I was actually more reassured than intimidated by Dr. Sacco’s visit and talking about next year as well. (Except for the defending the thesis part, like Drew. I think I will need to invest in some of the full armor or at least a noticeably thicker skin.) But overall, I’m actually looking forward to it.

All things considered, I’m more concerned with the research than the writing. I have full faith that once the research is done, patterns and themes will emerge and I’ll be able to organize them, and the paper will essentially write itself. (My job will be adding the footnotes.)

What can I say, I’m an optimist.

But the research part is a little scary, in part because I’m still not entirely sure where I should be looking. I have a few starting points, but they all seem to be pointing in different directions at times. I guess this summer will be my opportunity to just pick a path and start walking, and turn around if I hit a dead end. I figure if I get into it early, I’ll have time for a couple of false starts. And Dr. Sacco has also assured me that the paper does not have to be anything earth-shattering in the end, and it may be that I end up writing on something a little different than what I set out to do, and that won’t be the end of the world. It’s a good thing to believe.

In a way I can’t believe we’re already at the end of the semester. It has definitely been a learning experience for me (and sometimes a humbling one) but I’m overall excited about what’s coming next. And I hope that most of you are too, so that there will be ample other people to discuss dead ends and stumbling blocks and general panic with next year, because misery loves company.

On that note, an article that popped up on my browser this evening about Stephen Ambrose that also mentioned Michael Bellesiles: kind of a final warning about the importance of documenting sources, and you know, not making things up:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100426/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1787

We’ve talked a lot about the responsibilities of historians in class, from “not plagiarizing” to “not displaying bias and/or altering the historical record to further your own ideology.” But the frustration of the redacted files got me thinking about other responsibilities: responsibilities to historians.

Obviously, some information has to remain classified and restricted, particularly during wartime or if it involves sensitive materials. (Some of you may remember that many of the Abu Ghraib photos were not published because of their upsetting nature and fears that they would incite even more violence.) Then there are files that are delayed for a period of time after their collection or the end of whatever project or subject matter is addressed; six months or seventy years, it’s still a long time.

But do governments or other organizations have a responsibility to keep records? And then to release them when it’s politically feasible? (Does the Bush administration have a right to destroy email records?) Should they be held accountable to historians and political scientists or ethnographers as well as to courts of law? Should we be frustrated that FOIA records are so incomplete and redacted, or should we be grateful to have access to anything? Both?

How are we supposed to represent historical truth when faced with such incomplete and contradictory information?

That was a really good moment for me (occurring all of half an hour ago), because it really unexpectedly helped me to calm down, take a step back and think about what I want to explore and why.

So out of curiosity, why are you all in this class? I know some of you are double majoring, some are planning to go to law school, and some of you are probably looking into this whole “professional historian” thing like me because you feel more connected to history than any other discipline. What are you all hoping to get out of this thesis project? Why history honors? Where do you want to go from here?

I guess I’m just curious because it seems like such an obvious thing – why are you a history major? – but it was one that I really hadn’t given enough thought to recently.

For that matter, every history class I’ve taken has had a very different way of approaching it. In my intensive “History of the Americas” course in high school, we watched several taped lectures from Marshall Eakin, a Latin Americanist at Vanderbilt, who seemed interested in the different colonial styles of various European nations and also in American pre-history. A major theme was that it wasn’t necessarily a case of one cultural power eclipsing another, but a meeting of two great cultural powers. (There was probably a lot more, but I missed most of that unit.) Then I took a course when I was studying in Wales on genocide that presented the colonization as such, an admission you won’t hear from most Americans (and certainly not in the public schools.) It goes to show that there are at least as many views on the cultural collision now as there were at the time, and kind of plays in to what we’ve been talking about in the background these past few weeks: how different historians can choose to emphasize certain aspects of their work.

And because this is another late post and I ramble frequently, and because this is a free post, I’m going to talk about that for a minute: how do our interests, perspectives, and backgrounds influence the kind of history we do?

I mentioned last week that I’m really interested in microhistory and the “history of the local,” and that’s true. I would also consider myself much more interested in social and cultural history (and how prevailing attitudes play out in contemporary cultural representations, as with early cinema or fifties pulp novels), and I have a definite fascination with religion/religious dogma/interaction between church and state, as well as a fascination with gender and sexuality/perspectives thereof. Does this play into what I research on my own time? Of course it does. When selecting books for a class on medieval history, I choose things with titles like “Marriage and the Cloister: Women in Frankish Society, 500-900.” My essay for a class on Modern Italy focused on the female emigration experience, while my project for the same class was about how Mussolini incorporated the Catholic Church into his systems of fascism. And I actually found all of the above interesting, which probably makes some of you political or military historians want to stab yourself with a fork.

As I struggle to define a clear thesis topic and also figure out what the hell comes after all this, it’s comforting to know what I enjoy, what type of history I might do, and what my focal points will be if I really do spend my life doing this.

And I’m not even going to touch Che Guevara this week.

