Category Archives: History writing

I read an interesting article recently in Rethinking History Vol 14 Issue 1, 2010.  It was called ‘A letter from an emeritus historian c.2049’, written by Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Professor of History at University of California, Irvine.

The framing device of the article was that it was written by a retired professor in 2049 who had been approached by a younger historian who had uncovered articles of his written back at the turn of the twentieth century- around 2009 or thereabouts.  The elderly professor, conscious of not wanting to be seen as doddery or rambling (but probably not succeeding!), has written to the younger researcher reminiscing about historiography fifty years earlier,  recalling his own publishing career, and expressing some regrets about history-writing seen in retrospect.

It took me back to the time in the 1980s when I was frustrated (albeit not for the same reasons as those the author describes) by wanting to ‘write my second book first’ (a lovely phrase). And to moments in the 1990s and early noughts, when I found myself admiring books by young professors of history who, more daringly than me, began their careers by writing ‘second books’ immediately.

Writing the second book first- the book that you wanted to write all along, but were dissuaded from writing. I must admit that at the moment the idea of my writing ANY book seems in the realm of the far-away, but I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the constraints of the traditional thesis genre.  I feel as if I am receiving mixed messages about this.  On the one hand we are pressured early to map out a chapter plan, no doubt to give some direction to our writing.  Where a PhD has been published later as a book (and I know that there’s often much rewriting that goes into this) it seems that often the traditional thesis chapter structure is so integral to the thinking that it follows the work into its new incarnation where, to me, it often reveals the academic DNA of the original.

But at the same time, we’re being told that the door is ajar to do things differently- although, tellingly, those who are calling us from the other room are no longer supervising students directly. I attended a workshop given by John Hirst a couple of weeks ago called ‘Must History Have Chapters?’ where he distributed the tables of contents of a range of history books and theses including Michael Roe’s The Quest for Authority in Eastern Australia,  Garrett Mattingly’s The Armada (1959) , and the more recent Pistols! Treason! Murder! by Jonathan Walker – and wow!  check out the website!

I feel as if I’m being enticed to be courageous- but not quite yet: to be brave- within limits.  I’m not really sure how I want to write my thesis and having upgraded it to encompass Willis’ whole career opens up options that I hadn’t considered before.  Another post for another day will explore my own feelings about the use of “I” in my thesis, and I’ll be attending a writing retreat in late October that I know, already, will push my writing- or at least help me clarify where I don’t want to go.  I’m pleased that I’m still at a stage where I haven’t ventured so far in any one direction that I can’t head off somewhere completely different.

I’m reading and very much enjoying a book by Jane Errington called The Lion, The Eagle and Upper Canada: a developing colonial ideology.  The book was awarded the Corey Prize in 1988, a prize for the best book on Canadian-US relations, jointly sponsored by the American Historical Association and the Canadian Historical Association.  Reviews that I have read about the book at time of publication have not been universally glowing, but I’m enjoying it nonetheless, oblivious as I am at this stage of the nuances of US-Canadian historiography and politics.

One thing I have noticed, though, is that she does not use block quotes but instead snips them up and integrates them into a paragraph. For example:

On 3 June 1814 Rev John Strachan preached a Thanksgiving Service to his congregation in York celebrating the deliverance of Great Britain from the devastating conflict in Europe. “Thankfully and devoutly” he declared, we “acknowledge the mercy and goodness of Almighty God; for protecting His Majesty and His dominions during the whole of this arduous contest; and for the signal and glorious victories obtained by its armies.” “Our joy is full,” he continued, “when we reflect that … Great Britain has been chiefly instrumental, through the blessings of God, in bringing about the happy changes which we now contemplate.” “Truly” she was “the preserver of the independence of Europe” and “the proclamation of peace,” he declared, would triumphantly bring her to “a new era of glory.” And though peace had yet to be won in North America, Strachan called upon Upper Canadians to “rejoice”. We have earned “the happiest time…now rising upon us,” he maintained. (p.97)

This quote is duly footnoted as “Strachan, A Sermon Preached at York on the third day of June, Being the Day Appointed for General Thanksgiving, 1814, 22-3, 38, 34.  It reads smoothly, and it’s only when you look closely that you notice the rather clunky double inverted commas.

