Pearson Edexcel A level in History

Pearson Edexcel A level in History

DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ UNDERSTANDING OF HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS by Arthur Chapman 1

Contents 1. Introduction 2. What are historical interpretations? 2.1 The illusion of ultimate history 2.2 History is a collective practice

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3. Why should Advanced level History students learn about historical interpretations? 6 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Information literacy and citizenship Metacognition History as a discipline Historicity: Understanding time Transition to higher education

4. What challenges can understanding historical interpretations present?

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4.1 Research on younger children’s thinking about historical interpretation8 4.2 Research on 16-19 year-old students’ thinking about interpretation 9 4.3 Conclusion: Using research on students’ ideas when planning 10

5. Developing understandings of historical interpretations: Issues and strategies 11 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

Interpretations, representations and constructions Comprehending and analysing interpretations Explaining why historians arrive at differing interpretations Understanding that differences in interpretation can be legitimate Evaluating interpretations

6. Appendix 1: Activities to develop understandings of historical interpretations 7. Appendix 2: The History Virtual Academy project 8. Appendix 3: Suggestions for further reading 9. References 10. Author profile 11. Acknowledgements

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1. Introduction The study of historical interpretations has been an important feature of the history curriculum for many years. The latest subject content requirements for Advanced level History continue to stipulate its teaching. Pearson’s Edexcel GCE A level History (2015) assesses the study of historical interpretations through the coursework component of the qualification, as well as in Paper 1 Section C. Through the independently researched coursework assignment, students analyse, explain and evaluate the interpretations of three historians around a particular question, problem or issue, with the specification allowing a free choice of coursework topic and title. Students should understand the nature and purpose of the work of the historians as well as form their own critical view based on relevant reading on the question. By the end of the course students will: • • • • • •

recognise that interpretations are representations and constructions of the past recognise the relationships between interpretations and the questions that they seek to ask and answer comprehend and analyse the defining elements of particular interpretations explain why historians arrive at the interpretations they do and understand that differences in interpretation can be legitimate be able to evaluate differing interpretations against appropriate and relevant criteria organise and communicate their findings.

This guide draws on recent research and practitioner work on historical interpretations and aims to provide support for teachers in developing A level students’ understandings of historical interpretations by addressing the following questions: • • • •

What are historical interpretations? Why is it important for sixth-form students to learn about historical interpretations? What do we know about A level students’ thinking about historical interpretations? How can we help A level students develop their thinking about historical interpretations?

Note that this document offers guidance on teaching and learning approaches to support centres in developing students’ thinking about historical interpretations. For the full coursework requirements and marking criteria in the A level History qualification, please refer to the specification only.

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2. What are historical interpretations? A key point to note about historical ‘interpretations’ is that they are plural. To understand historical interpretations, it is necessary to understand something about the nature and development of the discipline of history. Although histories have been written for millennia, the academic discipline of history is generally understood to be a nineteenth century creation (Beiser, 2011; Berger, Feldner and Passmore, 2003; Novick, 1988). Despite the expectation, shared by leading nineteenth century practitioners of the discipline such as Lord Acton, that the professionalisation of history would lead to the creation of ‘ultimate’ history providing a singular and definitive account of the past (Carr, 1961, p.1; Megill, 2007, pp.162-164), the growth of academic history in the twentieth century led to the proliferation of histories rather than to their consolidation (Ankersmit, 1994). Understanding history – the discipline that aims to produce robust and warranted answers to questions about the past (Megill, 2007) – involves understanding this rather counter-intuitive result and understanding why it is that ‘ultimate’ history is, and always was, unachievable.

2.1 The illusion of ultimate history Why is it in the nature of the discipline of history to lead to plural and multiplying representations and constructions of the past and not the ‘ultimate’, singular and definitive account that Lord Acton expected the professionalization of historical studies to result in? Like everything and everyone else, the discipline of history and the historians who practice it exist in time. History asks and aims to answer questions about the past, however, neither history nor the past are static. The topics, issues and themes that we think merit attention, the questions that we consider worth asking, the methods of research and analysis that we use to answer these questions and the sources that we have available to us all change with time. Furthermore, historians are a very diverse group and they are all located in social, cultural, political, economic, geographic and ideological spaces, as well as in time (Appleby, Hunt and Jacob, 1995; Novick, 1988). Histories are decisively shaped by the identities of the people who write them (Schama, 1991). Histories are always narratives, to one degree or another, and writing a story involves a series of identifications and decisions, all of which are shaped by the assumptions and identities of the story’s narrator. ‘Ultimate’ history seemed possible in the late nineteenth century partly because it could safely be assumed that professional academic history was ‘his-story’ (rather than ‘her-story‘ or ‘their-stories’) and because it could safely be assumed that high – rather than gender, or labour, or racial, or cultural – politics was the ‘fit and proper’ subject of this story. What we can say about the past changes with time for a still more radical reason: history continues to unfold and the consequences and subsequent meaning of ‘what was’ continually changes as a result (Danto, 1965). In 1967, fifty years after the Bolshevik Revolution, ‘1917’ had a range of meanings many of which were no longer available after August-December 1991. The meanings of ‘1917’ will no doubt shift again by the revolution’s centenary in 2017. The past has a future and the future keeps rewriting the past.

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2.2 History is a collective practice 1

‘Ultimate’ history, then, was an illusion. This does not mean, however, that the discipline of history is an illusion. Despite their differences, historians have a great deal in common and share a common professional identity as historians, despite variations in approach, in interpretive framework, in topic, in method, and so on (Megill, 2007). Now, as in the late nineteenth century, history is an interpersonal and collective practice, and gains much of the objectivity that it can claim from this fact (Evans, 1997; Megill, 2007; Rüsen, 2005; Seixas, 1993). History is the work of many hands – of archivists, historians, curators, and so on (Samuel, 1994) – and not driven simply by individual subjectivity and whim. Historians both depend upon each other’s work and depend on each other for the recognition and validation of their own work. The disciplinary community of historians acts as the arbiter of what counts as historical work and history is made through public and open debate within this community. Histories always involve stories, to one degree or another, but there is much more to history writing than story-telling: the form of historical writing, characterised by close attribution of sources and an infrastructure of argumentation and justification (Grafton, 1997; Megill, 2007), embodies a commitment to debate and critical evaluation. Learning about historical interpretations involves coming to understand why it is that history is inherently plural and changing, rather than singular and ‘ultimate’. Learning about historical interpretations also involves coming to understand the ways in which interpretations are constrained by disciplinary practices. The rigour of historical practices is not measured by the permanence or the ‘ultimate’ nature of the histories that they produce. Rigour consists, rather, in the qualities of research and argument that historical works display and in the processes of debate and argument through which historical claims to knowledge are advanced, tested and, perhaps, sustained and developed. Historical interpretations, then, are representations and constructions of the past, created in particular moments of time, by particular authors who have particular agendas and who aim, through the interrogation of the records of the past, to make sense of time and change (Rüsen, 2005). In so far as they are historical (rather than simply about the past), historical interpretations are arguments and, as such, are amenable to rational scrutiny and debate. Historians cannot, as it were, ‘make it up’ or ‘say what they like’. 2 The processes of historical debate aim to ensure that the representations of the past constructed in historical narratives are subject to rational evaluation and these processes differentiate histories from the past-referencing practices of collective memory, party history, national myth, and so on (Lowenthal, 1985 and 1998; Megill, 2007; Wertsch, 2002; Wineburg, 2001 and 2007). Summary Students should come to understand: • • • • • •

that that that that that that

histories are representations and constructions of the past; histories are inherently plural and variable; histories exist in time and change with time; histories are authored and shaped by the subjectivities of their authors; histories are typically narratives grounded in evidence and argument; and history is a discipline and an interpersonal practice.

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It is worth noting that this was well-understood very rapidly, as Mandell Creighton’s ‘Introductory Note’ to the 1902 Cambridge Modern History shows (Ward, Prothero and Leathes (eds.), 1902, Volume 1, pp.1-6). 2 This is the burden of the so called ‘Irving case’– Irving claimed to be a historian and was judged not to be, because he did not adhere to acceptable scholarly standards (Evans, 2001).

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3. Why should Advanced level History students learn about historical interpretations? Many different answers could be given to the question ‘Why should Advanced level History students learn about historical interpretations?’ I will focus on five: a general educational answer, focused on educational aims (information literacy and citizenship); a generic answer focused on learning processes (metacognition); two historical answers, linked, on the one hand, to the logic of our discipline, and, on the other, to the understandings of time; and an answer focused on transition to university study.

3.1 Information literacy and citizenship Students encounter multiple perspectives and representations of different types in the contemporary present, relating to a wide range of issues in the past, the present and the future (Black, 2013; Samuel, 1994; Lowenthal, 1985 and 1998; Wertsch, 2002). As we will see below, many students give relatively simplistic and reductive explanations for differences in interpretation and representation. Educating students so that they can appreciate why multiple representations arise seems likely, then, to make a significant contribution to their general education and not simply to their history education. It is plausible to suggest, further, that school history has a particular role to play in educating students to think about issues of representation and interpretation, since many of the multiple interpretive frameworks and representations that they will encounter in the present are pastreferencing, narrative and historical in nature (Tosh, 2008).

