Going to the Sources

A Guide to Historical Research and Writing

Anthony Brundage

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119262855
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historiografía

It's been almost 30 years since the first edition of Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing was first published. Newly revised and updated, the sixth edition of this bestselling guide helps students at all levels meet the challenge of writing their first (or their first "real") research paper.

Presenting various schools of thought, this useful tool explores the dynamic, nature, and professional history of research papers, and shows readers how to identify, find, and evaluate both primary and secondary sources for their own writing assignments.

This new edition addresses the shifting nature of historical study over the last twenty years. Going to the Sources: A Guide to Historical Research and Writing includes:

• A new section analyzing attempts by authors of historical works to identify and cultivate the appropriate public for their writings, from scholars appealing to a small circle of fellow specialists, to popular authors seeking mass readership
• A handy style guide for creating footnotes, endnotes, bibliographical entries, as well as a list of commonly used abbreviations

Advanced Placement high school and undergraduate college students taking history courses at every level will benefit from the engaging, thoughtful, and down-to-earth advice within this hands-on guide.

1

The Ever-Changing Shape and Texture of the Past

Static and Dynamic Concepts of History

A conversation I had at a cocktail party years ago made me acutely aware of some common misconceptions about my chosen field of study. After being introduced to a psychologist, I listened with keen interest to his enthusiastic account of some of the latest approaches and interpretations in his discipline. Having expostulated on this topic with obvious relish, he said, “I don’t suppose there’s much new going on in your field.” Stunned by this remark, I scrutinized his face for signs of either humor or intentional offense. Seeing neither, I was forced to conclude that he genuinely believed history to be a passive, if not dormant, discipline. I attempted to disabuse him of this unfortunate view by explaining some of the recent – and important – developments in history: social history, women’s history, cliometrics, psychohistory, microhistory, and postmodernism. The mention of psychohistory produced a detectable flash of interest, and I would like to think that he has since begun to question his assumption that history is a dull, lifeless chronicle.

Reflecting later on this encounter, I realized that my companion’s attitude was by no means unusual, even among highly educated persons. The reasons for this are readily apparent. The popular conception of history simply as a record of past events seems to have the idea of history’s basic unchangeability as an obvious corollary. Many see history as a vast array of facts, largely political and military in character, arranged more or less chronologically. Thus conceived, history is unalterable, except through the occasional unearthing of a lost city or the discovery of a trunk full of letters in an attic. At its best, it is an exciting and vivid costume drama; at its worst, it becomes a tedious, turgid catalog of dates and names designed to torment the young. We should not be surprised that it is the latter viewpoint that predominates. Not only is modern American culture remorselessly present-minded, but quite often the way in which history is taught in our precollegiate schools only confirms its reputation as dull.

Things tend to improve at college level, where those who have not already developed an attitude of unremitting hostility toward history often discover that it offers them an exciting new set of intellectual challenges and vistas. Yet, even at this level, introductory courses sometimes only solidify students’ negative attitudes. This is not a matter of bad teaching; knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and articulate history teachers abound at every level. The problem lies in presenting history as a story with a fixed plot and cast of characters. It is true that this approach is natural and to some extent unavoidable, particularly with students who receive their first systematic exposure to history. But it is also possible, indeed critically important, to offer at least a glimpse of a very different concept: history as a dynamic process. By this I mean a rich, varied, evolving intellectual system that allows us to achieve a deeper and better understanding of our world, indeed of ourselves. In this vein history still deals with the past, but it conceptualizes a past in constant dialog with an ever-advancing present, one that responds to new questions and reveals fresh insights into the human condition. This is history as it is understood (and enjoyed) by professional historians, and it is high time that others were let in on the secret.

Obviously this concept of history stands in sharp contrast to the static one that prevails when we think of history merely as a fixed story. In the former, the past becomes kaleidoscopic, offering different answers to each inquirer. This should not be taken to mean that every person can fashion whatever he or she wishes and call it history. There are rigorous procedures one must observe in the framing of historical questions, in the selection and interpretation of sources, and in the presentation of one’s findings. Moreover, the pursuit of objectivity, though impossible to achieve fully, must remain a central concern of the historian. Not everyone finds the dynamic concept of history appealing; there is, after all, something comforting in the notion that the past is unchangeable. A shift from the static to the dynamic can be as disconcerting as our recent awakening (and I mean “recent” in terms of natural history) to the fact that the terra firma on which we walk is in fact an array of seething, grinding tectonic plates (an example all too familiar to a native Californian). The difference, of course, is that, while shifting tectonic plates seem to promise only devastation in the form of violent earthquakes and tsunamis, the concept of a dynamic historical past holds the promise of intellectual excitement.

