A Bibliovore’s Dilemma

Philip White

Hi, I’m Philip, and I have a problem. No, it’s not my raging caffeine addiction, but rather, an insatiable desire to buy any book of interest that I come across.

I often scorn so-called “shopaholics” who stock their walk-in closets with $200 t-shirts that I suspect are made in the same exploitative overseas factories as bargain bin items at supermarkets; and the techies who drool over the latest 60-inch flatscreen with its “600 Hz Subfield Motion” and “150,000:1 Dynamic Contrast Ratio.” Come on, not even the manufacture knows what the heck such piffle means, much less how those features can justify a two-grand price tag.

And yet, I am starting to become cognizant of my glaring hypocrisy, an epiphany sparked by my recent purchase of two more four-shelf bookcases from a going-out-of-business Borders to supplement my fit-to-burst living room built-ins. I can’t go near my local used book store without popping in, promising myself (and/or my long-suffering wife, who finds her volumes and those of our children crammed into ever-dwindling shelf space) that I’ll just look at the clearance section and its bevy of $2 books that beg for a good home. Sometimes I think I subconsciously choose to run errands in the vicinity just so I can get my weekly “fix.”

And then there’s the web. Performing the physical act of handing over cash or swiping your credit/debit card at the bookstore makes the buying process more tangible, and, or so the theory goes, makes one consider the purchase more carefully. Online, this goes out the window—a few clicks and you’re done. If you’ve already saved your card details on the vendor’s website, it’s even quicker and easier, with even less time to self-question if that $148.15 that’s about to be taken out of your account/put on your next bill is exorbitant or reasonable.

When you write for a living, it’s much easier to answer such a question, whether it arrives before the shelf-straining purchase or later, when you get your next card statement, with a simple justification: “It’s for work.” This particular form of self-deception is at its most acute when you are working on a long feature story or, Lord have mercy, a book. People have asked me “Why don’t you just get books from the library?” I have done that, of course, frantically jotting down notes in time to beat the punitive daily late charges or, for longer passages, using the tech miracle that is Nuance Naturally Speaking to dictate until my voice box feels like it’s been invaded by a couple of enraged porcupines.

But when it comes to a book that you know (or tell yourself you know) that you’ll need large sections for at least one project or, heaven forbid, may actually make time to read for pleasure as well as for research purposes, how can one not plonk down some hard earned cash for it? Now that I’ve forced myself to become more organized, I make sure that book receipts (from brick-and-mortar bookstores) are scanned and e-mail confirmations saved (online retailers) in easily findable files so that come tax time I can list the books as expenses. Again, one more justification: “It’s a tax write off.”

So my questions are twofold: When is it time to draw a line between essential research tools and filler that I’ll use two lines from and never touch again?

Or, should I stop worrying, admit that I’m a fallen, shameless “shopaholic,” with no more self-restraint than the fashionista, gadgeteer, whatever-your-retail-vice-is crowd, and just enjoy my book-collecting “hobby”?

Teaching: An Imaginary Course on Very Cool Books

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday, I killed some time creating an imaginary American history course. Its theme was not an investigation of some specific period of time. Instead, it was historiographical . . . in a peculiar way. It covered all the books that were revelations to me early in my career.

My course was chronological through my study of history. It started with Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, a book that has been criticized from every direction and yet still seems to me to have gotten the most important part of a book right: it tried to answer a crucial question that sits at the heart of the conception of America. How did men who owned human beings come to espouse a philosophy of human freedom?

The next, obvious, book for my course was Eric Foner’s Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, a book I’ve cited so many times it’s the one citation I know by heart. The idea that political ideology was a world view created from ideas and experiences was such a revelation to me that I have spent my life studying it.

Richard White’s Middle Ground held me so spellbound that I read the entire thing standing up in the middle of a room; I couldn’t take the time to sit down on the couch ten feet from me. Who knew that you could look at American History from a completely different geographic perspective and tell a story that made sense—even more sense—than one told from the coasts?