And actually, that ‘background’ reading is probably the most helpful part of the class so far in some ways. I think Presnell’s The Information-Literate Historian is full of some really useful knowledge, and it’s helping me to calm down a little bit when I’m seized by total paralysis at the prospect of writing a thesis that is, as Presnell puts it way back on page 8, “a viable topic that not only interests you but also adds to the historical literature.”

To be frank, while I actually enjoy writing in small doses and don’t even tend to balk at research papers, my work is at best a polishes sort of synthesis, a good overview of a selected topic (that my unoriginal brain prefers to be suggested by the professor, frequently) and I have no idea how to write something that “adds to the historical literature.” Thinking thoughts that haven’t already been documented? Writing about a group or idea or culture that I don’t have a lot of previous exposure to? Terrifying. Maybe that’s why I tend to gravitate towards a quote-unquote “history of the oppressed,” and even focus mostly on the twentieth century – the odds are greater of finding something to work with that hasn’t already been done to death.

As it is, I still don’t exactly have a viable topic, although the assignments for the class are giving me a good idea of what does not interest me as a historian. But I think part of my inability to commit to a specific time and place is a fear of not finding primary sources. Do people really release journals and documents to the hands of undergraduates with no publication record and nothing to recommend them but an ID identifying them as a UT student? Would the UT libraries have anything that would prove remotely interesting to me as I commit to a year-long writing process? Would writing about local Knoxville history limit my grad school prospects to schools in the south?

This is why I don’t do as well with topic-less posts.

To try to add some semblance of substance to the post, I really did love the pieces we read for the “history of the local” group. It was exactly the sort of detailed-but-with-broader-social-implications history I love to read. And while the ‘background’ readings may have been the most useful to me so far (primary source fears notwithstanding), these local histories were definitely the most engaging. And maybe that is a sign about the sort of research I should be doing.

(I’m not the only one who still doesn’t exactly have a thesis topic, am I?)

As other students pointed out, “Not All The Orphans Really Are” was difficult to lump into many of the categories presented in “The Emperor’s Mirror,” which I think is a very positive thing because, as we discussed briefly in class, most of the best history will fall between the various extremes in order to be more effective.

That being said, I would definitely classify “Not All The Orphans Really Are” as a more synchronic history, as little change is presented and it analyzes the era as a cohesive whole, in fact as more of a moment in time than a period spanning well over a century.

I would also say that it is more etic, given both the distance from the history considered and the author’s (presumed) lack of personal experience with eighteenth-century Seville orphanages. This is a more difficult distinction to make, because as Alex and others mentioned, there was much attention paid to the contemporary culture and attitudes, but I still find that it comes from the perspective of an observer, and as a more cultural history I think the style is only appropriate.

Again, the argument is not made that all “orphans” can be generalized into one category (indeed, the opposite would seem to be the point) but I still think the piece falls under the nomothethic approach, as it considers many different cases to form its argument. Similarly, I think social forces are more at play in the article (again, appropriate given its nature as a social and cultural history.)

The piece is definitely multi-factor rather than single-factor and qualitative rather than quantitative, as it relies on numerous individual accounts to create a broader picture, and each account would appear to be at least somewhat unique, which is to a large extent the point Tikoff is attempting to make. The qualitative versus quantitative debate was one of the more interesting ones touched on in class to me, as I am (as you could probably all guess) not someone who finds purely quantitative research particularly interesting. That being said, I really do appreciate the use of well-chosen statistics to better express the scale of trends described, and Tikoff’s figure of 20-40% of children born in Seville between 1800 and 1830 being abandoned to foundling homes is a shocking one. It’s a good example of why the quantitative/qualitative dichotomy is one especially that should not be pushed to the polarities, and rationale that good history should be a mix. (In fact, I would have liked to see a few more well-chosen numbers thrown into the article.)

Regarding this week’s side debate into student apathy, most of my thoughts can be found on Alex’s initial post, although I’m sure I could talk more about it if gven the slightest provocation.

Also, here is a link to the article I mentioned in class on The Balkanization Of North America, for those interested – it’s a really funny read with some interesting points. http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/109452-0/

Reading Reagan and Rossinow was interesting as they presented two very different ways of looking at history, at least in the initial chapters we read. Both examined a cultural issue in America through the microcosm of one specifically chosen city, but the sources considered and overall themes and goals of the pieces were quite different.

Personally, I much preferred Reagan’s piece, for some of the reasons we discussed in class. It was more accessible, I felt, focusing less on philosophy and more on specific instances and recordable fact. Similarly, we found that we preferred Reagan’s methodology, incomplete as it may have been, specifically as regards racial disparity, as it focused more on primary sources and firsthand accounts than Rossinow’s research, which involved more intangibles and more secondary works. Reagan also did a better job in the first few chapters of convincing me that Chicago was representative of urban America as a whole. While apparently Rossinow later discussed historical significance of Texan figures in greater detail, it was less immediately engaging.

That being said, it was interesting to be reading some monographs and getting an idea of what we might be looking for as we narrow in on a thesis topic and books to consider for our first assignments.