3.2 Metacognition There are also very good reasons to think that learning is most effective when students are asked to be reflective and to consider the nature of the subject or practice that they are setting out to learn (Donovan and Bransford, 2005). History is produced through enquiry and argument. Histories are constructed by posing questions about the past, interrogating aspects of the record of the past, drawing conclusions from source materials in relation to these questions and constructing arguments that advance claims about the meaning and significance of aspects of the past (McCullagh, 1998). Histories are constructed in interpersonal scholarly communities whose probative practices both constrain and give warrant to the claims that historians advance. It is probable that students will learn and understand history better if we ask them to reflect on how history works as an intellectual process and discipline of thinking. There is good reason to think that they are unlikely to come to coherent understandings of the discipline they are learning if we do not help them to understand and reflect upon it and how it works (Rogers, 1979; Lee, 2011).

3.3 History as a discipline Historical interpretations – in whatever genre – advance knowledge claims about the past. In other words, they ask us to accept that something was the case, that it came about in a particular way, that we should attribute a particular significance to it, and so on. It is possible for history education to focus solely on the outcomes of historical interpretation – on the factual claims that historians advance. If students learn historical claims without learning about how claims are made and established, however, students may fail to understand what it is that makes historical accounts claims to knowledge rather than, say, mere assertions of opinion (Rogers, 1979). Students who know some of the outcomes of historical research and argument and who know little about these processes themselves are likely to be unable to cope 6

with the contrasting or conflicting claims about the past that they will encounter in their studies. They may, for example, assume that there can only be one valid claim about a particular historical issue and fail to appreciate that there can be as many claims about the past as there are historical questions to answer and defensible ways of answering them.

3.4 Historicity: Understanding time Histories exist in time – historical interpretations are of their time, in the sense that they reflect the values and concerns of the moments in time in which they were written and in the sense that they are shaped, to one degree or another, by what has happened in the time that separates their moment of composition from the times that they analyse and narrate. As Mandel Creighton put it, in one of a number of comments pointing to the impossibility of Acton’s ‘ultimate’ history: history deals with a subject which is constantly varying in itself and which is regarded by each succeeding generation from a different point of view. (Creighton, 1902, p.4) Learning about change in interpretation is learning an important point about our discipline – like everything else, histories are in history. Learning about histories in time may also, perhaps, prompt students to reflect on the ‘historicity’ of their own perceptions and experiences and, thus, help to develop their wider understandings of human complexity and diversity.

3.5 Transition to higher education Understanding history education as education in a discipline, rather than simply in a subject matter, is also likely to help students develop the understandings and ‘habits of mind’ that they will need to develop as they transition to university study in history or other disciplines (QAA, 2014). Learning history at university involves negotiating plural narratives, arguments and interpretive frameworks (Booth, 2005; Collins, 2011). Over-reliance on textbooks in school, on the other hand, can create the impression that complex historical topics can be understood adequately by reading single and often quite short texts. University tutors report (Booth, 2005) that students often arrive at university with the expectation that their tutors’ role is to provide them with ‘the’ key facts and ‘the’ answers to historical questions – expectations that are at odds with the nature of the discipline. Focusing on plural historical interpretations and on history as disciplined debate seems likely to help prepare students for university study, not least by drawing their attention to the provisional and plural nature of historical claims to knowledge and to history as a process of interpretation through which knowledge is constructed, contested and constantly revised.

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4. What challenges can understanding historical interpretations present? This section addresses the following question: •

What does research tell us about the barriers to understanding that we are likely to encounter?

Section 5 will then explore strategies that we can use to move students’ thinking about interpretation forward.

4.1 Research on younger children’s thinking about historical interpretation Compared to other aspects of historical learning – such as historical evidence – historical interpretations is under-researched. There are, nevertheless, important research findings that we can draw upon when thinking about the challenges that students may face when learning about historical interpretation, notably Project CHATA’s research into children’s understandings of historical ‘accounts’. 3 Project CHATA explored 7-14 year-old students’ ideas about history and historical accounts or interpretations. 4 CHATA found that younger children often explained variation in interpretations in terms of telling (the stories were the same but they were simply narrated differently), in terms of topic (the accounts were about different topics or issues), in terms of undeveloped evidential explanations (the historians had happened upon different sources) or by pointing to difficulties in finding out about a past that you could no longer witness. Older students tended to explain differences in terms of active decisions that historians had made – in expressing their views through their accounts or by twisting the facts in a biased manner. On the basis of this research and data arising from the Schools Council History Project Evaluation (Shemilt, 1980), Lee and Shemilt developed a progression model for accounts, reporting a number of assumptions that students often hold about accounts, summarised in Table 1 below. Table 1: Progression in ideas about accounts: outline 1 Accounts are just (given) stories 2

Accounts fail to be copies of a past we cannot witness

3

Accounts are accurate copies of the past, except for mistakes or gaps

4

Accounts may be distorted for ulterior motives

5

Accounts are organised from a personal viewpoint

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Accounts must answer questions and fit criteria

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3 Project CHATA (Concepts of History and Teaching Approaches) was an Economic and Social Research Council funded research project directed by Ros Ashby, Alaric Dickinson and Peter Lee at the Institute of Education, University of London between 1991 and 1996. Research focused on 7-14 year-old students’ ideas about historical concepts such as evidence, cause and accounts. A sample of 320 students across the 7-14 age range completed a series of three pencil and paper tasks involving paired stories differing in theme, tone and time scale and 122 students were interviewed (Lee, 1997, pp.25-6). CHATA findings are summarised in various places, for example, in Lee and Ashby (2000). 4 The terms ‘interpretations’ and ‘accounts’ are interchangeable and ‘account’ denotes a representation of the past (such as an historical narrative). 5 Based on Lee and Shemilt, 2004, p.30; this figure draws and the paragraphs that follow draw heavily on Chapman, 2011(a).

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Before level 4 in this model, students tend to understand historical accounts as (usually flawed) copies of a fixed past. At levels 4 and 5, students tend to understand accounts as either deliberately distorted or simply personal and subjective representations. It is only at level 6 in this model that students begin to engage with historical methodology in any sustained way: here we have a recognition that what historians say is shaped by the questions that they are trying to answer and / or by the concepts that they use to make sense of the past. This model can help us, when planning and teaching, by identifying some of the misconceptions that students may hold that represent barriers to learning and also by indicating the understandings that we should be aiming to build.

Common misconceptions The past is fixed Many students talk about history in a way that assumes that the past has a single and fixed meaning, and these students talk about historical interpretation as if it should also be singular and fixed (accounts should agree in mirroring a ‘fixed’ past). This is a misconception. What we can say about the past is conditioned by the topics and issues that we focus on and by the questions that we ask and a range of other variables, including, for example, the methods that we use to answer our questions. As Lee and Shemilt argue, histories are more like theories, developed to solve problems and to answer questions, than they are like pictures, developed to mirror ‘what happened’ (Lee and Shemilt, 2004). Historians are searching for the ‘truth’ Many students assume that historical sources should be thought of as witness statements reporting ‘what happened’ and that the historian’s job is to find reliable reports and to piece them together, in the manner in which one might reassemble a jigsaw or a broken mosaic, to create a true ‘picture’ of the past. This is a misconception and one that fails to appreciate the importance of questions. If accounts are answers to questions, then it follows that there can be as many different and legitimate accounts as there can be different questions about the past. Questions also determine the conclusions that can be drawn from sources. Any source, ‘reliable’ or otherwise in testimonial terms, must be interrogated and reliability is relative to the question that is asked.

4.2 Research on 16-19 year-old students’ thinking about interpretation Chapman (2009(c)) investigated Advanced level History students’ understandings of historical interpretations. The table below summarises the range of ways in which a sample of 16-19 yearold history students tended to explain variations in historical interpretations.

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Table 2: Types of explanation for variation in interpretation 6 Explanatory Type 1. Authorial explanation

2. Archival explanation 3. Impositionist explanation

4. Hermeneutic explanation 5. Inquisitorial explanation

Definition Variations in interpretation are explained in terms of authors’ backgrounds or background beliefs Variations in interpretation are explained in terms of the variable or limited nature of the archive available to historians Variations in interpretation are explained in terms of variations in how historians imposed their preconceptions on the record of the past through their interpretations Variations in interpretation are explained in terms of variations in how historians construed or constructed the meaning of the record of past Variations in interpretation are explained in terms of variations in the questions that historians asked about the past

Many of the students who explained interpretive differences using the first three explanations drew on ideas common in the CHATA findings, lending support to them by showing continuity of ideas across age groups. Students who offered explanations of the fourth and fifth type, however, were clearly developing powerful ideas about the active role that historians play in constructing knowledge of the past and moving beyond simplistic ideas of ‘bias’. As was argued in relation to the CHATA data, it is important to consider students’ thinking about interpretations alongside their ideas about other aspects of historical thinking, notably ‘evidence’. It was common to find that students with restricted understandings of interpretation also had simplistic understandings of evidence, often assuming, for example, that historians rely mainly on witness ‘reports’ or ‘testimony’ and that they operate by piecing together the truth from reliable reports. Developing student thinking about interpretations and developing their understandings of evidence are likely to be parallel and closely related tasks.

