Back to the 1960s

A few years ago, at a used bookstore in Leonardstown, Maryland, I picked up How to Study History. [1] Written by two well-known historians, Norman F. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, it was published in 1967 and reflects views about history that prevailed when I was in college. They differ quite a lot from those I’m being taught now, as I will point out.

But first, you’ve got to love this book! It was written to give undergraduates a play-by-play description of how to study history. Somewhat patronizingly, it reminds the student “to carry with him [yes, him; it’s 1967] at all times a pen and some kind of note paper” and, ”as a general rule, avoid group study.”[2] But it also helps the student distinguish  between demonstrable proof and inferential proof and analyze both literary and artistic primary sources.

It sets high standards. The book includes two sample papers by freshmen. Overall comment on one: “A superior paper, yet you can do better. Try to be even more concise and to the point. B+.”[3] It’s been a long time, I believe, since superior papers received a mere B+

But the book has a larger purpose—setting down what history means (or meant in 1967).

“What the historian does is to obtain information about the past and then to make judgments about the significance, meaning, importance, and relevance of these bits of information. . . . Far from prohibiting historians from making judgments, we now say that the historian has an obligation to make judgments.” [4]

Cantor and Schneider don’t dictate how these judgments are to be made. Instead, they see the ability to understand and interpret history as developing out of individuals’ own experiences. ”Other things being equal, the best historian will be the one with the most varied and sophisticated personal experience of human conduct and social change.”[5]

In other words, draw from yourself, your knowledge, and your experience to write history

Now let me shift to more recent historians. While the taxonomy of historical schools differs, one of the newest listings is found in Lynn Hunt’s 2014 book Writing History in the Global Era.[7] She says that in the postwar period there were “four major paradigms of historical research: Marxism, modernization, the Annales school and, in the United States especially, identity politics.”[8]  These are already more complex than implied by Cantor and Schneider. (I briefly describe these paradigms in the notes below).

Then, beginning in the 1960s, “cultural theories” (influenced by anthropologists Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz plus philosopher Michel Foucault) overturned even those traditions. Cultural history absorbed and shaped such trends as “postmodernism,” “poststructuralism,“ the “cultural turn” and the “linguistic turn.” Cultural theories held that societies had their own rules, many of them embodied in language. Cultures had their “contexts” or “discourses” under which certain ideas or actions were “true,” even though truth would be different in different cultures.

Under postmodernism, Hunt explains, the French Revolution “could no longer be viewed as the victory of capitalism over feudalism, as it had long been described in Marxist historiography, for example. Instead, it became a revolution in political culture, in which language, ritual, and symbols played a transformative role.”[9]

Lynn Hunt is smart and sufficiently dexterous to handle all these shifts (her book adds an even more recent one, globalization). I’m not as swift, but I am studying global history this semester so we’ll see.

In any case, there’s something comforting about going back to the 1960s. Cantor and Schneider believed a historian should “constantly improve upon the set of assumptions that he uses to make judgments . . . and create systematic order out of the chaos of events to understand the how and why of history.“

That was his (or her) job. Doing it was possible because “all the methodological principles of the historian are derived from common sense”[10]. Common sense? Now, that’s refreshing.

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[1] Norman F. Cantor and Richard I. Schneider, How to Study History (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell), 1967.

[2] Cantor and Schneider, 12, 15.

[3] Cantor and Schneider, 234.

[4] Cantor and Schneider, 19, 20. Italics are the authors.’

[5] Cantor and Schneider, 11. Italics are the authors.’

[6] Cantor and Schneider, 259.

[7] Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton, 2014).

[8] Marxism views history as a process of one class overthrowing another; modernization theory records the increasing complexity of life over time;  the French Annales school views history as taking place in long waves influenced by population growth and the physical environment; identity history focuses on the experience of groups of people whom historians have largely ignored in the past.

[9] Hunt, 27.

[10] Cantor and Schneider, 9.