Years ago, as a young economics professor, my husband served on a history student’s advisory committee. At the student’s dissertation defense, the historians asked detailed questions about the paper. My husband asked, “What is the theory behind your findings?” The student stammered an answer and my husband concluded that historians don’t think much of theories.
I won’t address whether historians have theories right now, but, rather, discuss economists’ theories about how people make decisions. Some are simple: Incentives matter, so when something becomes more costly (in money, effort, or pain), people usually want less of it. Another is opportunity cost: something may have value, such as sitting on the lawn on a nice day, but its opportunity cost is high if it means missing an interview for a good job.
Economists apply their theories to all kinds of human behavior. In my historical research on primogeniture in the Middle Ages, I came across a bold and bracing paper, “An Economic Analysis of the Protestant Reformation.“[1] The economist authors tried to figure out why some regions in Europe became Protestant and why others stayed Catholic. They hypothesized that some European countries were more open to Protestantism than others: “societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth” would welcome Protestantism, while “more homogeneous, rent-seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth” would reject it. Continue reading “Historians Have Facts, Economists Have Theories?”
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.
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”
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.)