4.3 Conclusion: Using research on students’ ideas when planning The research that has been done does not allow you to predict what students might think or indicate a ‘ladder’ that can be used to help them progress or as an assessment tool. The research can be used diagnostically, however, to identify possible barriers to understanding (‘blockers’) and also to demonstrate what students can achieve. The research can help us think, also, about the kinds of thinking that we are trying to develop and about strategies to build those kinds of understanding (‘builders’). 7

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Based on Chapman, 2009(c), p.96. For a further study that develops similar categorisations, see Magnoff (2016). 7 I owe the idea of ‘blockers’ and ‘builders’ to Peter Lee. Pearson’s Historical Thinking Progression map (Chapman, 2015) and related A level textbooks (e.g. Bullock, Nuttall and White, Pearson 2015) develop this ‘blocker’ and ‘builder’ model further.

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5. Developing understandings of historical interpretations: Issues and strategies How can we help Advanced level students develop their understanding of historical interpretations? The materials that follow in this section draw on research on developing sixth form students’ thinking, on strategies developed through classroom practice, reported in the journal Teaching History and elsewhere, and on new strategies developed for this guide. This section is structured around key issues that we need to address in developing student thinking. Possible activities and strategies to use are integrated into the main text but also provided separately in Appendix 1 at the end of this document for ease of reference.

5.1 Interpretations, representations and constructions As has been noted above, students may hold misconceptions that are likely to inhibit their understanding of historical interpretation. For example, the misconception that the role of historians is to produce definitive accounts of the past that literally re-present or mirror a truth that is ‘out there’ waiting to be found. 8 To combat this misconception we need to help students understand the necessary and active role that historians play in making sense of the past. We need to help students to understand: •

that historical interpretations are constructions – things that historians actively make rather than simply find;

•

that histories are more like theories – developed in answer to questions or in response to problems – than they are like pictures;

•

that although histories involve representation (description, explanation, and so on), they are not simply re-presentations of a fixed past.

8 The notion that historians might seek to use evidence to find ‘the truth’ or ‘what happened’ is untenable not because historians are not interested in truth or in understanding the past (far from it). The problem is that the idea is unfocused and impractical (Fischer, 1971). What would a ‘true’ answer to the question ‘What happened during the Russian revolution?’ look like, for example? We can be sure – given what we know about the human mouth – that there was plenty of dentistry going on, or painfully felt to be absent, in 1917-18 but books on the Russian revolution tend not to spend much time on discussions of it. Histories are answers to more precise questions than ‘What happened?’. We need to develop students’ understandings of the decisions that historians must make before they can begin to interpret anything – decisions about which questions to ask and not to ask, decisions about how to define concepts, decisions about what source materials to examine, and so on.

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5.1.i Designing tasks that focus attention on historians’ concepts and criteria To help students understand that historians are active in producing the histories that they write we need to help them understand the kinds of activity – and active decision making – that inevitably arise in all research. The following activity, adapted from Harris (1974), indicates that these understandings can be developed relatively easily (Chapman, 2011(b)). It does so by focusing on an apparently simple and readily accessible problem in the present.

Activity 1 9 Ask students to imagine that two research teams have set out to answer an identical question about a contemporary location (e.g. a town square) but have come up with dramatically divergent answers and then ask them to explain why such divergent answers may have come about. For example: Two research teams have been instructed to count the exact number of people in Cathedral Square, Peterborough, at precisely 2.45pm on Saturday 16 July 2016. One team reports the number as 125.5 people and the other as 1,011. How on earth do we explain this dramatic discrepancy? [Based on Chapman, 2011(b)] In my experience, students typically try to account for the discrepancy in terms of error (one team has made mistakes), some kind of deficit (one team is less intelligent, has misunderstood instructions and so on) or bias (one team has an agenda). Once students have had a chance to explain the discrepancy, start to introduce conceptual and criterial aspects of the problem. If, for example, I am going to count people in a location, I need first to define the location, for example, where does the square begin and end – are shops on the square in the square for the purposes of this exercise? There are a range of other issues to consider – what, for example, counts as a person (an adult, a child, a baby, a foetus)? What does it mean to ‘be’ in the square (can I ‘be’ asleep)? And so on. Next, ask students to work in groups to devise instructions for the research teams that will prevent, or at least minimise, variations in results (e.g. lists of definitions of terms, suggestions as to how to go about the practical business of counting, and so on). When they have had a chance to do this, ask them to compare and to debate what different groups have done and to agree an overall set of ‘best’ instructions for the research teams in the square. This activity aims to make two important points: •

First, there’s no doing research without making decisions (defining terms, deciding on procedures and so on); and

•

Second, these decisions can be rationally debated and argued about.

To secure the pay-off on this activity, the understandings developed through it need to be applied to an historical context. There are many of these – much scholarship, from Rudé’s Crowd in the French Revolution (1968) to analyses of the strength of opposition to the Vietnam War, depend upon defining and counting.

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See Appendix 1 for a full statement of this and all subsequent activities.

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A good example of a transfer task relates to the question of the number of Chartists attending the Kennington Common meeting of 10 April 1848. 10 The meeting is important – since it was in 1848, the year when England did not experience the wave of European revolutions associated with the ‘Springtime of the Peoples’. Just how serious a threat was posed by Chartism? Just how near to revolution did Britain come in 1848? Historians have turned to sources like the famous daguerreotype of this meeting to help think about questions like these. 11 Students could be given this picture, be made aware of the wider problem context and then be asked to devise a methodology for counting the number of Chartists at the meeting using the photograph. Estimates at the time ranged from 15,000 to 300,000 and the issue has divided historians (Goodway, 1982, pp.129-42). To solve this problem – as was the case with the ‘square’ problem – we need definitions (‘Where does the ‘meeting’ begin and end?’, and so on) and, most importantly, some way of establishing ‘who’ was a ‘Chartist’. There are children and cab drivers in the image, for example, as well as people speaking from the ‘platform’ – how do we decide ‘who’ counts? 12 Asking students to define the concepts ‘Chartists’ or ‘Chartist supporters’ and to then apply them to the photograph ought to make it clear that decisions and judgements are involved in answering even quite simple historical questions. If historians have to make decisions in such a simple case as this, then how much more so must this be true where more complex problems are concerned?

5.1.ii Scaffolding reading to draw attention to historians’ decisions [M]uch of what you say is persuasive but do… use labels carefully. It doesn't tell us all that much to know that [an author] was a Marxist. Marxists come in very different stripes and they frequently squabbled like ferrets in a sack... It's seductive, but not usually historically warranted, to argue ‘He is a Marxist, therefore...’. I’d be inclined to concentrate more on the evidence of the texts themselves which you do extremely well. (Chapman, 2012, p.196) This quotation exemplifies feedback given to students who were trying to explain why differences in interpretation had arisen. The student ideas that the feedback responded to exemplified a classic challenge in teaching about interpretations: we want students to understand that there are differing ‘schools of history’ but often find that students quickly reduce these ‘schools’ to stereotypes and labels indicating ‘bias’. The History Virtual Academy project (HVA) from which this quotation arose aimed to develop richer understandings of what historians ‘do’ and aimed to achieve this by asking students to examine texts that took very different stances on the same historical issues. Students were asked to explain ‘why’ different interpretations of these issues arise. Once students had responded – often without fully using the clues available in the texts they were reading – they were given formative feedback (such as the quotation above) and a scaffold to help them read the texts in a more focused manner (see below). Some dramatic shifts from a simplistic and 10

I am grateful to Professor Ted Vallance for suggesting this application of the crowd counting exercise.

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https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/2932484/the-chartist-meeting-on-kennington-common10-april-1848 12

Chartist Ancestors is a website that aims to generate a data bank of ‘Chartists’ allowing people now to see if they may be descended from ‘Chartists’ in the mid-nineteenth century. To compile their data set the website’s organisers have had to decide who to put in their spreadsheets. They have had to decide, for example, if ‘signing a petition’ was enough, or if one had also to be a member of the National Charter Association to be a Chartist (see http://www.chartists.net/chartist-ancestors-databank/).

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passive understanding of historians to an active and more complex one were observed over the course of the project. (See Appendix 2 and Chapman (2012) for more information on the HVA.) Question prompts to scaffold students’ reading of different interpretations •

Are the historians asking the same questions or are they in fact answering different questions about the past? (It is possible to set out with different aims – to set out to describe something in the past, to explain it, to evaluate it and so on.)

•

Do the historians examine the same source materials as they pursue their questions about the past?

•

Do the historians ask the same questions of their source materials?

•

Where different conclusions are drawn from similar facts or sources, it may be because the historians disagree about what these things mean. There are many reasons why they might. Consider these possibilities (and others that you can think of!): o

Do they have differing understandings of the context (the period, the background situation and so on)?

o

Are they defining concepts in different ways (if we disagree about whether a ‘revolution’ has occurred, for example, it may be because we are using different criteria to define the concept ‘revolution’)? 13

Activity 2 below is based around this scaffold and aims to help students to notice the ways in which historians’ writings express and embody active decisions about how to interpret the past.

