Historical Methods

Arizona State University Sign on Campus

I just finished a graduate course in Historical Methods at Arizona State University online.  The week before the course started, I presented a paper at the American Historical Association annual meeting.  My advisor was also there presenting a paper on historic representations of the Virgin Mary in Peruvian culture.  After the conference a journalist from ASU interviewed me for an article in ASU Now.  (<---Click to read that article). I'm honored to be chosen to promote the M.A. in history program at ASU online, but my goal is not to get another degree as the journalist assumed.  I enrolled in the ASU program in order to learn historical methods to improve my writing as a historian.  The course I took was an overview of the historical methods used by Western European historians since 500 BC.  I discovered that historical methods are not any different from those used in educational or theological research and they developed in much the same way over the years.  What I am looking for is a new theoretical framework for historical research that builds on a postmodern understanding of space and time, feminist critical method and contemporary mystical perspectives of the nature of God and divine intervention in human history.  Such a method does not seem to exist yet, and I want to develop this idea further.  We read five full-length texts and a dozen or so 30-60 page journal articles dealing with historical methods from various perspectives.  The basic text for the course was The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th edition by John Tosh.  The introductory lecture covered the early years of history from Herodotus to Saint Augustine up to Hegel and Ranke, the major historians of the modern era.  Over the course of eight weeks we studied postmodern theories addressing issues of race, culture and gender and questioned the possibility of pure objectivity in the search for the truth.  There were about thirty people in the course, men and women from all over the country.  We contributed comments to the community forum, participated in weekly discussion boards and submitted observations and reflections on the readings.  The course helped me to grow in understanding how historians have thought about the craft of writing history over the centuries, and it gave me some new ideas about selection and interpretation of source material.  Although I will not be continuing on to get the M.A. in history at ASU, I would definitely recommend the program to anyone seeking a graduate degree.  In the following posts I will share some highlights from the course I took and excerpts from my reflections.

Correcting Historic Bias

Removal of statue of Robert E. Lee in Dallas, Texas on September 14, 2017.

Through the process of scholarly research, as we historians arrive at an understanding of truth, it is important for us to resist unconsciously accepting the previous interpretations of those who produced, sorted and filtered the information.  This is true even when examining primary sources.  Historians, like journalists, are professionally trained to recognize unconscious bias, to see through intentional obfuscation, and to detect the willful spread of misinformation for political purposes.  Nevertheless, we can sometimes be duped into accepting a false account of events that well-written and well-documented.  As John Tosh pointed out, “The priorities and prejudices in the written record are evidence of the kind of rule handed down to subjects or citizens.  The unwary researcher may be led by the hand, taking on board the political perspective and professional concerns of those who wrote the records.”1  History is full of evidence that those in power strive to subject others to their own version of events.  The propagation of elitist views negatively influences perceptions about truth in the present day, and that effect applies to artifacts as well as written records.  Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, “What happened leaves traces, some of which are quite concrete – buildings, dead bodies, censuses, monuments, diaries, political boundaries – that limit the range and significance of any historical narrative.”2  According to Trouillot, “the historicity of the human condition also requires that practices of power and domination be renewed.  It is that renewal that should concern us most, even if in the name of our pasts.”  The recent removal of civil war statues that validated white supremacist ideology is a testament to growth in civic awareness of the need to correct previous historic bias. 3

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1 John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History, 6th edition. (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2015), 117-118.

2 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015), 29.

3 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 151.