Historical Thinking
Historical Thinking
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The following documents and pages will help you develop your understanding of the world around you and be better equipped to analyze and examine the historical processes.
Please look through each and let me know if you have any questions or need assistance in developing your skills as a historian.
Links to Sections Below:
Links to Sections Below:
Doing History is Asking Questions
Doing History is Asking Questions
Learning to do history means learning to ask good historical questions--questions that are worthy of prolonged discussion, questions that will lead to deeper insights into important matters, if not to definitive answers.
"Students cannot possibly learn everything of value by the time they leave school, but we can instill in them the desire to keep questioning throughout their lives . . . The aim of curriculum is to awaken, not 'stock' or 'train' the mind. That goal makes the basic unit of a modern curriculum the question. . . What the modern student needs is the ability to see how questions both produce and point beyond knowledge."(Grant Wiggins, "The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance, Educational Leadership, November 1989.
"A moment's reflection should suffice to establish the simple proposition that every historian, willy-nilly, must begin his research with a question. Questions are the engines of intellect, the cerebral machines which convert energy to motion, and curiosity to controlled inquiry. There can be no thinking without questioning--no purposeful study of the past, nor any serious planning for the future. . . . Without questions of some sort, a historian is condemned to wander aimlessly through dark corridors of learning. Without questions of the right sort, his empirical projects are consigned to failure before they are fairly begun. . . . It should be self-evident that some questions will yield empirical answers and others will not" (David Hackett Fischer, Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, 1970, pp. 3-4).
"Serious researchers, however, do not report data for their own sake, but to support the answer to a question that they (and they hope their readers) think is worth asking. So the best way to begin working on your specific topic is not to find all the data you can on your general topic, but to formulate questions that point you to just those data that you need to answer them" (Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams, The Craft of Research, 3d ed., 2008, 41).
For more on the importance of asking questions in education and in democracy, visit the Right Question Institute, http://rightquestion.org/, an organization based in Cambridge, Mass., dedicated to teaching the skill of developing good questions.
Types of historical questions:
What happened?
Who was responsible?
What was the motive/role/strategy of one or more of the historical actors?
What caused or influenced something and how? (Influence more doable)
What was the impact of something? (time frame may be too long)
How or what did people think about something?
What was their ideology?
What were their values?
What was the weltanschauung or mentalité?
How does something fit into its context or reflect or embody important historical themes?
See Patrick Rael's website, specifically is page on "How to Ask Good Questions."
Also: Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas.
Asking Better Questions
Asking Better Questions
One key to writing a good paper is to start with a good question. Framing good questions takes effort. Here are some tips.
Value questions: No right or wrong answer; answer is determined by the values and opinions of the answerer. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream? What is the good life?
Empirical questions: Answer is based on evidence plus judgment and evaluation of the evidence. There may be no one clear-cut definitive answer, but some answers are better supported by the evidence and the reasons than others.
Mixed value/empirical questions: Who was the greatest president? You can add up legislative achievements, but ultimately, your values come into play. A conservative might choose Ronald Reagan over FDR.
Clarifying questions: What does this mean? These are important to ask at the start of a discussion class. There are some things you need to know to participate in the discussion.
Speculative/Counterfactual questions: What might happen in the future, or what might have turned out differently if certain conditions were different?
Discussable questions: How arguable is it? Is there evidence to support different kinds of answers? Do you see a tension between different values or interpretations--different ways of interpreting the evidence? Do you need to dig deeper to find nuance and a more sophisticated understanding?
Answerable: Is there a body of evidence somewhere (in our library if it's a research paper; otherwise, usually in the assigned readings for class), that will provide enough evidence to support a plausible answer?
Broad v. Narrow: Narrow questions point us toward one specific thing in a reading. Broad questions require you to bring in lots of evidence from different places.
Premises: Are you aware of any premises or givens that the question assumes? Are they accurate? Can you sharpen the question by adding any givens?
Responses: In their guide to academic writing, They Say, I Say, authors Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein say “the underlying structure of effective academic writing—and of responsible public discourse—resides not just in stating our own ideas but in listening closely to others around us, summarizing their views in a way that they will recognize, and responding with our own ideas in kind. Broadly speaking, academic writing is argumentative writing, and we believe that to argue well you need to do more than assert your own position. You need to enter a conversation using what others say (or might say) as a launching pad or sounding board for your own views...You must find a way of entering a conversation with others’ views...If your own argument doesn’t identify the ‘they say’ that you’re responding to, then it probably won’t make sense”
Inevitability v. Contingency
Inevitability v. Contingency
To what extent do humans have control of their own destiny? Read the definitions of inevitable and contingent below (adapted from Dictionary.com) and the quotes from King, Sumner and others, and reflect upon the degree to which we are helpless pawns driven by unconscious drives and pushed around by large unalterable forces or free agents, endowed with the power to act and shape, or at least influence, history as we choose?
