A Semester's Worth of History

It's been a rather longer hiatus from bloggerdom than I thought it would be. I didn't post at all in December and haven't posted anything in nearly six weeks. I have no excuses, and perhaps worse than no excuses, I forewent my chance to really post some good ones since I had three weeks with literally nothing to do but eat turkey and stuffing, drink wine and wassail, and watch full seasons of LOST and Star Trek. Instead that's all I did, and though I read a few books I'd been wanting to get through before the new semester began, I also spent a lot of time sleeping till noon and and staying out at night drinking with friends. Poor me, eh? So, I've finished my first semester as a graduate student and am in the process of beginning my second. I thought I'd make my triumphant return to the world of internet posting with a little reflection on that process and what I hope the new year has in store for me in academia.

Firstly, while I haven't been particularly surprised by the workload, the amount of reading I've done over the past four months is pretty staggering. With only two classes, one of which was a graduate/undergraduate mix and thus less intense, plus thesis research (which I did little for, since I haven't even fully settled on a topic yet), the reading was still at a high level. I haven't counted specifically, but I think I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 pages of text over the course of the semester, totaling somewhere around twenty-five full books and significant portions of perhaps sixty to seventy others. The amount of writing I did was also rather high (higher than usual, from what I've been told), totaling at around 115 pages--two lengthy research papers, five shorter reading analyses, two non-research papers, and two finals. Still, I never felt particularly overwhelmed, and after I mastered the arts of skimming and picking precisely the most important passages of texts without reading them in their entirety, the voluminous content breezed by rather quickly. I also managed to avoid having any serious panic attacks, although the one all-nighter I pulled to finish a 15 page final paper I had not had a chance to work on until the night before it was due, left me gasping for breath somewhere around 3 AM as I had serious doubts I would meet the 10:30 AM deadline. Of course, it all worked out though.

What has this process been like and how has it changed my outlook on the idea of history? I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned thus far is the difference between the study and practice of history. Studying history tends to be easy: you absorb all of the information in front of you by reading and understanding the arguments presented by historians. The practice of history, however, is usually a lot more challenging. One must know the proper research paths to take, how to evaluate the sources (not to mention the necessity of studying language to broaden one's source base), how to recognize the various points of views the authors bring to the table, how to approach history from the theoretical frameworks of the day while never denying the actual information one must find to confirm one's own theories (this of course, does not always happen, which is why one should derive theories after the research). This is a contentious topic in history, as many historians have been accused (and rightly so) of simply searching for information that confirms their arguments. I think the biggest difference between studying history as an undergraduate and studying it as a graduate student is the amount of theory and criticism employed at this level. This seems obvious in retrospect, but it never dawned on me as an undergraduate that this aspect of historical study was missing from my education. As an undergraduate, for the most part, one studies history, in the words of the founder of the professional history, "wie es eigenlich gewessen ist" or "as it actually happened." That is not to say that controversy over interpretation is not acknowledged, but in general, professors lecture, students take notes as authoritative, and papers and tests are written and taken to prove that a certain level of knowledge has been achieved. Not so, graduate school.

Most of the classes we take are on the theory and philosophy of history, rather than on the accumulation of knowledge. It is essentially assumed that you will do that sort of legwork on your own, and when class time arrives, the goal is not to regurgitate these facts, but to argue your case based on the evidence you've amassed. While this may not seem like earth shattering information (and it's not), I do find it interesting that history seems to be one of the few disciplines that is taught this way. Theory and criticism are not at all a part of the undergraduate experience. To me, this is a bit like being a biology major and never being introduced to evolutionary theory, or studying philosophy without ever understanding what metaphysics or epistemology are. I also received a bachelor's degree in English, and after the first few introductory courses, the coursework became rather theoretical to some degree, or at least we were initiated into the vocabulary of the trade. I had two courses on literary criticism as an undergraduate. Courses are rarely even offered on historical criticism or historiography at the undergraduate level.

