One of the enduring historical questions is why the Industrial Revolution started in England, rather than somewhere else. One theory—that of Robert Brenner—gives a lot of credit to England’s agricultural revolution.
Thanks to agriculture, England developed the ability to provide enough food for a growing population (famines ended completely by 1700). At the same time, the changing agriculture reduced the need for so many people on farms. The former manor tenants moved to the towns and cities and became the human engines of the industrial revolution.
For a class this fall, I read a 1976 article by Robert Brenner explaining how this agricultural revolution came about.[1] By the way, I may have earlier overstated the case when I said that historians don’t take Marxism all that seriously. Brenner was either a Marxist or a neo-Marxist, and his paper is laced with Marxist references to “class,” “class consciousness,” and “surplus-extraction.”
Although I have been a professional writer for more than fifty years, I still have some things to learn about academic writing. Here are five lessons I’ve picked up so far:
Don’t use bullets or make lists (like this one). A professor told me that explicitly, and once I began to read more journal articles, I saw the rule at work. Bullets are a useful tool in, say, policy papers, although they are undoubtedly overused in the Internet era (with automatic bulleting). Why aren’t they right for academia? Maybe they make things look too simple. Ideas and facts need to be interwoven in history; trying to separate them into single phrases may oversimplify. Or it may just be a matter of style.
Don’t use short paragraphs. I discovered this on my own. My journalistic three- or four-sentence paragraphs just don’t fly. Again, I don’t exactly know the reason. But combining paragraphs in my papers has given them (and me) a more serious image; very good for a future academic. And topic sentences help.
The first paragraph, especially, should be long. Forget about the Wall Street Journal’s “anecdotal lede” (yes, that’s the way editors spell it), which was invented to attract the reader’s attention. Don’t use Business Week’s “back when, but now” lede, which creates in a few sentences the story’s context for a busy reader. By the way, quotations to enliven the piece are also on the edge of propriety. Be serious. Continue reading “Learning to Write, Again”
My class in historiography introduced me to a relatively new historiographical concept, “memory.” A group of people, usually a country, shapes a memory of its past that reorders the facts of history into a narrative. Historians explore such memories and how they came about. It’s fascinating, but it makes me uneasy.
David W. Blight is a leading historian of memory. His brilliant book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory epitomizes the best use of the concept. [1] In brief, he explains that after the most devastating war in American history the reunified nation had to come to grips with what had happened. Americans created a memory of the war—its goals and its results.
The protocol for most history articles is to begin with a critique of previous historians’ writing or to note that they have missed something important. Most historians do this politely. Sometimes though, exchanges can be heated, even a bit nasty. It isn’t all dull behind the covers of the Economic History Review.
I’ve seen two such debates in my limited experience—an animated conversation with just barely contained hostility. In both cases, the conflicts were between a “social” and an “economic” historian and between a man and a woman. Here’s a summary of one. [1]
In 2004, economic historian Sheilagh Ogilvie criticized a new approach to the history of pre-modern guilds—“rehabilitation” literature that painted guilds as contributing to economic efficiency rather than being merely self-interested monopolists (as economists had been saying for years). She called these “stimulating perspectives,” but they needed to be“tested against alternative theories,” which she then proceeded to do with an empirical study of a weavers’ guild in southwestern Germany. Nothing was untoward in her remarks.
A few years later, S. R. Epstein replied. First, he said that Ogilvie used merely a “single—arguably even singular” example. Her goal was to “demolish a view now held by a majority of scholars with relevant expertise in early modern economic history.” “[H]er article not only misrepresents essential elements of modern international scholarship” but also “fails to address significant elements of her [own] selected study.” All that in one paragraph.
In a sense, all historical writing is revisionist. In their writing, most historians attempt to show that some aspect of history has been slighted, ignored, or undiscovered, and they have come up with a remedy. Sometimes, though, revisionist history is very powerful.
In his 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy offered a revisionist view of the Protestant Reformation in England. His goal was to “contribute a shovelful of history to the burial of the venerable historiographical consensus” about the English Reformation.[1]
That consensus (which echoes the “whig version” of history challenged by Herbert Butterfield) pictured an open-minded, modern religion (Protestantism) replacing a superstitious, populist “folk” religion (Catholicism). Historians, says Duffy, were under the sway of A. G. Dickens, the “doyen of English Reformation studies,” who disdained what Duffy calls “late [Catholic] medieval piety.” Duffy’s 654-page volume (which I am reading for a class this fall) was designed to restore respect for Catholic England, and apparently it did.