Activity 2 14 1. Ask students to write down some initial ideas about ‘why’ historians’ interpretations might differ (and to retain this list to revise and update later). 2. Present them with two contrasting interpretations of an event or issue (ideally, ones that differ dramatically) and to list what the differences are. 3. Ask them to write down a bullet-pointed explanation of ‘Why’ these differences may have arisen and to consider if their initial ideas allow them to explain the differences. 4. Give students the scaffold of questions above and ask them to re-read the texts and to modify their original bullet-pointed explanations as appropriate. 5. Ask students to redraft the lists they have produced at point 1 above and to produce a new collective list as a class of reasons why historical interpretations can differ and to discuss the questions ‘What new ideas have they developed?’ and ‘Which of the ideas they have explored seem to be the most powerful?’

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Chapman, 2012, p.198.

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5.2 Comprehending and analysing interpretations Understanding particular historical interpretations necessarily involves comprehension – understanding what histories say, in a literal sense. It also involves understanding the arguments that historians make – understanding how they work, in a logical sense. This section deals with each of these issues in turn – comprehension and argument-modelling.

5.2.i What historians are saying – comprehending histories Reading history can be very challenging – historians tend to write in abstract ways (Cooke, 2009), to use specialist terminology and to presuppose (and not provide) contextual information frequently essential to text comprehension (Coffin, 2006). Historians also typically combine narration with argumentation in their writing (Grafton, 1997) in ways that can make it difficult for students to separate out narrative detail and lines of argument. This can make evaluating historians’ claims particularly challenging (since students often fail to differentiate the argumentative ‘wood’ from the narrative ‘trees’). Students need to understand what particular historical works are saying before they can think critically about them. Many very valuable strategies that aim to help students read history carefully and critically have been developed by history teachers and reported in the journal Teaching History and elsewhere. 15 Rachel Ward (2006), for example, reports a strategy for teaching about the English Reformation using Eamon Duffy’s monograph The Voices of Morebath (Duffy, 2001). Ward’s students first completed a number of exercises to build their understanding of religious policy during the Reformation. They were then presented with cards containing evidence extracted from Duffy’s account of the implementation and reception of religious reforms during the Reformation in the village of Morebath and asked to classify the information under headings, such as ‘evidence of acceptance’ and ‘of resistance’. Ward’s students were then asked to consider the implications of the evidence that they had classified and to draw their own conclusions about the overall success and failure of Reformation policy. Once they had had opportunity to develop good period understanding, through the exploration of this evidence, and to begin to form their own conclusions, by thinking about the implications of this evidence for an enquiry into policy success, the students were presented with extracts from Duffy’s book in which he draws his conclusions about what the evidence from Morebath tells us about the success and failure of the Reformation. Students were then asked to evaluate Duffy’s conclusions. [See Activity 3 in Appendix 1] Ward concluded that: Scaffolding students into reading Duffy’s work [made] them more able to engage with his ideas and also [helped] them to ask more enquiring questions, rather than getting bogged down in trying to comprehend the text. (Ward, 2006, p.11)

15 Further examples, in addition to those discussed below, include Chapman (2003), Kitson (2003) and Laffin (2012).

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In her Better Lessons in A Level History (2009), Diana Laffin describes a range of strategies to scaffold sixth-form students’ understandings of historical writing and historians’ claims. For example, a sequence of lessons on interpretations of women’s lives in Nazi Germany (Laffin, 2009, pp.60-68), focused through close reading of Claudia Koonz’s monograph Mothers in the Fatherland (1987), includes strategies: •

to help students comprehend Koonz’s arguments – by reading and annotating short extracts from her monograph with queries and explanations

•

to enable text comprehension, by encouraging students to recognise and summarise the key claims that Koonz makes in these extracts from her book

•

to help students identify and characterise Koonz’s wider ‘world view’ and approach to the issues by encouraging students to label key passages of her text with adjectives.

Students are then encouraged to explore similarities and differences between Koonz’s claims about women’s lives under Nazism and the views of other authors by organising cards that summarise key claims (for example, ‘Women’s health and welfare improved’) on a Venn diagram, where the component circles stand for the different historians’ overall arguments (Laffin, 2006, p.68). [See Activity 4 in Appendix 1] Gary Howells (2011) describes a range of strategies used over the two years of Advanced Level study to develop students as readers of historical works. Whereas Ward had presented students with cards to help them make sense of an historical issue prior to engaging with historical writing, Howells asked his students to create their own cards to help them read and make sense of historiographic developments over time. The students were given an enquiry question to organise their reading of the historiography – ‘Why was Pitt able to secure his ministry by the end of 1784?’ (see Howells, 2011, p.5). They were then given a number of accounts of Pitt’s ministry – starting with simple accessible accounts and, where there had been shifts in interpretation, accounts were given in chronological order. For each account students were asked to note down key arguments explaining Pitt’s success (filling in a card for each with a clear heading – such as ‘The Failings of the Whig party’). They were then asked to move cards around to model how factors were linked together by particular historians. As new historians were introduced, students were encouraged to think about similarities and differences in the factors mentioned and how they were linked together by different historians. [See Activity 5 in Appendix 1] Howells, describes a number of additional active reading strategies to help students grasp the literal meaning and, more importantly, the historiographical significance, of what they are reading, for example, annotation and highlighting strategies to help students identify key factors and issues, and the use of grids to compare what different historians have to say about aspects of an issue (Howells, 2011, p.7-10). Howells also reports a story-boarding strategy designed to help students grasp and 16

compare ‘the different narrative structures historians use’ (see Howells, 2011, p.13). Students were presented with a number of different accounts of the rise of Thatcher in turn. For each account they read, they were asked to story-board the written narrative into ‘scenes’ (as if scripting a film). Doing this made differences in narration and framing very clear: whereas one historian’s ‘first scene’ involved Keith Joseph, another focused on Enoch Powell, and so on. Students were encouraged to consider what the various story-boards had in common and what this tells us about how historians have explained the issue in question. (Most of them focused on factors other than Thatcher, it turned out, and this tells us something about how historians have approached explaining Thatcher’s rise.) Howells’ strategy scaffolded reading, helped to make historiographical differences clearly visible and also highlighted some common threads in the historiography (none were Thatcher-centric). [See Activity 6 in Appendix 1] As these three examples show, active reading strategies and visual scaffolds (cardsorts, Venn diagrams, and so on) can be used creatively to help students understand what they are reading. More importantly, they can also help model the complexities of historical arguments and controversies and help students to build their understandings of substantive historical issues and of historical debates about these issues.

5.2.ii What historians are arguing Helping students understand history means helping them understand what historians say (see the previous section). It also requires that we teach them to attend to the logic of what historians say, or, in other words, to historians’ arguments. Students need to understand historians’ arguments – what they conclude and the reasons that they give in support of their conclusions. Analysing arguments presupposes recognising argument. We need, first, to help students recognise arguments in the history that they read and, second, to understand how historians’ arguments work. Arguments attempt to establish something – a conclusion. Arguments aim to convince readers of their conclusions by providing supporting reasons. Conclusions can be of various types – an argument might aim to convince you that you should do something, that you should believe something, that you should like something, that you should explain something in a particular way, and so on. Reasons can be of various kinds also – factual evidence, statements of principle, and so on (van den Brink-Budgen, 2000). To understand an historian’s argument you need to: 1. identify their conclusion – what the historian wants you to believe about the past; 2. identify their reasons – the evidence that the historian offers in support of their conclusion; and 3. understand how (a) and (b) fit together – for example, how (b) is meant to provide support for (a).

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Students often find it difficult to recognise an argument when they see one – a necessary first step before they begin to analyse argument. The activity below aims to help students recognise arguments using accessible (and intentionally absurd) examples. (See Activity 7 in Appendix 1.) Which of these four texts is an argument? Text 1 Text 2 Frank: “Apples are hideous!” Once upon a time, I was walking down Marcia: “Nonsense! Apples are the road minding my own business. I beautiful!” was very tired (it had been a long day at Frank: “I tell you: apples are the orchard). I decided to take a nap. I hideous!” lay down in the shade of a particularly Marcia: “Nonsense! Apples are inviting apple tree. The sunset flickered beautiful!” through the leaves of the tree. The rustle of the leaves sent me to sleep. Next thing I knew, a fat apple had landed on my nose! Text 3 Text 4 Apples are hideous things that Apples grow on apple trees. I like to go should be feared and avoided! on holiday to Cyprus. There are no Only the other day, as I was apples on the moon. sleeping minding my own business, I have a sister (she is called Zoe). She a great big fat apple fell out of its doesn’t like apples very much. tree and smacked me in the face. Barack Obama is President of the USA. See! Students often identify Text 1 as an argument. It is not. It is understandable that it should seem to be one, however, given that argument often denotes ‘dispute’ in everyday contexts. 16 •

Text 1 is a dispute and not an argument – it consists of assertion (‘Apples are hideous!’) and counter-assertion (‘Nonsense! Apples are beautiful!’) but no reasons are offered in support of either claim.

•

Text 2 is a narrative – its component statements are linked by sequence and not by inference (reasoning).

•

Text 4 is rambling nonsense – a ragbag of unrelated statements.

Text 3 is an argument, however, as we can see by rewriting it in a way that makes its logical form clear: Reason: The other day as I was sleeping minding my own business a great big fat apple fell out of its tree and smacked me in the face.

Conclusion: Apples are hideous things that should be feared and avoided! Two claims are present and one (the ‘reason’) is used to provide support for the other (the ‘conclusion’). It is a bad argument – you cannot infer a general 16 Monty Python’s ‘Argument Clinic’ sketch (widely available online and as a DVD) is an entertaining and accessible way of exploring the differences between argument and dispute.