Shortly after entering the program, a second year graduate student, following an engaging discussion on how to be a historian, told me that "You will find out rather quickly what type of historian you are," by which he meant that the theories we accept and the theories we regard as bullshit will differentiate themselves rather early in our career. So far, I'm not entirely sure that I agree. Perhaps it's my moderate personality or my ability to find the positives and negatives in modes of discourse or perhaps I'm just wishy-washy, but I have not quite found any particular historical framework that I feel is either the theoretical approach to take, nor have I found any that I feel to be complete bunk. One recent trend in historical studies is, since the late 1970s and early 80s, postmodernism, which is extraordinarily difficult to define. As far as history is concerned, postmodern theory treats "truth" (and oftentimes fact as well) as entirely subjective and tends to view historical thinking and writing as more of a humanities study than a social science. In this ideational structure, literary criticism and linguistic theory inform history more than research into the past itself. Everything, as they say, is "text". While I believe that the vocabulary and rhetoric employed by postmodernism has enriched historical study, I think that the denial of factual information has done something of a disservice to the profession itself. One of my major problems with postmodernism has little to do with the more arcane and jargon-laden arguments set forth by the theoreticians and more to do with the imprecise definitions utilized by the field. I plan on writing a bit more on this later, but for now, suffice to say that, in my view, postmodernism contradicts itself by making a "truth claim" that "there is no truth" and by failing to understand the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. Western thought in general, but postmodernist thought (and for that matter scientific, rationalist thought) in particular, regards subjectivity and objectivity as essentially binary or entirely separate from one another, rather than as a continuum, which I believe they are. That is to say, something is not either objective or subjective, but most forms of knowledge are somewhere along the continuum, and one can observe facts and make arguments that are more or less objective than other arguments. A denial of all objectivity (which many postmodernists do) is, to me, as illogical as denying all subjectivity as well. In any case, some postmodernists historians have an "anything goes" attitude, which celebrates bias, in a sense, by saying that since no one is really ever capable of true objectivity, we should embrace subjectivity. For my part, as a historian, I think it would be absurd to claim that we don't approach our subject with bias, but it would be equally absurd not to mitigate these tendencies and attempt to rely on evidence (and where it takes us, even if it takes us somewhere we do not wish to go) at all costs.

Finally, it's been an interesting experience working with undergraduates. I've had some contact with different levels of education via my two years as a substitute teacher in high school and middle school and my summer grading standardized test for the state of Kentucky. So far, the undergraduate experience has been less trying on my nerves but no less challenging intellectually. Obviously, in dealing with a higher level of student, one expects a higher degree of intelligence, writing ability, behavior, and so on. For the most part, this is true. As a teaching assistant, I haven't had any discipline problems with any students in my classes. I have to say though, that while many times students surprise me with their lack of certain basic sets of knowledge, most of them generally seem as competent in historical knowledge as I would expect the average college freshman to be. The class I TAed for had around 120 students, and their grades ended up following a pretty standard bell curve, though the apex of the parabola hovered around the low-B rather than the mid-C mark. Probably around a dozen students in the class were able to write sparkling essays in relatively polished prose that demonstrated a fair amount of knowledge, just as there were around a dozen students who believed that Italy was Sweden, the French Revolution occurred in the Early Middle Ages, and AIDS caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And this is after listening to a semester's worth of lectures. Most students who can't handle it drop after the first few weeks but it's not uncommon for students who think that the Mediterranean Sea is named the "Sea of Calamity" to be there taking the final on the last day of class along with the history majors.

I look forward to my future semester. I have a class called Hermits and Heretics: The History of the Medieval Church, 300-1450, which looks promising, and I'm furthering my historiographical studies with both European and non-Western historiography as well as American historiography. Plus, I'll begin my thesis in earnest this semester through the prospectus course all first years must take in their second semester. I still don't know exactly what my thesis will be on, though it will almost certainly be on a late medieval or early modern history of science topic. Currently some ideas include looking at the evolution of the soul/body to mind/body dualism among natural philosophers from, say, Albertus Magnus to Rene Descartes. Another idea is to pick one country during a particular time period (or, after taking Hermits and Heretics, perhaps the Church) and look at its specific legal attitude towards astrology. I have a few others but haven't fleshed them out yet. I guess that's what the prospectus class is for. You can be sure, dear reader, that, like it or not, I'll probably be posting about it along the way. It's good to be back to the world of blogging and the world of academia.