masterpiece, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. In another life, I had the privilege of reviewing it: "Cronon's research is so thorough, his explanations so deep, his sprinkling of evocative details so apt that the reader sees the 'obvious' with new eyes." Cronon's colleague Kenneth Jackson put it more straightforwardly: "No one has ever written a better book about a city."



William Cronon, "How Long Will People Read History Books?," Perspectives on History, vol. 50, no. 7 (October 2012), http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2012/1210/index.cfm : accessed 5 October 2012.

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).


Harold Henderson, "Past Prophecies," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 6 October 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Another angle on professionalism

William Cronon has been one of my favorite historians ever since 1991, when he published the definitive account of 19th-century Chicago and its hinterland, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West.

Now he's the president of the American Historical Association with some interesting thoughts on that profession in the March 2012 AHA newsletter Perspectives on History:

. . .professional historians who work in the academy should be immensely grateful when they are joined in an organization like the AHA by professional historians who make documentaries, design web sites, post blogs, curate exhibits, teach school, and publish popular books. Only if we all gather together under the same big tent will we be able to learn from each other the ways good history can be more effective in reaching the many audiences that hunger for its insights. Forty million people watched Ken Burns's documentaries on The Civil War. Barbara Tuchman probably influenced more people's understanding of the First World War than any other historian of her generation. Public school teachers shape the historical consciousness of many millions more students (and citizens) than college teachers ever will. And so on and on.

How do we avoid professional boredom? By making sure we don't define "professional" too narrowly.

Read the whole thing!