I read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale in that same house, reading it cover to cover through the night during a week when I was the sole caregiver for a toddler and an infant—a good reflection of the significance of the book, but not a good decision for an already sleep-deprived mother. That anyone could weave such a textured portrait of colonial life out of the jagged threads of jotted phrases proved to me how much could be done in history, if only one had imagination and dogged determination.

At this point, though, my enthusiasm for my course slowed. The problem should be easy to see, perhaps, but I hadn’t seen it until I actually taught White’s Middle Ground in a historiography class once. These books were such classics from the minute they appeared that their ideas have been incorporated into our general understanding of the past. While I was wildly excited about Middle Ground, my students remained unmoved. Finally, one of them explained that while the book must have been a revelation when I read it, they had never known any historical world in which what he wrote wasn’t common knowledge. They couldn’t get excited about something that was to them, as she explained, “wallpaper.”

So I went back to the drawing board for my fantasy course. This time, my “classics” would either be newer, or less widely known.

Elliott West’s Contested Plains makes the cut easily. It’s a thorough portrait of the relationship of humans to the environment through a close study of the Colorado gold rush of the 1850s, but West doesn’t stop there. His larger point is the immense power of ideas, and he steps out of the safe tower of the academic historian to suggest that it is imperative for humans to imagine new ways of living together.

Eric Rauchway’s Murdering McKinley is still my favorite example of just what strong narrative technique can do to illuminate history. His rip-roaring portrait of the search for just why Leon Czolgosz murdered the president does more to bring the late nineteenth-century to life than almost any other book I can think of. Hey, he even explains that Czolgosz was pronounced “Cholgosh.” For that alone, the book belongs on a list of classics.

Like American Slavery, American Freedom, Bonnie Lynn Sherow’s slim volume Red Earth asks the right question. If Indian, black, and white farmers all got land in Oklahoma at the turn of the century, and if they all lived under the same laws, why did the white farmers end up with all the land? Her careful, detailed study of the answer to that question has a number of surprises, and complicates our picture of race in America.

OK, here’s a surprise one: Robert Mazrim’s The Sangamo Frontier: History and Archaeology in the Shadow of Lincoln is about archaeology . . . mostly, sort of. Mazrim is an archaeologist, and he puts the archaeological record back into his investigation of the human history of the Sangamo region of Illinois. The book combines history with an explanation of how archaeologists work and the meaning of what they find. And Mazrim has an unerring eye for the great anecdote or piece of evidence. Who knew a book about dirt in the Sangamo region could be a page-turner, but it is.

I’m going to leave this here, with four old classics and four new ones. But I’m not going to drop this idea (there is, after all, always time to kill). Other suggestions for books that introduce new ways to look at the historical world are most welcome.

Amateurs, Professionals, and Popular Histories

Dan Allosso

As I look at the historiographical “tree” I drew, it strikes me that the books on it have all been chosen by historians. I wonder what it would look like, if it included books that were especially important at imparting historical ideas to the general public?

The other day, Lisa responded to Chris’ post with a comment about appreciating older scholarship, and the “parents/grandparents” element of our intellectual lineage. I’ve been thinking about that, as I’ve been reading professional historiographies (John Higham, Peter Novick, Ian Tyrell) this week, along with assessments of the influence and popularity of books: Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947) and Cowley & Smith’s Books that Changed Our Minds (1939). Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith's book, dedicated to Charles Beard, consists of a series of essays on authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry. While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled had written books that did influence large groups of Americans. Carl Becker, for instance, nominated William Graham Sumner's A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (1907), “which impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,” and Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If ' (1911), which “confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.” (quoting Becker’s letter, 6) Beard said “Brooks Adams’s two books are thumping,” which the editors took to mean The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and Theory of Social Revolutions (1913). Both Becker and Beard recommended Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (1923).

Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!); An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Theory of the Leisure Class got an equal number of votes. Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for their body of work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Autobiographies included Henry Adams’, Theodore Dreiser’s, Joseph Freeman’s, Robert M. La Follette’s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which is called “the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.” (12)

Several of Cowley and Smith’s picks also appear in the lists of popular, “amateur” history I’m compiling from Higham, Novick, and Tyrell, which focuses more on the question of whether or not an author was academic, and how he (yes, 99% of the time, he) fit in the growth of the profession, but nevertheless offer some guidance regarding popularity. For example, former Senator and amateur historian Albert Beveridge’s Lincoln (1928) earned $51,000 in royalties in its first six months (Higham 75). H.G. Wells’ Outline of History (1920) was “issued by a hesitant publisher at an exorbitant price . . . it sold one and a half million copies--one copy for every twenty homes in the country--within twelve years.” (Higham 74) Although the multi-volume set is global in scope, it deals extensively with American history and perhaps contextualizes it in a way that resonated with readers. Volume Four begins with back-to-back photos of Lincoln at Antietam and Bismarck at Versailles. Novick compares sales of Wells’ Outline with J. Franklin Jameson’s American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), which sold less than a thousand, and John D. Hicks’ Populist Revolt (1931), which “took seventeen years to sell fifteen hundred copies.” (Novick 193) Allan Nevins, always interested in popular history, said that Mark Sullivan’s Our Times (1926) had “probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.” (Tyrell 49)

Cowley & Smith mention that Robert Lynd responded to their survey on the most influential books, with authors like Alfred Adler, John Dewey, William James, Veblen, Thomas Huxley, and with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. These suggestions, the editors noted, were much different from the “books taken from the Middletown public library in 1935,” which Lynd described in Middletown (Chapter 17) and Middletown in Transition (Chapter 7). Those chapters probably deserve a closer look, alongside the titles I’ve pulled together on reader response theory and interpretive communities.

See also:

Waldo Frank, Our America

Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Herbert Croly, Promise of American Life

Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money

Joseph Krutch, The Modern Temper (said to be “very influential in the colleges,” 13)

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Graham Wallas, The Great Society

John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes

James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Boston's Best Bookstore

Randall Stephens

Coming to the 2011 AHA in Boston? Have a moment or two to spare? Check out the Brattle Book Shop, near the Downtown Crossing and Park Street T stops. The store is one of the oldest in the country and is brimming with books, old and new. Sections on 19th-century history, European studies, Asian history, New England history, religious history, African-American studies, ethnicity, political science, and on and on line what seem like miles of shelf space.

I’m particularly fond of the outdoor area, which contains thousands of books for as little as $1 to $5 each. (See the video I shot, embedded below.) That space is open all year round, only closing when it rains or snows. (After a long Boston walk with my border collie Beatrice, I’ll peruse titles until Bea begins to whimper out of sheer boredom.)

As Beatrice waits impatiently, I’ve been surprised by how many great history titles I’ve found outside. I’ve picked up books there by Allan Nevins, Oscar Handlin, Gordon Wood, Pauline Maier, Patricia Bonomi, and many more. Also, I’ve been happy to track down unusual 19th-century travel accounts, memoirs, primary source collections, and all manner of biographies.

Brattle Book Shop is real must-see for history bibliophiles!

I asked Ken Gloss, proprietor, about his store and what a history professor, grad student, or history enthusiast might find there.

Randall Stephens: What makes the Brattle Book Shop unique? What would you say are some of its most distinctive features?

Kenneth Gloss: The Brattle Book Shop can be traced back to the 1820s and it’s been in my family since 1949. It is a Dickensian-style store. The outside stands hold about 2,000+ books at $1, $3, and $5. We have two floors of general used books, and a third floor with rare books, 1st editions, leather-bound volumes, manuscripts, etc.

We go to estates throughout New England almost every day. It is like being Jim Hawkins on Treasure Island finding great books and libraries and then bringing them back to the shop.

You never know what is new to the shop on

any given day.

Stephens: What sort of clientele do you serve? Does the Brattle Book Shop have a typical customer?

Gloss: We have every type of customer you can imagine. We’ve got street people who buy from our $1 tables, collectors who spend large sums on rare letters, manuscripts, rare editions, and the customer who just wants a hard-to-find volume. They are young, old, male, female, regular, one-time, compulsive, and interesting. We have one customer who comes in every day and calls in sick when he cannot get in.

Stephens: Many historians that I know keep an eye out for that gem of a book. What sorts of books at Brattle would catch the eye of a historian on the lookout for a bargain or a rarity?