Common sense, and common decency: don’t steal someone else’s work. It seems like one of those basic understandings, but having read Jon Wiener and followed it up with the AHA guidelines, apparently it’s something that bears repeating as often as we hear it. Because although it’s on the syllabus for essentially every undergraduate class at the university, every professor seems to read that section aloud and comment that just last semester, it was an issue. What I find particularly interesting in the AHA’s section on plagiarism, however, is the emphasis added after depictions of some possible consequences: “The real penalty for plagiarism is the abhorrence of the community of scholars.“

This sounds like a terrible fate, of course, for any historian. Blacklisted, demonized, held up as a case example. Forever wandering alone in an intellectual desert, the pariah of academia. But a more cynical view immediately sprang to mind after reading Wiener: the view that this could be the AHA’s worst of all possible endings solely because in the real world, plagiarism is not punished nearly as harshly as it is inside History 307 or English 102 classrooms.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, after plagiarizing and paying out a good deal of hush money, was able to revitalize her career. Jayme Sokolow, never publicly admonished for plagiarism, was able to sell two plagiarized manuscripts even after AHA involvement. It could be that the (sometimes temporary) scorn of one’s peers is the “real” penalty for plagiarism only because of institutional impotence and inability to combat plagiarists.

Something that did interest me in the AHA guidelines was the emphasis on the often subjective nature of history, and the statements that ethical protocol did not necessarily dictate neutrality. The view that “multiple, conflicting perspectives” are a fundamental part of changing discourses on history was a welcome  one, especially as we’ve talked extensively about bias and its limitations in class. This sanctioning of interpretation within common sense guidelines (ie, don’t twist facts to suit your thesis, don’t invent a national poll that never took place) offers room for differing perspectives, which is fairly exciting.

My church bulletin contains a small box reading “Because words shape our thinking, we strive to use inclusive language in our worship.” In the case of my church, this often involves using non-gendered terms in hymns and sermons. But the power of language extends far beyond the Presbyterian Hymnal and well into the public sphere. When we discussed media and bias, we didn’t return to the conversation of language, but perhaps we should have. The words chosen by a particular writer or media personality (Nancy Grace, anyone?) are designed to elicit certain reactions from an audience. It’s all in the spin, and some of the spin is the phraseology. For example, referring to a prisoner as a “cop-killer in police custody” carries very different connotations than those of “person of interest held in connection with the crime.”

This can equally be applied to the writing of history. As we discussed bias, someone 9and unfortunately I can’t remember who) said that we should “use methods geared toward objectivity, even knowing it might not be achieved.” This was expanded in our list to regarding objectivity as a goal, with caveats of recognized biases in a format as accurate as possible.

Language can reveal our biases, and in the context of history, while it might not change reality, it can certainly change the perception of reality. We also addressed the quote “History is written by the winners.” This always reminds me of differing treatments of the Cold War in American and Soviet textbooks. Particularly when we study more distant events, we rely heavily on few first-hand accounts, limiting our perceptions and knowledge of the event and doubtless affecting our understanding of the period in question.

We also discussed whether it might be better to have a primary source with known biases, so as to better counter the biases in the interpretation, and this is another instance in which language and word choice can help us to better understand available information. As we make a “best faith effort,” language is an important factor to consider and to weigh in with the rest of our evidence.

As we discovered last week, we aren’t exactly professional historians. Most of us have probably written, at best, a 10 or 20 page research paper as part of our final grade for a class that may not have been our biggest area of interest, using mostly secondary sources and Red Bull as our inspiration. I can’t speak for the rest of the class, but I felt distinctly unprepared talking about the practice of history, and what it meant as a career beyond the undergrad experience of signing up for classes that might motivate me.

The William Cronan and Michael Kahn readings have helped to clarify some of my presence in this class. A former Anthropology major/English minor, I fell back on history because I genuinely enjoyed the classes and my classmates. There’s a love of learning in history classes that I don’t feel consistently in most other disciplines. When I tried to communicate that to my advisor, she said that she felt the same thing. Historians were her favorite teachers, her favorite mentors. It’s a feeling that’s definitely expressed in Cronan’s opening remarks about how historian will be able to identify each other even in a room full of closely related disciplines.

The points Cronan makes about constructive rather than destructive criticism, and mutual respect in academia, work well with Kahn’s evaluation of the seminar, Friere’s condemnation of the narrative, and the move toward an exchange of ideas. That clearly seems to be the direction the class is taking, and I’m intrigued to experience a full-fledged reading seminar and exchange of ideas.

Simultaneously, I think there’s a lot to be said for occasional lapses into narration. Again, a large part of me feels wildly unprepared to leap straight into the practice of history, and while I feel that the group exploration of research, writing and revising will be beneficial, I also worry that I don’t have enough knowledge or experience to contribute meaningfully. I worry that without the safety net of a lecturer, the responsibility of understanding the material presented will be crushing.

Likewise, while I find it interesting to probe at connections and threads through history, I worry that narrowing a thesis topic will be excruciatingly difficult, and Cronan highlighted my fears that I might be locked into a topic that could define my entire career. So, while interesting and thought-provoking, I’m already a little terrified at the prospect of actually doing history.