Revising Our View of the Past

Rather than simply presenting a rigidly fixed view of the past, historians constantly search for fresh sources, approaches, methodological tools, and interpretations, in an effort to offer an ever-new past to whatever the present is. It may be more precise to say that historians offer us a multitude of new pasts, since each historian’s view of the past is at least slightly different from another’s, and sometimes dramatically so. In other words a vigorous, many-sided debate among scholars is not only unavoidable but essential to the discipline. Even when differences are subtle, they can be important. When an interpretation entails a more sweeping challenge to an established way of interpreting a past event, process, or person, we call it revisionist.

Revisionism, together with less extensive shifts in approaches and interpretations, has been practiced since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, as anyone who has examined the history of historiography (that is, of history writing) will know. Revisionism has, however, become particularly pronounced in the last few centuries, with the dramatic transformations that have taken place in social, economic, and political life. As the pace of change quickens and the magnitude of change increases, a corresponding pressure arises that we revise our presently held accounts of the past. This happens because one of the most fundamental dimensions of our identity is provided by history and, as we change, so must it, too. When a young United States was mainly an agrarian society with few large cities, no complex technology, and no vital role to play in the world, one kind of history sufficed. As the nation grew, became industrialized, and developed an array of perplexing social problems, Americans needed to ask new questions about their past: What was life like on the frontier, and how had these experiences shaped the development of our national character? What was the historical experience of hitherto disempowered or exploited groups: African Americans, American Indians, Hispanics, Asians, and women? How did mass immigration affect politics, society, culture, and the economy? How did the different social classes interact historically, and how and why are the old patterns changing? How was the United States’ posture vis-à-vis the rest of the world changing? These are only a few of the questions that have been posed by generations of historians since the late nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, a multiplicity of new approaches and interpretations has been offered in response, and hitherto neglected records and remnants of the past have become primary-source material.

Americans did not, of course, initiate these new ways of looking at the past. Many European societies had begun to experience social and economic change much earlier, and this was reflected in their historical accounts. The philosophes of the European Enlightenment developed a decidedly revisionist view of history and used it to great effect in their campaign against ignorance, superstition, and tyranny. Writers like Voltaire and Gibbon broke with long-established tendencies to write reverentially about states, rulers, and legal and ecclesiastical institutions. Their works, still rightly regarded as great classics in the writing of history, served as manifestos in the eighteenth-century struggle to advance the cause of liberty and reason.

New Forms of Historical Consciousness

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the attendant political unrest and demographic change at the end of the eighteenth century, some writers were moved to ask novel questions about the past. Thomas Malthus, that “gloomy” economist who began to point with alarm to the rapid and accelerating growth of population, complained that “the histories of mankind which we possess are, in general, histories only of the higher classes.” He went on to suggest the composition of a history of the habits and mores of the general population on the basis of accurate statistical information. Malthus was well aware of the massive intellectual labors that would have to be expended on such a project, but he nonetheless called upon future scholars to shoulder the burden:

A satisfactory history of this kind, of one people and of one period, would require the constant and minute attention of many observing minds in local and general remarks on the state of the lower classes of society, and the causes that influenced it; and to draw accurate inferences upon this subject, a succession of such historians for some centuries would be necessary.¹

Thus, almost two hundred years ago, Malthus outlined an agenda for the diligent historical demographers and social historians of our time, whose labors are bearing rich fruit. Fortunately the invention of the computer has significantly shortened the time he predicted would be required for such investigations.

The miseries thrust upon humanity by the early Industrial Revolution, coupled with the rise of a large and militant working class, prompted others to look for the historic roots of social conflict. Karl Marx is, beyond question, the most important of these commentators, and many historical studies have been immensely enriched by his powerful and trenchant analyses. When he and Friedrich Engels issued The Communist Manifesto in 1848, that text was intended as a clarion call to arms, not as a work of scholarship. But the manifesto’s assertions that the economic organization of society is the key to the past and that human history is driven by class struggle represent perhaps the most sweeping revisionist claims ever offered.

Marx’s insistence that each historical epoch can be properly understood only by reference to its economic and material bases has profoundly altered the discipline of history. Virtually all subsequent historians, most of whom would object to being described as Marxists, are deeply in Marx’s debt. This is not a question of embracing Marxism as an ideology or of accepting its critique of capitalism and its vision of the future – elements that can be readily detached from the Marxist perspective on the past. The point is that Marx, like Malthus, forced people to question whether humanity is really well served by confining its historical attention to the doings of kings, statesmen, and generals – a questioning that, admittedly, had been initiated earlier, by writers like Voltaire....