Gloss: We buy and put out books each day. Many of those are by amateur historians, professors, and writers. So you never know what will be on the shelves. That is what keeps people coming. There are also many, many bargains.

Books that Regular People Read

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Today's post comes from Dan Allosso, a PhD student in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He reflects on the bestsellers of ages past and what we can learn about regular people from the books they read.

Dan Allosso

Since historians rely heavily on written records of the past, they often wonder about the audiences of the literary subjects they study. And about the reading habits of people who didn't bother to preserve detailed narratives of their lives and thoughts. How many people (and which people) read Emerson's "American Scholar" essay, Ben Franklin's Autobiography, or Thomas Paine's controversial Age of Reason? We've all heard that Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best selling book of its time; how many people also read H. R. Helper's Impending Crisis?

Frank Luther Mott (1886-1964) is best known for his Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize-winning A History of American Magazines. He also wrote a book called Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States, in 1947. As the title suggests, Mott identifies about 324 books that were the biggest sellers of their day. This is extremely valuable, for people who want to know what regular folks in America were reading. It’s a little surprising that the library doesn’t contain a whole shelf-full of books like this, but Mott’s is the only one I’ve found so far.

There are a lot of surprises in this book. For example, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the bestseller for 1776, is preceded by Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son in 1775 and followed by Milton’s Paradise Lost (originally published in 1667) in 1777. In the early 1820s, people were buying a lot of Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper. They avidly read Washington Irving’s Tales of a Traveler and Sarah Josepha Hale’s Sketches of American Character; but not Timothy Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York. They did read George Bancroft’s History of the United States, but not as much as the delved into Jared Sparks’ Life of Washington or Daniel P. Thompson’s The Green Mountain Boys, published in the 1830s.

Possibly the most interesting thing about Mott’s list of American bestsellers is that nearly all of them are available “full-view” on Google Books (and now on Google ebooks). I think this is a game-changer for people interested in the past. We no longer have to depend on the judgment of previous scholars, who might have preferred Timothy Dwight over Sarah Hale, even though Hale was widely read in her time (and was the author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”). Not that Dwight’s work doesn’t contain valuable material, but we no longer have to assume it gives us the best view of what interested people at the time. Using guides like Mott’s along with resources like Google, the Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg, we may be able to better understand what regular people thought and cared about. This might tell us why Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and Harvey’s Coin’s Financial School (1894) were so much more widely read (and influential?) in their day than Marx’s Capital (1889).

"I can't read this book . . . it's long and boring"

Randall Stephens

Are we awash in a rising sea of idiocracy? Or, are things just different today; no better, no worse than yesterday? Is short always sweet? Perhaps anything worth saying can be pared down to 140 characters (twitter) or 160 characters (SMS). I don't believe that. And I think that "pithy" and "tweet" probably shouldn't go in the same sentence.

Still I'm not above assigning portions of a longer book. Maybe students do get less from the whole. I know that some students are paralyzed with fear at the thought of reading a 250-page work of non fiction. It's like asking them to scale a mountain and then paraglide down into a briar patch.

So, I was intrigued by Carlin Romano's sign-of-the-times essay in the August 29th Chronicle: "Will the Book Survive Generation Text?" (It's part of a series of essays on what the future of the profession holds.) He summarizes the work of academic forecasters and doomsayers--Derek Bok, Jennifer Washburn, Frank Donoghue, Mary Burgan, Louis Menand. Romano proposes a funny sort of idea, "extreme academe," to sum up what might take place in our near future. "Extreme academe, as a vision, ups the ante of such concerns. It adds flash and cynicism to mere trepidation," says Romano. "According to it, college students in 2020 will use plastic cards to open the glass security doors installed at each entrance to campus. On special occasions, the sole tenured faculty member at every institution will be wheeled out, like the stuffed remains of Jeremy Bentham at University College London, for receptions."