Still, I find myself a little uneasy about it.  It reminds me of the technique of “The Week” magazine, to which I subscribe largely because of the generous discount for subscriptions.  As a way of distilling the essence of commentary (and perhaps to avoid copyright issues), the magazine likewise uses snippets of sentences in inverted commas, although sometimes I wonder why they choose such banal words to highlight in this way. For example, it summarizes Rex Jory’s column from “The Advertiser” in this way:

The perfect monopoly has struck again, says Rex Jory. The price of postage stamps “crept up” 5c to 60c last week, and what could we do about it? Nothing.  This is preposterous and outrageous. It’s bad enough that Australia Post can charge “pretty much what it likes” but it also “contemptuously” refuses to provide a weekend service.   etc etc.

Errington’s integration of snippets into a prose summary probably does justice to the sentiments expressed- possibly better than verbatim slabs would have done, but I feel wary- what if she’s misrepresenting what is said?  Although, short of slavishly writing out the whole document, how is any reader to know that paragraphs are not chosen selectively and skewed by ellipses and omissions?

I think, too, of the advice given in Ann McGrath and Ann Curthoy’s recent book How to Write History that People Want to Read that examiners and readers always skip over slab quotes anyway.  Do they? Do I?  I must admit that I think I do sometimes.  I think I’m looking for the analysis rather than the evidence.  Yet the fear of plagiarism or sloppiness prods me into backing myself up when I am writing, even though I don’t always read the evidence when somebody else backs themselves up the same way.  Errington’s technique weaves the analysis and evidence together in a way where it is less easy to skip.  I think I like it, but I’m still not sure.  A little writing challenge to meet, I’m sure.

The London Review of Books has a fascinating article by Keith Thomas, a fellow of All Souls College in London (Vol 32, No. 11 10 June 2010). Keith Thomas is an historian of the early modern period, and a student of Christopher Hill whose books I remember vaguely from an undergraduate subject over 35 years ago on Puritans and Quakers, Shakers and other tremblers in the English Civil War.

I enjoy  reading about how other historians “do it” and enjoy reading biographies and autobiographies of historians generally- and they are legion!  I’ve been in enough historians’ offices to glimpse their shoeboxes of index cards and rolls of paper, and I must admit that I’ve always been bemused by what they do with them.   Even before reading Thomas’ article, I’ve been aware of Beatrice Webb’s  adage of “one fact, one card” and I’ve always wondered how that would work with a multi-layered fact that could be categorized in so many different ways.  [ One spin-off of reading Thomas’ article has been that I went to my bookshelves and picked up Beatrice Webb’s book My Apprenticeship which I must have bought 35 years ago and have never even opened. What impelled me to buy it for the princely sum of $2.10 I wonder?  It may just find its way to the pile of books beside the bedside table.]  But Thomas has enlightened me- you place a punchhole in the margin of the card for a particular category and then, using a knitting needle you can locate all the cards that have been punched in the same place on the card under that category.  Well I never!

Thomas himself writes on sheets of paper on one side only, notes down the bibliographical details (and is honest enough to admit that he often gets them wrong!), then cuts up the pieces of paper and files them in envelopes, with a separate envelope for each topic.  He then keeps an index of all the envelope-topics.  His envelopes include jottings, newspaper articles etc.  Some of the envelopes become voluminous enough to migrate to a box or drawer.

For myself, I’m an NVivo gal.  I returned to history after a period working as a researcher in education which has somewhat of a social-sciences bent, with quite a bit of work on interviews and protocol analysis.   It was in this context that I became aware of Nud*ist, the early incarnation of NVivo.  Basically (and I suspect that most qualitative research programs do a similar thing), there are the source documents which remain intact, then the “nodes” that are tags that you attach to the text in the source document- a bit like highlighting them with different coloured pens.   You can group the tags together into trees of associated nodes,  merge nodes that ended up being similar, or split nodes into categories that you weren’t originally aware of when you started your research.  Its plasticity is intentional: it is assumed that your categories will be shaped by the research you undertake.

