My second year at Wells, I took on the department’s course on historiography, which was required of all history majors and attracted a steady but modest number of students in other fields simply because they enjoyed studying history. As taught then, the course started with a history of history writing and segued into a primer on historical method. My colleague, Steve Taylor, had taught it before I took it over. The principal book used as text was E. H. Carr’s What Is History?, written and published in 1961. I’d never been impressed by that book. As far as I was concerned, the outstanding virtue of Carr’s book for an undergraduate class was that it was short. I thought Carr a weak theorist and his positivist interpretation of what constituted historical “fact,” I find fuzzy and specious.(So much for trashing that book!)
Steve may also have had them read Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), which was popular reading in classes on method, though I never understood why. It was an enjoyable book to read but behind Butterfield’s dashing prose lay a sorely outdated view of what constituted history: Butterfield championed the “great men and great ideas” view of the nature and content of history.
At one time or another over the next six years, when I taught the course, entitled Hy390: Historiography or Hy390: The Historian as Detective, while it was ostensibly a course on historical method, I didn’t teach it primarily as that. First off, I knew that most of our history majors weren’t preparing for a career in the field: they took history for edification –it was part of, a centerpiece in, a humane and broad education, so a course focusing on the nitty gritty work of historical research, while it might help them write their senior theses (which were required of all majors), would be of little relevance in their subsequent lives. Secondly, I argued and continue to argue today, that a logistical problem for history is that, unlike other disciplines in the social studies, it does not have its own methodology or vocabulary but rather borrows tools and insights from other disciplines as needed to address the subjects it studies. Thus, to me it was both more interesting and more germane to look at how particular historians addressed the study of particular historical issues and also, something that also interested me, to show students how many different ways there are to come to the study of history, which I see as a house of many rooms.
It was my habit to build my courses around common readings and the discussion of them in class and to assign lots of (short) books and articles that we read together and talked about together in class, also readings that for the most part linked together, building a dialogue across the whole semester. To keep courses fresh, I routinely changed about a third of the assigned readings in every class every year.
I kept a copy of the syllabus for HY390 for the spring of 1977. Here it is, almost in full, so you can see how I shaped that class. I like quotations so I started with three of them:
- from the poet, Wallace Stevens (four lines from “The imperfect is our paradise…”);
- from Guibert de Nogent (ca. 1108), on how hard it is get inside other people’s skulls; and
- from the great nineteenth century historian F. W. Maitland: The progress of ideas is not from the simple, to the complex, but from the vague to the definite.
Then, I wrote about what historiography is and isn’t. Again, a quote: from comic mystery writer Colin Watson:
‘That’s it!’ whispered Mrs. Hatch. Her face registered something akin to the ecstasy of a rewarded birdwatcher. One finger crooked to direct the company’s gaze…
Then me again:
TO BEGIN
“Historiography”is an ambiguous term that covers not one but several separate fields of knowledge concerned with the process of historical explanation. In this course, we shall concentrate on only the study of some of the practical problems the historian faces when planning and carrying through historical research and writing –a course, in short, in historians’ strategies and tactics. A good part of the course does concern itself with high-level general questions, but only because working historians (however pragmatic they may be) do formulate answers to such questions while they work. Also, it is my contention that formulating these answers intentionally allows the historian to assess his or her own biases and commitments and thus do the work better. The difference between the philosopher of history and the working historian is one of degree on this point, not one of concern. Both philosophers and historians seek analytical rigor in their work, but the historian reserves whatever capacity he has for rigorous examination for the “doing” of history, which is anad hoc, provisional enterprise often composed of incomplete answers to complicated questions.
Still, answers of some kind the historian does need to the grand questions: what is history? and what is it for, its purpose and worth? are there criteria to distinguish between well made, convincing explanations and poorly made, unconvincing ones? and how close can historical reconstruction get to the original it emulates? Over this semester, we too shall seek answers to some of these questions, but tentative, not firm, ones.
It is my contention that form and language are critical concerns of the working historian. Research is not a passive act and the historian not a neutral observer (regardless of what Sir Francis Bacon argued). The historian’s work stands or falls on his selection of the proper categories and vocabulary, his success in finding an appropriate form to channel the search for evidence and for what he wants to say. Language is a problem for all disciplines but it is especially pressing for the historian because history, by and large, doesn’t have a special language. It is written out of the common language, rich in resources but often lamentably ambiguous. A great deal of our discussion and reading this semester will focus on the pitfalls of language and the penalties incurred by blindness to them.
Finally, this course is intended to give you a sense of how historians “do” history, by which I mean how they select research projects, do the research, and hammer out the results into written, convincing form. I have chosen readings for discussion that illustrate particular problems of historical research, interpretation and exposition.
I have looked too for readings that should jolt you a bit, and encourage you to spread your wings as historical researchers. History is an expansive field, and growing more expansive daily. It can be “done” in all sorts of ways.
It’s time for us to take a look at a few.
REQUIRED READINGS:
Willam Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, esp. Pt I: Benjy’s Tale 
Robin W. Winks, Jr., ed.: The Historian as Detective: Essays on Evidence
Studs Terkel: Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
or
Ronald Blythe: Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village
Michael Lesy: Wisconsin Death Trip
ON LIBRARY RESERVE (optional reading):
Jorge Luis Borges: “Death and the Compass” (from Ficciones)
Martin Duberman: “On Becoming a Historian” (from The Uncompleted Past)
David Hackett Fischer: Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought
J. H. Hexter: “The Historian and His Day” and “The Myth of other Middle Class in Tudor England” (from Reappraisals in History)
Thomas Haskell: “The True and Tragical History of Time on the Cross” (from NY Rev of Bks, 20 Oct. 1975)
Lucien Febvre: “A New Kind of History”(from A New Kind of History)
Ved Mehta: The Fly and the Fly Bottle: Interviews with Philosophers and Historians 
Martin Duberman: Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community
Frederick C. Crews: The Pooh Perplex: A Freshman Casebook
***
I started the calendar of class assignments with another quote: from the philosopher of science Karl Popper:
Observation is always selective. It needs a chosen object, a definite task, an interest, a point of view, a problem. And its description… in turn presupposes interests, points of view, and problems.
I liked Popper. I used another quotation from him halfway down the assignments calendar:
[P]recision does not consist in trying to reduce this range [of error] to nothing, out in pretending that there is no such range, but rather in its explicit recognition.
***
The final assignment read in full:
IN PLACE OF A FINAL EXAM, A DIVERTISSEMENT. Big Questions One More Time
–-to be conducted over coffee and pastries, my treat
- Critique the course: what works, what doesn’t? what about the work load? how should it be structured? led? when did the discussions work best?
- Now that you’re done with it, what do you think the sticky questions are in history? doing history?
- What’s your own state of mind now?
And I ended the syllabus with a quotation from jazz artist Charles Mingus that I have used repeatedly because it’s so appropriate:
After that, as long as [the musicians] start where I start and end where I end, [they] can change the compositions any way they feel like it.
from Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip 
dallybooks 