Romano worries that, "Destructive cultural trends lurk behind the decline of readerly ambition and student stamina. One is the expanding cultural bias in all writerly media toward clipped, hit-friendly brevity—no longer the soul of wit, but metric-driven pith in lieu of wit. Everywhere they turn, but particularly in mainstream, sophisticated venues—where middle-aged fogies desperately seek to stay ahead of the tech curve—young people hear, through the apotheosis of tweets, blog posts, Facebook updates, and sound bites as the core of communication, that short is always smarter and better than long, even though most everyone knows it's usually dumber and worse."

He also takes aim at a kind of cult of "interactivity.": "Another cultural trend propelling the possible death of the whole book as assigned reading is the pressurized hawking of interactivity, brought to us by the same media panderers to limited attention spans. It's no longer acceptable for A to listen to B for more than a few minutes before A gets his or her right to respond."

Not so encouraging. Certainly worth considering as the job market continues to shrink and as the culture of the academy undergoes radical change.

"I hate history": Thinking of Ways to Get the Average, History-Hating Student Interested in the Study of the Past

Randall Stephens

I'm gearing up to teach a large West in the World since 1500, civ-style class. As usual, I know there will be dozens of students enrolled who care not a fig for history and think historical knowledge is, at best, useless trivia. "I'm a business major. Why do I need to know all this?" My work is cut out for me, as it is for other professors who will be teaching similar gen-ed classes in the fall.

I like to start off course like this with a general "Why study history" lecture. We study the past to know who we are and to know how history still shapes the present, I tell them. History is also our collective memory. Just as we think it is not best for a person to have amnesia, we also think it is best for a society to have a collective memory. I also usually touch on the chief contributions historians have made to our understanding of what it means to be human. And, I spend some time looking at the very different views various historians have concerning the same events.

This year, though, I was thinking about doing something a little different. I plan to pose some general questions/head-scratchers that might get them thinking historically about why things are the way they are and why history matters. So, for example:

In 1931 the historian Carl Becker said: "If the essence of history is the memory of things said and done, then it is obvious that every normal person, Mr. Everyman, knows some history." Do you have a family history? Do things that happened in your family in the past still shape how you interact with your mother, father, sister, brother, cousins, grandparents, aunts, and uncles?

Show the students a map of the world. Ask: Why is it that the northern hemisphere has tended to contain the wealthiest countries in the world? What light might history shed on that development? Explain Jared Diamond's thesis.

Read them a mid-19th century law on the status of women as dependents. Ask: How do we got from that point A to point B today?

Draw a long timeline, spanning back 200,000 years, the starting point of modern humans. Ask: Why it is that only relatively recently--roughly 5,000 years ago--humans began to record their history?

The historian Mary Beard says that most people today would find the "brutality toward other human beings" in the ancient world to be abhorrent. Throughout most of human history slavery and rigid social hierarchies were taken for granted. Ask: Why do modern western societies value equality and humanitarianism?

Show students some maps from the early modern era and some from the modern era. Ask: What accounts for the fundamental differences in how cartographers drew these maps? What might history tell us about the changing perceptions those in the West and those in the East had of the world?

Quote Johann Gottfried Herder: "History is geography." Ask: Is history shaped or controlled more by geography than any other force? Why or why not?

Does history have a direction? Are we heading "somewhere"? Is society getting better? Is society getting worse? How could we know one way or the other?

Needless to say . . . I'm still thinking through these.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part V: Tips for Discussion Sections

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order Heather Cox Richardson describes the purpose of discussion sections and offers advice on public speaking and how to have a successful discussion.

Tips for Discussion Sections
Heather Cox Richardson

Discussions sections (in my courses, at any rate), are designed primarily to do two things. First, they give students an opportunity to explore in-depth material that pertains to the class, but which we don’t have the time to cover in lecture. Second, they give students a forum in which they can practice speaking and arguing in public.

My discussion sections are usually designed around a problem raised by the course material. This problem is identified in the “discussion question” part of the syllabus, listed for each week, near the readings. To prepare for discussion, do the readings and think about the question. How would you answer it? Why? What do the readings (or films) have to do with the question? What other ideas or issues have the readings raised? You should have a clear idea of what you are going to argue in class before you get there. If you are required to write your answer, remember to do so and to bring your response to class.

