Adapted from "WRITING A GOOD HISTORY PAPER History Department Hamilton
College ©Trustees of Hamilton College, 2008"
There is SOME good advice for writing history here, and SOME statements that are no longer useful.
1. Get off to a good start.
Avoid pretentious, vapid beginnings. If you are writing a paper on, say,
British responses to the rebellion in India in 1857, don’t open with a
statement like this: “Throughout human history people in all cultures
everywhere in the world have engaged in many and long-running conflicts about
numerous aspects of government policy and diplomatic issues, which have much
interested historians and generated historical theories in many areas." This
is pure garbage, bores the reader, and is a sure sign that you have nothing
substantive to say. Get to the point. Here’s a better start: “The rebellion
in 1857 compelled the British to rethink their colonial administration in
India." This sentence tells the reader what your paper is actually about and
clears the way for you to state your thesis in the rest of the opening
paragraph. For example, you might go on to argue that greater British
sensitivity to Indian customs was hypocritical.
2. State a clear thesis.
Whether you are writing an exam essay or a senior thesis, you need to have a
thesis. Don’t just repeat the assignment or start writing down everything
that you know about the subject. Ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to
prove?" Your thesis is your take on the subject, your perspective, your
explanation—that is, the case that you’re going to argue. “Famine struck
Ireland in the 1840s" is a true statement, but it is not a thesis. “The
English were responsible for famine in Ireland in the 1840s" is a thesis
(whether defensible or not is another matter). A good thesis answers an
important research question about how or why something happened. (“Who was
responsible for the famine in Ireland in the 1840s?") Once you have laid out
your thesis, don’t forget about it. Develop your thesis logically from
paragraph to paragraph. Your reader should always know where your argument
has come from, where it is now, and where it is going.
3. Be sure to analyze. Students are often puzzled when their professors
mark them down for summarizing or merely narrating rather than analyzing.
What does it mean to analyze? In the narrow sense, to analyze means to
break down into parts and to study the interrelationships of those parts.
If you analyze water, you break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. In a
broader sense, historical analysis explains the origins and significance of
events. Historical analysis digs beneath the surface to see 2 relationships
or distinctions that are not immediately obvious. Historical analysis is
critical; it evaluates sources, assigns significance to causes, and weighs
competing explanations. Don’t push the distinction too far, but you might
think of summary and analysis this way: Who, what, when, and where are the
stuff of summary; how, why, and to what effect are the stuff of analysis.
Many students think that they have to give a long summary (to show the
professor that they know the facts) before they get to their analysis. Try
instead to begin your analysis as soon as possible, sometimes without any
summary at all. The facts will “shine through" a good analysis. You can’t
do an analysis unless you know the facts, but you can summarize the facts
without being able to do an analysis. Summary is easier and less
sophisticated than analysis—that’s why summary alone never earns an “A."
4. Use evidence critically. Like good detectives, historians are critical
of their sources and cross-check them for reliability. You wouldn’t think
much of a detective who relied solely on a suspect’s archenemy to check an
alibi. Likewise, you wouldn’t think much of a historian who relied solely
on the French to explain the origins of World War I. Consider the following
two statements on the origin of World War I: 1) “For the catastrophe of
1914 the Germans are responsible. Only a professional liar would deny
this…" 2) “It is not true that Germany is guilty of having caused this
war. Neither the people, the government, nor the Kaiser wanted war…."
They can’t both be right, so you have to do some detective work. As always,
the best approach is to ask: Who wrote the source? Why? When? Under what
circumstances? For whom? The first statement comes from a book by the
French politician Georges Clemenceau, which he wrote in 1929 at the very
end of his life. In 1871, Clemenceau had vowed revenge against Germany for
its defeat of France in the FrancoPrussian War. As premier of France from
1917 to 1920, he represented France at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.
He was obviously not a disinterested observer. The second statement comes
from a manifesto published by ninety-three prominent German intellectuals
in the fall of 1914. They were defending Germany against charges of
aggression and brutality. They too were obviously not disinterested
observers. Now, rarely do you encounter such extreme bias and passionate
disagreement, but the principle of criticizing and cross-checking sources
always applies. In general, the more sources you can use, and the more
varied they are, the more likely you are to make a sound historical
judgement, especially when passions and self-interests are engaged. You
don’t need 3 to be cynical as a historian (self-interest does not explain
everything), but you do need to be critical and skeptical. Competent
historians may offer different interpretations of the same evidence or
choose to stress different evidence. You will not find a single historical
Truth with a capital “T" on any matter of significance. You can, however,
learn to discriminate among conflicting interpretations, not all of which
are created equal. (See also the section on Analyzing a Historical
Document.)
5. Be precise. Vague statements and empty generalizations suggest that you
haven’t put in the time to learn the material. Consider these two
sentences: “During the French Revolution, the government was overthrown by
the people. The Revolution is important because it shows that people need
freedom." What people? Landless peasants? Urban journeymen? Wealthy
lawyers? Which government? When? How? Who exactly needed freedom, and what
did they mean by freedom? Here is a more precise statement about the French
Revolution: “Threatened by rising prices and food shortages in 1793, the
Parisian sans-culottes pressured the Convention to institute price
controls." This statement is more limited than the grandiose
generalizations about the Revolution, but unlike them, it can open the door
to a real analysis of the Revolution. Be careful when you use grand
abstractions like people, society, freedom, and government, especially when
you further distance yourself from the concrete by using these words as the
apparent antecedents for the pronouns they and it. Always pay attention to
cause and effect. Abstractions do not cause or need anything; particular
people or particular groups of people cause or need things. Avoid grandiose
trans-historical generalizations that you can’t support. When in doubt
about the appropriate level of precision or detail, err on the side of
adding “too much" precision and detail.
6. Watch the chronology.
Anchor your thesis in a clear chronological framework and don’t jump around
confusingly. Take care to avoid both anachronisms and vagueness about dates.
If you write, “Napoleon abandoned his Grand Army in Russia and caught the
redeye back to Paris," the problem is obvious. If you write, “Despite the
Watergate scandal, Nixon easily won reelection in 1972," the problem is more
subtle, but still serious.(The scandal did not become public until after the
election.) If you write, “The revolution in China finally succeeded in the
twentieth century," your professor may suspect that you haven’t studied.
Which revolution? When in the twentieth century? Remember that chronology is
the backbone of history. What would you think of a biographer who wrote that
you graduated from Hamilton in the 1950s?
7. Cite sources carefully.
Your professor may allow parenthetical citations in a short paper with one or
two sources, but you should use footnotes for any research paper in history.
Parenthetical citations are unaesthetic; they scar the text and break the
flow of reading. Worse still, they are simply inadequate to capture the
richness of historical sources. Historians take justifiable pride in the
immense variety of their sources. Parenthetical citations such as(Jones 1994)
may be fine for most of the social sciences and humanities, where the source
base is usually limited to recent books and articles in English. Historians,
however, need the flexibility of the full footnote. Try to imagine this
typical footnote(pulled at random from a classic work of German history)
squeezed into paren- theses in the body of the text: DZA Potsdam, RdI,
Frieden 5, Erzgebiet von Longwy-Briey, Bd. I, Nr. 19305, gedruckte
Denkschrift für OHL und Reichsleitung, Dezember 1917, und in RWA, Frieden
Frankreich Nr. 1883. The abbreviations are already in this footnote; its
information cannot be further reduced. For footnotes and bibliography,
historians usually use Chicago style.(The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th
edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.) On the Writing Center’s
website you can find a useful summary of Chicago citation style prepared by a
former history major, Elizabeth Rabe ’04
(http://www.hamilton.edu/ writing/Footnotes.html). RefWorks (on the library’s
website) will convert your citations to Chicago style. Don’t hesitate to ask
one of the reference librarians for help if you have trouble getting started
on RefWorks.
8. Use primary sources.
Use as many primary sources as possible in your paper. A primary source is one
produced by a participant in or witness of the events you are writing about.
A primary source allows the historian to see the past through the eyes of
direct participants. Some common primary sources are letters, diaries,
memoirs, speeches, church records, newspaper articles, and government
documents of all kinds. The capacious genre “government records" is probably
the single rich-est trove for the historian and includes everything from
criminal court records, to tax lists, to census data, to parliamentary
debates, to international treaties—indeed, any records generated by
governments. If you’re writing about culture, primary sources may include
works of art or literature, as well as philosophical tracts or scientific
treatises—anything that comes under the broad rubric of culture. Not all
primary sources are written. Buildings, monuments, clothes, home furnishings,
photographs, religious relics, musical recordings, or oral reminiscences can
all be primary sources if you use them as historical clues. The interests of
historians are so broad that virtually anything can be a primary source.
9. Use scholarly secondary sources. A secondary source is one written by a
later historian who had no part in what he or she is writing about. (In the
rare cases when the historian was a participant in the events, then the
work—or at least part of it—is a primary source.) Historians read secondary
sources to learn about how scholars have interpreted the past. Just as you
must be critical of primary sources, so too you must be critical of
secondary sources. You must be especially careful to distinguish between
scholarly and non-scholarly secondary sources. Unlike, say, nuclear
physics, history attracts many amateurs. Books and articles about war,
great individuals, and everyday material life dominate popular history.
Some professional historians disparage popular history and may even
discourage their colleagues from trying their hand at it. You need not
share their snobbishness; some popular history is excellent. But—and this
is a big but—as a rule, you should avoid popular works in your research,
because they are usually not scholarly. Popular history seeks to inform and
entertain a large general audience. In popular history, dramatic
storytelling often prevails over analysis, style over substance, simplicity
over complexity, and grand generalization over careful qualification.
Popular history is usually based largely or exclusively on secondary
sources. Strictly speaking, most popular histories might better be called
tertiary, not secondary, sources. Scholarly history, in contrast, seeks to
discover new knowledge or to reinterpret existing knowledge. Good scholars
wish to write clearly and simply, and they may spin a compelling yarn, but
they do not shun depth, analysis, complexity, or qualification. Scholarly
history draws on as many primary sources as practical. Now, your goal as a
student is to come as close as possible to the scholarly ideal, so you need
to develop a nose for distinguishing the scholarly from the non-scholarly.
Here are a few questions you might ask of your secondary sources (bear in
mind that the popular/scholarly distinction is not absolute, and that some
scholarly work may be poor scholarship): Who is the author? Most scholarly
works are written by professional historians(usually professors) who have
advanced training in the area they are writing about. If the author is a
journalist or someone with no special historical training, be careful. Who
publishes the work? Scholarly books come from university presses and from a
handful of commercial presses (for example, Norton, Routledge, Palgrave,
Penguin, Rowman & Littlefield, Knopf, and HarperCollins). If it’s an
article, where does it appear? Is it in a journal subscribed to by our
library, listed on JSTOR, or published by a university press? Is the
editorial board staffed by professors? Oddly enough, the word journal in
the title is usually a sign that the periodical is scholarly. What do the
notes and bibliography look like? If they are thin or nonexistent, be
careful. If they are all secondary sources, be careful. If the work is
about a nonEnglish-speaking area, and all the sources are in English, then
it’s almost by definition not scholarly. Can you find reviews of the book
in the data base Academic Search Premier? If the book was published within
the last few decades, and it’s not in there, that’s a bad sign. With a
little practice, you can develop confidence in your judgment—and you’re on
your way to being a historian. If you are unsure whether a work qualifies
as scholarly, ask your professor.
10. Have a strong conclusion. Obviously, you should not just stop abruptly as
though you have run out of time or ideas. Your conclusion should conclude
something. If you merely restate briefly what you have said in your paper,
you give the impression that you are unsure of the significance of what you
have written. A weak conclusion leaves the reader unsatisfied and
bewildered, wondering why your paper was worth reading. A strong conclusion
adds something to what you said in your introduction. A strong conclusion
explains the importance and significance of what you have written. A strong
conclusion leaves your reader caring about what you have said and pondering
the larger implications of your thesis. Don’t leave your reader asking, “So
what?"
11. Revise and proofread. Your professor can spot a “one-draft wonder," so
don’t try to do your paper at the last moment. Leave plenty of time for
revising and proofreading. Show your draft to a writing tutor or other good
writer. Reading the draft aloud may also help. Of course, everyone makes
mistakes, and a few may slip through no matter how meticulous you are. But
beware of lots of mistakes. The failure to proofread carefully suggests
that you devoted little time and effort to the assignment. Tip: Proofread
your text both on the screen and on a printed copy. Your eyes see the two
differently. Don’t rely on your spell checker to catch all of your
misspellings. (If ewe ken reed this ewe kin sea that a computer wood nut
all ways help ewe spill or rite reel good.