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conclusion about apples (or any other type of ‘thing’) from one incident – but that doesn’t matter at this point. Students need (a) to know what an argument is, (b) to be able to recognise them when they see them and (c) to model how they work. Once students are clear about what ‘argument’ means, they can be asked to identify them in the work of historians – in books, in TV documentaries, and so on. In my experience, they find this much more difficult than we might expect so they are likely to need a lot of practice. (See Activity 8 in Appendix 1.) Examples of historians’ arguments can be found in many places – in books, articles, documentaries, and so on. An example is modelled below. This is based on comments made by the historian Robert Gellately about the Gestapo in the BBC documentary The Nazis: A Warning from History (1997) and it can be viewed in the documentary or read in the ‘book of the film’ (Rees, 1997, p.64-6). 17 In his comments, Gellately summarises key arguments made at greater length in his books about the ways in which policing worked in Nazi Germany. The logic of his argument in the documentary works something like this: Reason 1: There were 28 Gestapo for 1 million people in Würzburg (in other words, there was a low ratio of secret police to people in this part of Germany).

+ Reason 2: Around 80-90% of the ‘crimes’ in the Würzburg Gestapo’s files were reported to them by ordinary people, not identified by Gestapo employees (in other words, Germans seem to have denounced each other to the Gestapo frequently).

Conclusion: Gellately concludes that the Gestapo operated with the cooperation of the German people. Having introduced students to the definition of argument and having shown them how they can model arguments, it is likely to be very helpful to present them with passages (in film or text) in which historians make arguments and then to spend time asking them to identify and model the arguments (conclusions and supporting reasons). It is likely to be helpful to do this a number of times with arguments of differing degrees of complexity. (See Activity 8 in Appendix 1) Unless and until students can recognise and model arguments there is little to be gained by asking them to evaluate them – you need to know what is being argued before you can decide how far you are convinced by what an historian is claiming you should believe.

17

The interview with Gellately is in the second episode of this series (entitled ‘Chaos and Consent’) and opens the section of the programme that is about the Gestapo.

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5.3 Explaining why historians arrive at differing interpretations The research tells us that students often hold assumptions about how historical knowledge is produced which are likely to lead them to offer simplistic explanations for variations in interpretation (see Sections 4.1 and 4.2 above). So, for example, they may (1) assume that variation in interpretation is a problem (and that there should be one ‘true’ account of the past) and (2) explain variation in nefarious terms (in terms of bias, political distortion and so on) or (3) in terms of simple errors on the part of historians. It is possible also that they may (4) simply trivialise differences in interpretation – as if they were merely a matter of historians having differences of ‘opinion’ that they choose to ‘express’. There are many reasons why historians may propose differing interpretations of the past – they may be setting out to do different things and answer different questions, they may be consulting different source materials, they may use differing methods to interpret their sources, they may be using different concepts to make sense of the records that they are examining, and so on. They may also be writing at different stages in the ‘cycle of interpretation’ and be different types of publication. This section deals with these issues in turn under the headings: • • • • •

tasks and questions the ‘cycle of interpretation’ types of history and historians’ purposes historians’ methods and research strategies historians’ assumptions and interpretive frameworks.

5.3.i What historians are doing – tasks and questions Once students have begun to grasp that histories are constructions of the past – things that historians actively make rather than simply find – we can begin to explore the different types of construction that historians make in greater specificity and depth. To understand historical constructions (books, articles, documentaries, and so on) we need to know what the historians who made them were trying to do. Very frequently, differences arise because historians have set out to do different things: •

different historians may be attempting to perform different tasks from one another); and

•

different historians may be attempting to answer different questions about the past.

Understanding what an historian is trying to do is also essential if we are to evaluate the extent to which they have been successful: we need to know what an historian is trying to do and the question/s they have tried to ask before we can ask ‘How well have they done it?’. Allan Megill has identified ‘four tasks’ that all historical writing must engage in, to one degree or another. These ‘tasks’ are outlined and summarised in Table 3 below (based on Megill, 2007, pp.63-77). 18 Megill’s ‘tasks’ are analytically distinct and enable historical works to be compared, although in practice, historians often attempt to perform more than one task at the same time.

18 Table 3 is based on Megill’s work but adapts it: Megill uses ‘interpretation’ to refer to what is called ‘evaluation’ here, for example.

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Table 3: The four tasks of historical writing 19 Task

Explanation

1. Description

Describing an aspect of historical reality – telling what was the case Explaining why a past event or phenomenon came to be Attributing meaning, value and / or significance to aspects of the past Justifying descriptive, explanatory or evaluative claims by supplying arguments to support them

2. Explanation 3. Evaluation 4. Justification

We can often tell a very great deal about the ‘tasks’ that historians are attempting from the titles of their articles, chapters or books. Consider, for example, the title of David Landes’ book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some so poor (1998). We can infer from the title that this is a work of comparative history that looks at more than one country. We can also infer that the author is setting out to explain why international inequality has arisen. We can often tell a lot about the tasks that historians set out to perform in their works from the introductory paragraphs of articles or chapters or from the introductory sections of books. Landes says the following in his preface: My main aim in this book is to do world history… to trace and understand the main stream of economic advance and modernisation: how have we come to where and what we are, in the sense of making, getting and spending. (Landes, 1998, p.xi) The inferences that were drawn above from Landes’ title are confirmed by the preface and we can conclude that Landes set out to: •

describe the pattern of world economic development over time; and

•

explain why this pattern has arisen.

The ‘tasks’ that historians undertake are linked to the ‘questions’ that they are trying to answer – we might say, for example, that Landes is trying to answer the following questions: ‘What has been the pattern of world economic development over time?’ and ‘Why did the world economy develop in the way that it did?’

Activity 9 20 Give students the title of a work of history (an article, a chapter, or a whole book). Ask them to see if they can work out from the title alone what ‘task’ the author may be trying to undertake and what questions they think the historian might be trying to answer. Once they have made some suggestions and discussed them, present them with a short extract – an opening paragraph, for example. Ask them to consider if this supports the conclusions that they drew from the title. Historians can attempt tasks and ask questions that vary in a number of ways. They can differ in scale, in time period, in the range of issues considered, and so on.

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Adapted from Chapman, 2011(a), p.102 after Megill, 2007.

20

See the Appendix 1 for a full statement of this and all subsequent activities.

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Consider this selection of titles from works that deal with the ‘English’ Civil War: Michael Braddick (2008) God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A new history of the English civil wars. London: Penguin Books. Jonathan Clark (1986) Revolution and Rebellion: State and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. D.R. Como (2007) Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism. Past and Present, 196 (1), pp. 37-82. Diane Purkiss (2006) The English Civil War: A people’s history. London: Harper Perennial. Trevor Royle (2004) Civil War: The wars of the three kingdoms, 1638-1660. London: Abacus. Rachel Weil (2006) Thinking about Allegiance in the English Civil War. History Workshop Journal, 61 (1), pp.183-191. These titles suggest that their authors are trying to do very different things – three (Braddick, Purkiss and Royle) look likely to be narratives of large-scale events and processes (wars), and two (Como and Weil) focus on smaller topics / themes. One (Clark) is larger-scale still – covering the theme of conflict over two centuries that include the period of the civil war/s and much else besides. The titles also suggest differences in perspective and we can begin to make inferences also about differences in the lenses through which the authors seem to be exploring the past – from a British (Royle) and from an English (Braddick and Purkiss) perspective, from a people’s (rather than an elite) perspective (Purkiss), 21 and so on. We can also see clear differences in the kinds of topic and question that interest Como and Weil – Como’s paper is about ‘Radicalism’ and Weil’s about ‘Allegiance’ and it looks like Como is interested in explaining Radicalism’s ‘origins’ (i.e. ‘Where did it come from?’ or ‘How did it arise?’) and Weil in describing Allegiance’s meaning/s. The titles of the three books also draw attention to an important fact about their common topic: three understand it in terms of ‘war’, singular, and two in terms of ‘wars’, plural. As was the case with Landes, we can tell quite a lot about historians’ tasks and questions from authors’ opening lines and introductions. We can also use abstracts, tables of contents, introductions, publisher’s descriptions (and so on). Consider what can be learned about the questions and tasks pursued by their authors from the two examples below, from Braddick (2008) and Weil (2006) respectively: England was the last of Charles’ kingdoms to rebel… the one with the most spontaneous royalist party, but also… the most radical and creative politics... In this… political world public support was courted, opinions… mobilized and… a revolution… carried out. My aim here is to understand that political process… (Braddick, 2008, p.xxvi) This paper uses the narratives offered by ‘delinquents’ to the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents to interrogate discourses of allegiance in the civil war… this paper explores the claims within these narratives… to elucidate what contemporaries thought allegiance was, and how they thought it could be known… (Weil, 2006, p.183) 21

Royle’s ‘three kingdoms’ are England, Scotland and Ireland (Royle, 2004, p.xii).