Although my research doesn’t have the model and theory-building aspect that is encouraged by NVivo, I find it invaluable for just keeping track of what I have.  As I read Thomas’ article, I could see how NVivo encourages and supports the same activities.  For example, where Thomas would open his envelope and have a little shuffle through the assorted things he found in it, I open a node and am amused by the things I’ve found to put in it. Where C.Wright Mills wrote of the pleasures of rearranging his filing cabinet as a way of reorganizing his intellectual index, I can see that on the (admittedly rare)  occasions that I’ve sat down and merged or split my nodes, or arranged them into trees that I’m doing an intellectual form of rearranging the furniture.   I like that I can easily go back and find the complete document from which a particular paragraph or dotpoint emerged,  and that a single paragraph can be categorized in any number of ways.

It’s certainly not foolproof, as evidenced by my chagrin over the missing letter (which, by the way I have never found, but I did find a document similar which I now wonder if I misinterpreted on my initial reading).  I live in terror of the whole edifice of NVivo collapsing. While I am not in danger of being drowned, as Anatole France warned, by an avalanche of index cards,  my increasingly towering spindle of backups on DVD  at home and work, and the steady accumulation of portable hard drives and data sticks must be contributing to Harvey Norman’s stellar profits.

Once you’ve started down a particular route, there is an element of commitment and momentum that keeps you on it.  Thomas obviously finds that his envelopes work: those who use card files obviously do too.  There’s the danger of constantly searching for the perfect system instead of actually sitting down and using it.  The corridors of academe are crowded with scholars who found their system and made it work for them.  I do find myself wondering if the availability of key-word searching and micro-tagging will change the sorts of histories we write- will the ease of locating the detail alter the process of creating a big-picture argument?  Or does the propensity to be either a hedgehog or a fox drive the systems and processes that academics set up for themselves?

I was rather startled by a fellow student admitting at our history post-grad seminar the other night that she has only read one history book from cover to cover.  Quite apart from her- well, is bravery the right word?- in disclosing this, I was surprised that the technique had obviously served her well enough to bring her to postgraduate studies at all.

I can barely bring myself not to finish a fiction book, but there are times when I hunt-and-peck my way through a non-fiction book using the index, as she said she did.  Undergraduate courses encourage chapter-only reading by the handbooks they use and the links they provide to online readings, which are in turn circumscribed by academic copyright regulations.   Conventions of academic writing like abstracts and keywords are an open invitation to browsing, and the demands of word limits require whole tomes to be noted but dismissed with a footnote, or a doff of the argumentative cap in passing.

But in areas that directly impinge and overlap with my own thesis, not only do I feel as if I should read the whole book, but I want to read it to pick up on the nuances of the argument, how it is framed, and where I want to distinguish myself.  These things don’t lie at the level of the fact, easily pinned down in an index entry, but instead permeate the work as a whole.  They’re built into the chapter structure of the work and they’re flagged in the introduction and burnished further in the conclusion.  I want to be part of the conversation with other historians who are saying the things I want to hear- I want to hear the whole conversation facing them directly, not just snippets and muttered asides .

I’ve been thinking quite a bit recently about the overarching structure of a historical work.  The book that my fellow-student had read (Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers) has very short chapters and it was suggested that perhaps it was this quality that added to its readability. Even though, as you may have gathered, I think Dancing with Strangers is a wonderful book, I am not usually enamoured of short chapters.  I’ll count Clendinnen as an exception but too many chapters to my way of thinking often suggests that the historian has not stepped sufficiently far away from the argument to see its broader contours.  But it can go too far the other way too.   One of the things that disconcerted me a little with John Hirst’s Convict Society and its Enemies was the imbalance in the chapter structure with one very long chapter comprised of several sub-sections.  On the one hand, this was entirely appropriate as they were elaborations on the central argument ; but on the other hand, as a reader it felt rather unbalanced and unwieldy.

I am usually grateful for the Part structure (i.e. Part I, Part II) of a book that traces the trajectory of the argument at its broadest level. And even though it can be clunky and contrived in less skilled hands, I like an opening up and rounding off at the end of each chapter.  While I like to be nudged into reading the next chapter,  the use of cliff-hangers can be melodramatic if not handled well.

I felt a little sorry for my fellow-student that her appreciation of history was so utilitarian.  I don’t only read history related to my thesis, as you can probably tell and no doubt much to the chagrin of my supervisors.  On the other hand, I’d like to think (and I think they would agree) that when a historian, or any reader for that matter, reads another historian’s work it’s not just for the facts alone.  Among other things, it’s for sitting back and watching how they write their history: how they set up their question; how they keep it moving along and how they  project themselves as an authorial voice (a topic for another post one day).