In discussion sections students can learn to present ideas and argue through problems. This is a critical skill that you really must have as you go out into the world. There is not a single profession you can choose in which this skill is not important. Almost no one is comfortable speaking in class at first, so don’t think you’re alone in being nervous about it. But wouldn’t you rather develop the ability to speak in public in a setting where your performance earns only about 1/12 of 20% of your grade in one of the many courses you’ll take in your college career, rather than at your first job, where your performance in meetings might well determine your employment status? There are tricks to making speaking in class easier (below).

History discussion sections are not supposed to mimic lectures, with a teaching assistant reiterating what the professor has said in lecture. The purpose of a history section is not to clarify the lectures (as is often the purpose of sections in science courses). History discussion sections have a different format, and a different goal. If you’re confused about lecture material, of course you should ask the T.A. if s/he can help, but don’t be surprised if s/he refuses to spend class time going over what has already been covered. S/he has a different agenda, set by the professor, and cannot spend large amounts of time going back over lecture material. If you’re confused and can’t find your way clear using the textbook or reviewing your notes, then visit your T.A. during his/her office hours.

Tips to Make Speaking in Class Easier:

Act. Of course you’re uncomfortable putting your ideas out there. Everyone is (including me!). But imagine how you would act if you weren’t nervous. Then do the act. Gradually speaking your ideas out loud becomes easier and more natural.

Learn the names of your classmates. Your college years are the time for you to meet new people and, yes, make contacts for the future. Can you imagine working with a colleague for three months without learning his or her name? Of course not. So why pretend that your classmates are so interchangeable that you don’t need to bother recognizing them as individuals? You may well end up meeting someone whose interests coincide with yours, or by whom you are impressed enough that when you need a graphic designer for your new start-up company, you know whom to call. At the very least, you won’t have to deal with the ridiculousness of referring to your classmates by pronouns after spending three months in their company.

Discuss things. Sections are not supposed to be a time to chat with the teacher. Discussions mean that you should talk to your classmates, while the T.A. acts primarily as a facilitator. This is not unlike a discussion of the last Red Sox game around the lunch table. You may not have something wildly original to say; actually, you agree with what the gentleman sitting two seats away just said. If that were the case, you wouldn’t sit there woodenly, watching other people talk. You would nod, or interject “I agree with Mike on that. The Red Sox should never have traded Clemens,” or in some other way indicate your interest in the conversation. If you’re not a fan, and the Red Sox discussion is losing you, you wouldn’t sit at the table silently. You would say: “Wait a minute. I’m lost. Who’s Clemens, and why is he so important?” Or you would even say: “I can’t get into the Red Sox. Baseball leaves me cold. European football is a far more important sport nowadays, since it’s followed by the entire world.” And if someone at the table wasn’t involved, you would ask him or her what s/he thought. Often, that would turn out to be the person with a slightly different perspective that s/he thought didn’t really fit the conversation and so was quiet, but when asked, made a point that got you to rethink the whole issue. This is exactly what should happen in classes, although the material should, obviously, be related to the week’s class material.

Now, how can you participate if you’re really lost? Ask questions about what people say: “Carole, could you say a little bit more about that? I really don’t understand how this material shows that Andrew Jackson was operating for the good of the majority.” And in the rare instance where you’re caught out having not done the week’s reading? Pass the ball to someone else. “I’m not sure what I think about this issue yet. I’m interested in the approach Maya is taking, though, and I wonder what Oleg would say about it.”

Speak up in the first two weeks of class, even if it’s just to say, “I agree.” No one has any expectations about your behavior in the beginning of the semester and, even if you’ve never made a peep in a class before, no one will know that. You can start speaking up and people will just assume you’re comfortable speaking in class. If you wait much beyond the third week, though, it will get harder to speak with each passing class.

Remember, too, that you have a responsibility to your classmates in discussion sections. Because of the nature of sections, you need to pull your weight to enable them to learn. We’ve all been in discussion sections which are deadly because only two students have done the work and the rest sit like statues. That’s not fair to anyone, and there’s no way a teacher can save such a class, since it won’t work without the students doing their share. Your responsibility includes making a section work well. If someone is floundering, help. If someone never speaks up, include him or her in the discussion. If you find yourself talking too much, work to throw the conversation to someone else by asking what a classmate thinks. While there is an ultimate payback for this behavior in your better understanding of class material, there is also a more immediate one. Did you save a classmate who was lost? Next time you falter, s/he’ll help you. But if you don’t….