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From its title, Braddick’s book might appear to be primarily focused on religious questions. It begins, after all, with ‘God’. The preface does not confirm that hypothesis, however, but indicates, rather, that the book is asking questions about English politics and about the unfolding of a political process that began when politicians of various stripes sought to mobilise popular support, using, among other things, religious rhetoric. Braddick sets out to ‘understand’ this process – to describe and explain it. There are striking contrasts with Weil’s purposes, as revealed by her abstract: whereas Braddick’s focus is broad political process in England as a whole over a number of years, Weil focuses, as one would expect in a scholarly paper, on a very narrow issue – the understandings of the concept of ‘allegiance’ that are apparent in one set of records (‘the narratives offered by ‘delinquents’ to the Committee for Compounding with Delinquents’ set up by Parliament in 1643 as part of the process of punishing defeated supporters of the Royalists). There are contrasts in the questions and task that Weil is undertaking also: whereas Braddick sets out to describe and explain, Weil’s aim appears to be simply accurately to describe how ‘allegiance’ was understood in the 1640s. The broader the range of titles we ask students to look at, the broader the range of contrasts that they may find. Consider the contrasts between the Braddick and Weil quotes above and the following, from the publicity on the back cover of Jonathan Clark’s book. This… book provides a radical reconstruction of… recent historiography… It… counters the Marxist interpretation of the 1640s as the ‘English Revolution’ by deploying our new understanding of the… nature of the world after 1660: it challenges the appropriateness of ‘revolution’ as a description… drawing attention… to the idea of ‘rebellion’… (Clark, 1986). Whereas Braddick and Weil are writing about the past directly, Clark’s primary object is writing about the past (historiography) rather than the past itself. Clark’s primary purpose could be characterised as descriptive, in the sense that he is arguing about the most appropriate description to use when talking about this period and setting out to justify the claim that it is much more sensible to think of this period in terms of ‘rebellion’ than of ‘revolution’. It is also clear from the publisher’s summary that we can expect Clark to engage in extensive evaluative argument about the claims advanced in other historians’ works and about the assumptions and approaches that other historians take, as he sets about trying to justify the new description that it proposes. To understand this as a ‘question’, we might say that Clark is asking the question: ‘What is the most appropriate way in which historians can conceptualise the changes that took place in these years?’

Activity 10 22 Repeat the ‘title’ and ‘preface’ task (Task 9) but with a number of titles (of articles, chapters, books, documentaries, and so on). Ask students to see what they can work out from the titles alone about differences in the ‘tasks’ or ‘questions’ that the historians are focusing on. Again, once they have made some suggestions and discussed them, present them with short extracts – an opening paragraph, an abstract, the publisher’s ‘blurb’ – related to each title. Ask them to consider if these support the 23 conclusions that they drew from the titles.

22


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It is likely to be helpful, when selecting works for students to compare and explore, to ensure that the works selected approach the topic students are studying through contrasting questions and by writing histories of different kinds.

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5.3.ii The ‘cycle of interpretation’ and where historical works sit within it Looking at titles, abstracts, tables of contents, introductions, publishers’ descriptions (and so on) is likely to be a useful strategy for exploring a further key point about historical writing, namely that historical works occupy differing positions in the ‘cycle of interpretation’ through which communities of historians construct our knowledge of the past (see Figure 1). Some works represent late stages in this process – historiographic syntheses and overviews and general narrative interpretations, for example. Other works represent early stages in the process, for example, research reports and monographs on specific tightly-focused questions and archives. The titles of historical works that we have looked at in the previous section indicate that these works belong at different stages in this ‘interpretive cycle’. Weil and Como, for example, are reports on archival research published in scholarly journals and Braddick’s book is a general interpretation that synthesises a large body of research by a number of scholars into an overview interpretation of an historical period. Understanding that there are different types of historical work can help students when they (a) set out to explain why particular interpretations differ and (b) when they evaluate differing interpretations (since different types of text have different uses and limitations – archival reports give depth but not breadth, for example, and are unlikely to be able to support generalisations). To understand what the historical interpretations are, students need to learn something about how history is made – or about the ‘cycle of interpretation’. Figure 1: The cycle of research, debate and interpretation

Historical Archives

Archival research reports

Historical Debates, e.g. in historical journals and monographs

Synthesis – e.g. in general interpretations

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There can be no historical knowledge without archives (point 1 in the figure) and research in and on archives (point 2 in the figure). History cannot consist, merely, of individual research reports, however, but requires synthesis and the creation of larger scale representations and understandings of passages and periods in the past (points 3 and 4 in the figure). Historians publish their research – in articles in scholarly journals and in monographs. Larger-scale representations and understandings emerge through debates among historians through which individual findings are tested and evaluated and synthesised, gradually enabling large-scale descriptions of periods and issues to emerge. The figure is a cycle for a number of reasons. Debate on individual findings, and how they relate to what is already known, can lead to further archival research (back to points 1 and 2 in the figure) or to the establishment of consensus on a particular issue and to works of synthesis (point 4 in the figure). The process of producing a synthesis of what is known can itself lead to further research and debate (back to points 1-3 in the figure), for example, because the work of producing an overall interpretation can reveal areas where not enough is known or areas where research findings are contradictory or problematic. Similarly, individual research reports can serve to refute and put in question existing general interpretations by pointing to exceptions. As we have also seen – in our discussion of ‘ultimate’ history (in Section 2 above), the present changes the questions that are asked of the past. Frequently, cycles are disrupted and research begins again as new questions are exchanged for old. The process of historical knowledge production, then, is a complex one with scope for multiple feedback loops and cycles at different points and history is rarely static, but tends to be continuously evolving and, at times, to change dramatically. Again, locating works that they are thinking about in the cycle can help students understand what they are looking at and also aid evaluative thinking. A work like Christopher Hill’s Century of Revolution (1961), for example, is work at a late stage in the interpretive cycle. The cycle has moved on a number of times since the late 1950s and early 1960s, however. Clark’s 1986 historiographical synthesis was in large part an attempt to show how new research in archives meant that it was necessary to move beyond period overviews framed in the terms used by Hill and by historians who shared his interpretative assumptions.

Activity 11 24 Understanding what an individual historical work is doing is not simply a matter of understanding the questions that its author is asking or the tasks that they are undertaking: it is a question, also, of locating that work in a wider interpretive process and understanding what it might be doing in relation to the wider field of knowledge production from which it emerges. Explain the ‘cycle of interpretation’ to students and ask them to locate a number of book or article titles in the cycle. What stage would they place Braddick’s work at, for example, and where might they place Weil’s or Clark’s? Historical works reveal their nature in many ways – through their titles, through the type of publication that they represent (a book, like Braddick’s, or a journal article, like Weil’s). Clues are present in the texts themselves, of course, not least in their references. As Anthony Grafton has shown, works of history can be understood as operating on two levels: -

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the level of narrative ‘superstructure’ (the ‘story’ that they tell); and


25

-

the level of narrative ‘infrastructure’ of argument, citation and referencing provided to justify and support the claims they make about the past (Grafton, 1997).

Scholarly works have references so that their claims can be checked – one can, in principle, look up the sources cited and see if one accepts what is claimed about the past on the basis of these sources. 25 The types of references that history books contain (in footnotes and in bibliographies) tell us a lot about the type of history that the works exemplify. Popular histories often have no references – other than image credits and acknowledgements for copyright material that they quote. Research reports and monographs are likely to contain a large number of references to archival sources – since they typically report on research in the archives. Research reports are likely to refer to archives more than works of interpretive synthesis which are most likely to reference the work of other historians (including research reports).

Activity 12 26 Explain the function of references / footnotes in history to your students. Then share one page each with them from two or three books or articles of different types. Ask the students to work out where the works that the pages are extracted from might fit in the cycle of interpretation, using the citations and references on those pages alone. A great deal can also be inferred about a work from the kinds of archive that it cites (national archives, regional archives, and so on). Exploring historians’ references helps emphasise a point made earlier: history is a public process of knowledge construction and one should, in principle, always be able to ask the question ‘What are the sources of evidence for the claims that are advanced in this history?’ and be able to refer back to the sources of evidence themselves to evaluate the interpretations that they are used to establish. The table below analyses three history books in terms of their content and references in order to show how contrasts between works of different types can be made clear. There is no expectation that students should analyse whole books for their A level coursework. The point of looking at books as a whole rapidly (as this table does) is to help students grasp the very substantial ways in which different types of history work (compare the percentage differences for notes, references and bibliography in Martin and Kershaw below, for example). In my experience, the process of seeing this – by being shown actual history books of different types and tables like the one below – can really help dramatise a key learning point for students.

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The so called ‘Irving case’ illustrates this point very well. Irving’s claims were refuted, in large part, by expert witnesses such as Richard Evans who went back to the sources identified in Irving’s footnotes and were able to show, in doing so, that Irving had misconstrued and manipulated those sources (Evans, 2001). 26


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Table 4: A comparison of text and scholarly apparatus in Analysis Book 1 Book 2 Author S.I. Martin – a John Belchem – journalist, author Senior Lecturer in and contributor History, University to the radio of Liverpool station GLR Title Britain’s Slave Industrialization Trade and the Working Class: The English experience, 17501900 Pages of main text 167 (95.4%) 247 (88.5%) as a % of the book as a whole Pages of notes, 3 (1.7%) 27 (9.7%) references and bibliography as a % of the book as a whole Source One paragraph Notes and acknowledgement thanking references (9.7%) features historians and others consulted. Two pages of picture credits.

3 works of history Book 3 Ian Kershaw – Professor of History, University of Sheffield Hitler, 18891936: Hubris

669 (76.5%) 206 (23.5%)

Picture credits (0.3%) Abbreviations, including for archives visited (0.5%) List of works cited (3.4%) Notes and references (19.3%)

What can we tell about these three books and the scholarship that they express and embody from the table alone? The first is a work of popular history accompanying a television series and does not follow scholarly conventions – commercial picture credits are provided but no bibliographic apparatus, allowing sources to be ‘checked’, is present. The second and third books deploy scholarly apparatus but in differing degrees of complexity – Belchem does not list archives visited and, although there are references to archival sources in his notes, most of the references in endnotes are to published sources. The differences in their purposes and content (suggested by their titles) explain many of the differences that are apparent between them: • •

one book (Belchem) covers a large period of time and a large group of people and the other (Kershaw) covers part, only, of one man’s biography; and one book (Belchem) is a survey that uses published historical work to produce a synthesis and overall interpretation and the other (Kershaw), although a synthesis itself in many respects, has many of the features associated with a research report or monograph, such as reference to extensive archival sources (see Table 4).

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Activity 13 27 Bring a collection of articles, chapters and books of different types into class and physically explore their textual features with students. Explore the conclusions that we can draw from these features about the nature of the scholarship that a work embodies. You can find a wide range of types of history article in magazine stands in supermarkets ranging from the more (e.g. History Today) to the less scholarly. An academic journal article could be used also (many are open access). 28 Books could range from monographs to popular history. Reassure students that they are not expected to analyse whole books for their A level coursework – the point of this exercise is (a) to help them understand that there are different types of historical writing (e.g. monographs, historiographic syntheses, ‘coffee table’ history books, and so on) and (b) to help them distinguish between them.

5.3.iii Types of history and historians’ purposes As we have seen already, historians can vary in the questions that they ask and in the ‘tasks’ that they set out to undertake. Variations in purpose occur at a number of levels also: for example, at the level of the individual work of history and also at the level of different types or genres of history. Histories can be differentiated by the aspects of the past that they enquire into as well as by the tasks that they undertake. In Lord Acton’s time, there was essentially one type of history – the political history of the nation state and of relationships between states, best exemplified by the monumental Cambridge Modern History that Acton planned (Ward, Prothero and Leathes (eds.), 1902). The history of history in the twentieth century, as has already been noted, is a story of diversification and fragmentation (Novick, 1988). There are now many different types of history – including ‘Social History’, ‘Religious History’, ‘Cultural History’, ‘Environmental History’, ‘Gender History’, ‘Women’s History’, ‘Intellectual History’, ‘The History of Political Thought’, ‘Imperial History’, ‘Overseas History’, ‘History from Below’, ‘Microhistory’, ‘Oral History’, ‘The History of Reading’, ‘Visual History’, ‘The History of the Body’ and ‘The History of Events’ (Burke (ed.), 2001; Cannadine (ed.), 2002). Histories can differ, also, in the scale on which they pursue their topics. Historians can set out to answer global questions on a very large geographical and temporal scale – for example, Landes’ Wealth and Poverty of Nations or Braudel’s Civilisation and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries (Braudel, 1981) – or to explore local questions through small scale case studies of one place and time – for example, Duffy’s Voices of Morebath or Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Darnton, 2009). Differences in types of history can be brought out in a number of ways and it is best to have a range of concrete examples to explore. One way to start to explore ‘types of history’ could be in the context of popular televisual history. Consider, for example, contrasting series like Simon Schama’s A History of Britain (2000/2001) and Channel 4’s Seven Ages of Britain (2003), presented by Bettany Hughes. 29 Whereas Schama self-consciously set out to ‘do’ 27


28

For example, ‘open access’ articles in The Historical Journal can be accessed by clicking on the ‘open access’ tab at this link http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=HIS. 29

Hughes’ series again differs fundamentally from David Dimbleby’s series of the same title, which focuses in the main on high culture and architecture (Dimbleby, 2010).

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narrative history in the tradition of Macaulay, focusing, in the main, on ‘history from above’, high politics and the actions of monarchs and elites, Hughes explicitly set out to: tell the nation’s story via those who have helped to make history, but haven’t necessarily made the history headlines… to find clues to the lives of those who have been written out of history – or in a pre-literate society, have never had the chance to write their own. (Hughes, 2003, p.xi) Both series take a national focus but differ in the type of history being attempted. Hughes was as interested in social history, everyday life and material culture as in politics. The type of history being attempted had clear consequences for the topics and stories that were examined in the two series and the medium of film can help to make this very obvious – the films ‘show’ very different things, places, activities, and so on. That the type of history that is attempted can have profound consequences for what is written is clearly apparent from a similar case to Hughes’ series, John Harrison’s book The Common People: A history from the Norman Conquest to the Present. Harrison had a clear aim, as his title shows, and, like Hughes, this is ‘social’ history ‘from below’. A great deal follows from his initial intent, as Harrison’s introduction explains: All history is… made by interweaving… evidence from the records of the past and for the common people the themes will be those which show most closely how they lived… Well known landmarks will be missing… We should… find nothing on Public Schools, but a fair amount on trade unions… (Harrison, 1984, pp.14-15) Harrison’s observations draw attention to ways in which what might be called the logic of the content can impact how histories of different types get written. It is not simply a matter of social, political, gender and other types of historian focusing on different things and their books differing in what they discuss as a result. Harrison goes on to explain ways in which an historian’s topic can impact their history’s periodisation and themes. The women’s history, the history of crime or the economic history of a particular time period are all likely to have different periodisations and to address different themes, as the factors shaping experiences of change and the type, nature and pace of change are likely to be different for all three topic areas. Historians’ purposes can also vary in consequential ways depending on how the work that they are writing is located in the historical process (see Figure 1, above) which itself has a history. What a historian is doing includes what they are doing in a performative sense through their writing. They may be setting out to challenge, contest and revise an existing historiographic consensus, for example, as was the case with Clark’s book above. Alternatively – and this will result in a very different kind of book – they may be setting out to explore a newly identified archive and to widen the scope of historical discussion in terms of what is discussed and / or in terms of the conceptual tools that are used to approach a topic – as, for example, Darnton’s ‘Great Cat Massacre’ essay did, first, by focusing on a new archival source (an as yet unexamined report of a ‘massacre’ of cats) and, second, by using concepts adapted from cultural anthropology to interpret the source (Darnton, 2009). 30

30 Further examples, where historians have deployed tools from anthropology to illuminate new or existing archives include Keith Thomas’ Religion and the Decline of Magic and Carlo Ginzburg’s Ecstasies.

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Variations in the ‘types’ of history that are written in a particular field are also shaped by what has already been written in that field (by its history, as it were) and by changes in the wider field of ‘history production’ affecting the conditions under which histories are written, filmed (and so on). The historiography of Chartism is a case in point. There was a dramatic increase in the number and quality of local studies of Chartism in the decades after the Second World War and these local studies used hitherto unexplored local and regional sources and archives in Leicester, in Newport, in London, and so on. This growth in local Chartist studies was in large part the result of an increase in the number of historians working in regional universities resulting from the expansion of higher education nationally in the same period. The proliferation of local studies had implications for the conceptualisation of ‘Chartism’ as a whole, drawing attention to the diversity of forms that Chartism took in different places. More recently, this emphasis on the diversity of Chartism has received new impetus from developments in other aspects of nineteenth-century history, notably the rise of gender and cultural history and changing interpretations of the industrial revolution as a whole that have emphasised the diversity and complexity of workers’ experiences in different regions and different industries, challenging stereotypical understandings of the nature and prevalence of factory labour (Brown, 1998, pp.1-9). The forms that historians’ writings take also reflect their purposes and the type of history that is being written. Orlando Figes’ A People’s Tragedy, for example, interweaves ‘private’ and ‘public’ narratives and emphasises ‘the human aspects of great events by listening to the voices of individual people whose lives became caught up in the storm’ (Figes, 1996, p.xvii). Figes does this in part to dramatise the ‘chaos’ of the period but also to emphasise the agency of individuals in history, even where outcomes were unintended, and to present the revolution as it was experienced – ‘as a human event of complicated individual tragedies’ and ‘not as a march of abstract social forces and ideologies’ (Figes, 1996, p.xvii). Figes’ content and his narrative approach both thus comment on and reject the ways in which the revolution had been understood and told by earlier generations of historians with different interpretive assumptions. Students should encounter histories of different types, particularly histories that enable clear differences in historians’ purposes to be readily established. Differences in purposes include: • kinds of historical focus (social history, economic history, and so on) • scale of focus (studies of individuals, villages, empires, and so on) • differences in what histories are seeking to do in the broader context of the evolution of historiography (challenging or defending a consensus, applying a new approach to familiar content, and so on).

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Activity 14 31 The type of history that an historian is attempting to produce will have profound consequences for what they include (and exclude) and for how they organise their narrative (as the example of Harrison or Figes shows). Dramatise types of history for students (e.g. by showing them contrasting types of documentary – Hughes and Schama, for example) or through museum websites (How do the websites of The People’s History Museum in Manchester 32 and of Leeds Royal Armouries 33 differ and what does this tell us about the ‘types of history’ that the two museums present?). Ask students to consider how one historical work (say, Schama’s A History of Britain documentary or The Peoples’ History Museum website) would differ if it had a different aim? Ask them to suggest what changes would need to follow if one or other of these ‘histories’ morphed into history of a different type (e.g. what if Schama was an economic historian – how might the content of his programmes have differed?). Finally, ask students to consider the strengths and limitations of ‘types’ of history. Writing history of a particular ‘type’ narrows vision (you only look for things that ‘fit the mould’). Are there advantages to having a narrow focus, however? What can you do with a microscope that you cannot do with a video camera, and vice versa?

5.3.iv Historians’ methods and research strategies As was noted in the context of the ‘square’ problem (Section 5.1.i above), it is not possible to answer an empirical question – in the past or the present – without making decisions about the methods that you will use to help you answer it. Some of these decisions will be conceptual. To count people, as we saw, you have first to clarify what a ‘person’ is and to define criteria for the concept. The same is true of any enquiry into any topic. Some decisions will be practical and relate to the methods or research strategy used to create knowledge. There are a great many decisions that must be made when conducting research including: • •

a choice of overall enquiry question or problem to research; decisions about which archives to consult and which sources within those archives to interrogate;

•

decisions about the questions to ask when examining sources;

•

decisions about how to analyse or process sources in order to answer the questions that will be asked.

This section will scope some of the variations in method found in contemporary historiography and explore how questions of method might be explored with students. Histories can be differentiated by method – ‘microhistory’ and ‘oral history’, for example (Burke (ed.), 2001; Cannadine (ed.), 2002). Much of the innovation in historical method that has taken place since the nineteenth century has followed from changes in historical purpose – in the nature of the historical object that historians were enquiring into and in the kinds of question that were being asked. To illustrate by returning to Harrison’s Common People, a work of ‘social’ history ‘from below’. Harrison’s aim – to inquire into the lives of ‘the common people’ from the perspectives of ‘the common people’ – differentiates his work from other 31

See Appendix 1 at the end of this guide for a full statement of this and all subsequent activities.

32

http://www.phm.org.uk/

33

https://www.royalarmouries.org/leeds 31

modes of historical writing, such as high political biography, in the questions asked, the archives identified and selected, the methods of research adopted, and so on. Nineteenth-century political history – the kind that inspired Acton – was the study of documents and written sources but, as Harrison noted, you cannot write the kind of history he was interested in writing by looking at political archives. For most of history, the common people have been illiterate and they have not left written sources (see Harrison, 1984, p.15). The endeavour to write ‘social history’ from ‘below’, like other developments in historiography, has resulted in innovation in research strategies and a dramatic expansion in historians’ understandings of what archives are and of how they can be interrogated. Traces of the lives of those who were not in a position to define the ‘official’ record (and thus to generate the archives that the state curates) were sought outside conventional archives and / or by reading these archives in new ways. Harrison (1984, p.16) identifies four archival developments, representing an expansion of history, resulting from the new kinds of ‘enquiry’ that social history expressed and enabled: 1. An expansion of archives of documents (e.g. new written sources – such as working class autobiographies – have been uncovered by looking outside traditional archives); 2. Innovation in ways of reading documentary sources, for example, reading ‘against the grain’ by asking questions about the ‘unwitting testimony’ provided by these sources (e.g. using legal and other sources, created by the state to help keep order, to gather information about those the state arrested, interrogated, prosecuted and punished); 3. The generation of new non-documentary source materials (e.g. by collecting oral testimony, studying material culture and its remains in archaeology and objects and artefacts); and 4. The development of new tools and technologies of data interrogation and interpretation (for example, using computers to digitise the records of the slave trade or parish records of births and deaths to reveal large scale patterns over time). 34 The developments that Harrison identifies allow clear contrasts of method and research strategy to be developed – microhistory (which uses strategies such as those mentioned in point 2) differs dramatically from cliometrics (quantitative economic history using datasets like those mentioned in point 4). Both differ dramatically from conventional document-based political history or from biography. Innovation in method and archive have occurred in many areas of historical practice (Burke (ed.), 2001; Cannadine (ed.), 2002) and often, as with social history, as part of an effort to recover the histories of groups whose lives and experiences had remained ‘hidden’ in conventional historical accounts (Rowbotham, 1992; Walkowitz, 1992). It is likely to be helpful to explore contrasting approaches to the same topic or issue with students if we want them to come to understand the ways in which different historians can approach the topic. The relative merits of different approaches can also be debated and evaluated. Two paired examples of historians’ works are explored below to illustrate some of the kinds of difference that we might want to help students explore. The examples illustrate: innovation and creativity in data generation (historians uncovering new sources and, in one case, creating new sources that did not exist before they 34

Projects like the ‘The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database’ (http://www.slavevoyages.org/), whose database includes information on almost 36,000 slaving voyages that can be manipulated at speed to answer complex queries, mean that it is now possible to know things about the slave trade that were not know at the time that it took place and that were not knowable before the database was constructed.

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designed their research); innovation and creativity in data identification (historians bringing new types of data to bear on an existing problem); and innovation and creativity in data interpretation (historians reading old sources in new ways). Case study 1: Understanding terror in Nazi Germany Both Robert Gellately – whom we have already encountered talking about his work to the BBC – and Eric Johnson are historians of Nazi Germany. Both are interested in understanding how the Nazi state apparatus functioned (Gellately, 2001, pp.2-8; Johnson, 2000). They both want to understand how it was that the Nazis were able to achieve and secure dominance over the German people and to understand the nature of that dominance. They pursue these questions by drawing on many of the same resources, including existing research studies and reports. One issue that both historians explore relates to how much the German people knew about the operation of the Nazi ‘terror’ apparatus (Gellately, 2001, p.5; Johnson and Reuband, 2005). They use different research strategies to consider this question. In the parts of Backing Hitler: Consent and coercion in Nazi Germany (2001) that deal with this issue, Gellately focuses on German media from the 1930s and 1940s – in other words, he draws on materials produced by the Nazis that were consumed by the German people at the time. This allows Gellately to make an assessment of the degree to which Nazi media publicised terror (or hid it) and, as a result, to draw conclusions about what people could have known about terror from mass media sources. He also uses this material to draw conclusions about how the regime operated. Whereas Gellately draws on Nazi media sources, Johnson and his co-researchers create their own sources. In both Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans (2000) and What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany (2005) Johnson draws on survey evidence created by his research project in the 1990s through questionnaires and oral history interviews administered to large numbers of people who had lived through the Third Reich. This data gives Johnson insight into what Germans knew and perceived at the time, as they remember it in the 1990s. Gellately finds that: In the 1930s the regime made sure the concentration camps were reported in the press… The regime boasted… of its new system of ‘police justice’… Far from clothing such practices in secrecy, the regime played them up… and lauded the… superiority of the Nazi system over all others. (Gellately, 2001, pp.5-6) Johnson’s data includes material like the following, arising from an interview conducted in 1994: We interviewed… Adam Grolsch… He candidly told us many things about his experiences as a radio operator in the German army… including how he had frequently listened to BBC broadcasts… and how he had personally observed the shooting of thousands of Jews from the Pinsk ghetto in October 1942. (Johnson and Reuband, 2005, p.xiii) Johnson and Reuband’s survey data enables patterns such as the following to be established for Germany as a whole: 69% of German Jews in their data sample reported that their treatment before 1933 was generally positive and 58% reported that things were negative after 1933 (Johnson and Reuband, 2005, p.270). 33

The two approaches yield results that are broadly consistent. For example, there is evidence in both to suggest that most Germans knew about camps. Gellately argues that the regime used the camps as propaganda to convey the message that, unlike previous ‘weak’ liberal governments, they were dealing with criminals and enemies of Germany. Johnson’s data indicates that although ‘ordinary’ Germans were aware of Nazi terror they felt that it was more of a threat to those the regime defined as its enemies than to themselves (Johnson and Reuband, 2005, p.387-398). Activity 15 35 Present students with summaries and short extracts from two historical works that deal with the same issue but that approach it using contrasting research strategies (such as those used, in the case of terror in Nazi Germany by Gellately and by Johnson and Reuband). Ask them to consider the strengths and limitations of both of the contrasting approaches. They could consider, for example, the question ‘What does one approach allow you to explore that the other approach does not?’ Ask them to identify one important strength and one important weakness for each approach. Which one, overall, do they think is likely to add the most to our knowledge of the issue? Case study 2: Revisionism and the ‘Indian Mutiny’ Both William Dalrymple and Rudrangshu Mukherjee are – among other things – scholars of the ‘Indian Mutiny’ of 1857/8. Both are particularly interested in understanding the meanings of these events for those participating in them. 36 They approach these issues in very different ways, however, and write different types of history. Mukherjee’s The Spectre of Violence: The 1857 Kanpur Massacres (2007) is a work in the ‘history from below’ tradition associated with the ‘subaltern studies’ school of Indian historians. The Spectre of Violence is an academic monograph and an exercise in revision and re-interpretation. 37 Mukherjee’s book is meta-historical, and consists, in large part, of a critique of the representation of the events of 1857 to be found in existing histories. Mukherjee looks back critically at previous histories and aims to re-start the ‘interpretive cycle’ on new assumptions. William Dalrymple’s The Last Mughal: The fall of a dynasty, Delhi 1857 (2006) is a mass market publication by a travel writer who distances himself from academic fashion and, in particular, from subaltern studies. