Over my lifetime I have loved reading history—especially big-themed books about the rise of the Western world and the causes of the Industrial Revolution. No, I did not expect to duplicate that kind of subject matter when I started an academic course of history.
I expected instead some chunky medium-sized themes in European history. I thought I would learn things like why the Hapsburgs fell, what caused World War I, why did the German states take so long to form a nation, why did France have so many credit problems, and why was the Hanseatic League successful?
My expectations were off-base. Had I been starting an undergraduate history major, such (yes, some unanswerable) questions might have been subjects of discussion. But graduate school is different. The emphasis is more on writing (especially a thesis) than on acquiring facts. Indeed, if I dare say so, the success path for graduate students and other researchers is to find something that no one has noticed before, research it, and then prove it shouldn’t be obscure at all! Continue reading “I Learn What Graduate Courses Are About”
The Internet has transformed research. But until I began taking college classes again, I didn’t understand how much an academic library can help me take advantage of it.
If you use Google Scholar, you come upon rich sources of information, but unless you have an avenue through a library, many of them are closed to you. As a student at NC State Library, I can check a box and every listing to which NC State has arranged a relationship will be marked “Find Text at NC State.”
I just found online the complete 1744 “Essay Presented, or a Method Humbly Proposed, to the Consideration of the Honorable the Members of Both Houses of Parliament by an English Woolen Manufacturer…” (a petition for subsidies). I can’t link you to it because of its limited access; nor can I give you access to the multitude of articles I have read from journals such as Past and Present, the Journal of Economic History, the Journal of French Historical Studies, etc. Reaching this treasure trove is not cheap. You have to take at least one course ($2600 at the graduate level) but you are treated like a king.
Historical writing evolves. So there are some things that a budding historian should not say, do, or be. I’ll start with words that have gone out of fashion.
“Dark Ages” was a pejorative term historians used (until recently) to describe Europe beginning around 500. Influenced by the Enlightenment, these nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians thought that after Rome “fell” (another term going out of style), Europe had plunged into a benighted age of deteriorating trade, economic stagnation, and ignorance. Europe didn’t get fully back on track until the rediscovery of the ancient civilizations—the Renaissance. The first 500 hundred years were the worst, thus the Dark Ages.
That prejudice is gone. The Middle Ages as a whole are seen as a period of commercial and agricultural vitality. The “fall of Rome” has given way to “late antiquity,” and the “Dark Ages” are now the Early Middle Ages (followed, at least among Anglophone writers) by the High and Late Middle Ages. (By the way, notice that I said “Anglophone,” not “English-speaking.” Trying to sound like an academic.)
I hadn’t planned on studying the Middle Ages, but one semester the only European course that looked good to me was History of the High Middle Ages, the period from 1000 to about 1300. (For climate aficionados that was the time of the Medieval Optimum, when it was warm enough to grow grapes in England and Greenland was temporarily settled.)
One thing I learned was that our romantic “Sir Walter Scott” fantasies about knights, castles, chivalry, and jousts are—largely true! There really was a courtly world. Lords built scores (perhaps hundreds) of castles across western Europe; the move to primogeniture (inheritance by the first-born male) meant that a lot of younger sons (“cadets”) were looking for rich heiresses; and jousts were a way of keeping young knights busy and in good shape without actually engaging in wars (of course, they had plenty of those, too). The aristocrats may have represented only 2 percent or so of the population, but they had chroniclers and poets to commemorate them.