And yes, all these skills translate directly into the skill set you need for your career—any career.

Rules for Discussions:

No fist fights. (I had to put that in… and yes, I had one in a class, once, but not over the class material).

Comments of any sort that make your classmates or T.A. uncomfortable are never appropriate. This includes political statements, incidentally. You are always welcome to talk and even argue about politics in my classes, but you must be respectful of all opinions that are not hate speech. No attacks on fellow classmates; no blanket name calling, as in: “All ------s are idiots! They all think that….” No referring to a group with which a classmate identifies by a derogatory name: “babykillers,” “fascists,” or “treehuggers.” All statements need to be backed up with verifiable facts, not just talking points from a political party.

If you want to make general comments linking the week’s material to a different issue, fine, but you cannot try to turn the week’s discussion into a detailed fight over another issue unless the entire class has access to the same materials to which you’re referring and unless the entire class wants to have that particular discussion. If an issue needs clarification and a resort to outside materials, it needs to be deferred to the following week, when everyone has looked at the relevant materials.

Actual explanations of outside issues and how those issues might relate to the week’s material are always welcome.

What you wear can make your teachers and classmates uncomfortable. If you want to wear something that makes a statement because you want to take a stand, that’s fine. But don’t carelessly put on a shirt that makes a sexual statement or show up in clothes that would be inappropriate to wear to your job because you’re not thinking. How you dress does affect the way you’re regarded. It’s hard to take seriously a student who shows up in a shirt that celebrates drinking or drug use, and it’s downright offensive to have to deal in a professional setting with someone wearing a shirt that makes overt sexual comments (women are just as guilty of this as men are, by the way). Someone once told me that the more powerful you are, the less flesh you show. Think about it. When was the last time you saw Dick Cheney in ratty shorts and a “The Liver is Evil; it Must be Punished” t-shirt?

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IV: How to Read for a College History Course

In an essay on "Success" Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear." Careful reading is difficult to master. Undergrads in history find it tough to get that kernel of truth buried deep in a document. Others search long and hard for the thesis in a haystack with little luck.

In this installment of Richardson's Rules of Order, Heather Cox Richardson gives advice to college students on close reading. She poses some crucial questions students should consider when they make their way through that microfilmed newspaper article, court record, diary entry, novel, census record, television program, or monograph.


How to Read for a College History Course
Heather Cox Richardson

There are two types of sources in history: primary sources and secondary sources. They should be approached very differently.

Primary sources are things produced at the time. Letters, photographs, census records, songs, movies, advertisements, newspapers, TV shows, paintings, emails, and books are all examples of primary sources. Primary sources tell historians about the world at a certain time, and how people who lived then saw their world.

When you read a primary source, you need to read every word very carefully. You want to figure out who produced the source, and for whom it was written. A letter from a Confederate prisoner of war to his elderly father describing the black Union soldiers who had captured him would be very different than the memo from the black soldiers’ captain commending their actions, and neither would exactly reflect what had happened. (Think about it—a letter to your grandmother describing a day of college life would be a very different thing than a letter to your best friend describing the exact same day and, again, neither would be one hundred percent accurate).

Why was the document—or film, or canvas—produced? When James McLaughlin wrote his book My Friend the Indian (1910) was he trying to excuse his role in the murder of Sitting Bull? When Frank Triplett wrote The Life, Times, and Treacherous Death of Jesse James (1882) was he attacking the Republican government that controlled Missouri and the rest of the nation in the 1880s? The answer to both of these questions is yes, and as a result both authors strongly slanted their telling of events. No one produces anything without a bias, so you need to know the author’s agenda when s/he produced the source, to give you some sense of what can and can’t be learned from the document. McLaughlin is fairly reliable about mid-nineteenth-century Lakota treaties, while Triplett is reliable only for giving us an excellent picture of how ex-Confederates perceived the postwar Republican government.

When and where was the primary source written? A Southern version of Reconstruction written in 1868 would be dramatically different than one written in 1890, just as a letter to a friend about an exciting new job would be very different after five years of overwork, underpay, and an eventual sacking during a downsizing, even though both letters were about the same job and were written only five years apart.

Finally, a question most students have trouble answering: What does the source say? What can we learn from it about the time in which it was written? This will be much easier to decipher once you know the “who, when, where, and why.” Think, for example, of Jimi Hendrix’s famous version of the Star Spangled Banner performed at Woodstock in 1969.

Without any context except a knowledge of rock and roll history, his version has meaning for guitar fans, but someone who had never heard of Hendrix, or the song, or the era would probably dismiss the piece altogether as “a bunch of utter garbage,” as a student once called it when we listened to it in class. With a knowledge of the history of the song as the nation’s anthem, Hendrix’s position as America’s premier guitarist at a time when African Americans and Native Americans were demanding rights in the nation, the context of the Vietnam War, and both domestic and international challenges to America’s stratified society, and the story of Woodstock, it becomes a vital piece of America’s history.

Secondary sources are things written after the period, which analyze primary sources to make an argument about how we should interpret the events of the past. In history courses, secondary sources will usually be books or articles, but they can also be documentaries or websites.

You read a secondary source very differently than you do a primary source. Your goal in reading a secondary source is to discover the author’s argument, and to see what evidence s/he marshals to support that thesis. Once you have a handle on the argument and its evidence, you need to analyze whether or not you buy the argument, and why you’ve taken your position.

To read a secondary source, begin with the introduction, even if the professor has not assigned it and has asked you to read only a chapter or two of the book. Historians tend to say what they’re going to say, then to say it, then to say what they’ve said. Introductions almost always lay out the argument of the book. Once you’ve read the introduction, skip to the conclusion, looking again for the argument of the book. In the conclusion, an author usually summarizes the book’s thesis. Stay in the introduction and conclusion until you are certain of the book’s argument.

Once you know what an author is up to, read the body of the book. The most efficient way to do that is to read the introduction and conclusion of each chapter, to see how the argument progresses, and then to go back to the beginning of the book and move through it, reading the topic sentence of each paragraph. By now you should have a very clear idea of how the book works and how the argument develops. You can now go back and read the book to see how the author uses evidence to support his or her points. Check footnotes sometimes, especially if something seems forced. Is the source a solid one, or does it seem insufficient to support the point it makes?

This is a different way of reading than you are accustomed to, and it will seem awkward at first. It’s worth developing the skill to do it this way, though. This is by far the most efficient way to read secondary sources in history (and many other subjects), and will give you the best command of the material in the shortest time. Remember, what matters is not how many hours you spend reading, but whether or not you actually understand what you read. A student once told me proudly that he had taken all day Saturday and Sunday to read every single word of a book I had assigned although he didn’t understand any of it. Personally, I can’t think of a more thorough waste of a weekend. Please recognize—as he didn’t—that simply passing your eyes over the letters on a page is not a good use of your time.

Once you have command of the book, think about it. Do you agree with it? Did the author make his or her point by using factual evidence that supported the conclusion? If not, what seemed wrong? Did s/he make a sweeping argument about nineteenth-century American society and use evidence only from a few decades? Did s/he put into footnotes critical information that contradicted the argument in the text? Does the argument seem radically different than prevailing thought? Does it appear forced, without adequate and believable sources? Does it seem to make assumptions about the past in order to fit a specific theory? Or does the book seem to make a solid argument about the past that illuminates the way society works? Do you agree with the argument? Does it change the way you think about things?

Thinking about a book doesn’t have to take place at a desk. It’s a good way to take up time when you’re walking somewhere, or doing repetitive exercise, or even going on long drives. Make thinking about your studies part of your life. This, too, will be a habit that takes some effort to acquire, but will stand you in very good stead in the future, when you’ll have work issues that require more thought than you can give them during work hours.

See previous posts for more Richardson's Rules of Order.