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent."
--Martin Luther King, Jr.
"The great stream of time and earthly things will sweep on just the same in spite of us. . . Every one of us is a child of his age and cannot get out of it. He is in the stream and is swept along with it. All his science and philosophy come to him out of it. Therefore, the tide will not be changed by us. It will swallow up both us and our experiments."
--William Graham Sumner
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." --Karl Marx
"It is not in the stars to hold our destiny but in ourselves." --William Shakespeare (Tragedy of Julius Caesar)
"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor." --Henry David Thoreau
Definitions
Agency: The capacity, condition, or state of acting or of exerting power.
Contingent: Dependent for existence, occurrence, character, etc., on something not yet certain; liable to happen or not; uncertain; possible; happening by chance or without known cause.
Determinism: A theory or doctrine that acts of the will, occurrences in nature, or social or psychological phenomena are causally determined by preceding events or natural laws.
Inevitable: Sure to happen; unable to be avoided, evaded, or escaped; certain; determined; unalterable.
Argumentum ad Hitlerum
Argumentum ad Hitlerum
Argumentum ad Hitlerum: A lazy man's use of historical analogy that only serves to short-circuit discussion of a topic. "They resort to Hitler to end discussion on everything from capital punishment ('well, Hitler deserved it, didn't he?') to vegetarianism ('it didn't improve Hitler's character, did it?')." See Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998), xxii.
Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970)
Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (1970)
David Hackett Fischer's 1970 book exposes the fallacies that frequently mar historians' attempt to represent the past accurately.
Fallacies of Question-Framing:
Loaded questions, false dichotomies, and begging the question.
Example: Asking "Why did the South secede?" assumes secession was inevitable and ignores alternative outcomes.
Fallacies of Factual Verification:
Errors in how historians collect and verify facts.
Anachronism, false analogies, and misuse of sources.
Example: Using modern concepts to interpret historical events out of context.
Fallacies of Generalization:
Misuse of inductive reasoning, including hasty generalizations and sweeping statements.
Example: Assuming all colonists supported the American Revolution based on select documents.
Fallacies of Causation:
Misunderstanding historical cause and effect.
Includes post hoc, single cause fallacies, and causal oversimplification.
Example: Claiming "slavery caused the Civil War" without acknowledging a complex web of interrelated factors.
Fallacies of Analogy and Hypothetical Reasoning:
Overreliance on false analogies or counterfactuals that don't hold up.
Example: "If Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated, Reconstruction would have succeeded" — a claim too speculative to be argued definitively.
Fallacies of Narrative:
Problems in the structure or storytelling of history.
Includes teleology (assuming history had to turn out the way it did), and narrative coherence fallacies (over-smoothing complex events).
Example: Presenting a "tidy" version of the past that erases conflict or contingency.
Fischer's Goals:
To promote clarity, logic, and intellectual honesty in historical writing.
To encourage historians to interrogate their assumptions, methods, and arguments.
To nudge the discipline toward rigorous, reasoned analysis rather than romanticized storytelling.
Why It Matters:
The book is still widely read and respected because it:
Challenges historians to think like logicians.
Remains relevant for anyone teaching or writing history, especially in inquiry- or evidence-based frameworks.
Offers a sharp toolkit for evaluating historical arguments.
History is a Mystery
History is a Mystery
We can never be sure about what happened in the past. Here's why:
1. Incomplete information. For the most part, all we have is what random people decided to write down and other random people decided to preserve. Sometimes historians consider other types of evidence: memories of the still-loving, monuments, art work, left-behind scraps dug up by archeologists. Altogether it's still just a tiny remnant of all that came before in the human experience.
2. Too much information (for one person to process). Thus, a key skill of the historian is to make judgements about significance and to decide what evidence to ignore and what evidence to examine closely. History, said the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt "is the record of what one age finds worthy of note in another." Not everything is worthy of note in the eyes of the discerning historian. See chapter 3 of Thinking Historically: Educating Students for the 21st Century by Stephane Levesque: "What is Important in the Past: Historical Significance."
3. Subjectivity: biases, examined assumptions, blind spots. The human mind (including yours!) is prone to all kinds of distortions.
4. Conflicting evidence. Every time you think you know what happened, you find a piece of evidence that contradicts it.
5. Human beings are inscrutable: they don't always mean what the say or say what they mean. So you can't even assume that what they wrote down is true. We can know what a person said or wrote, but not what they thought or believed. Never assume the public statements of political leaders reflect their true beliefs. Always consider what they want their audience to think and do. Consider every utterance as an action, what J.L. Austin called a speech act: "almost any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience."
Thus, you should approach the study of history with humility and tentative conclusions and:
6. Use Hedging language: "it seems possible/probably/likely that . . . "
7. Be "voraciously open to contrary argument" (and evidence). If you think you've got it figured out, do more research.
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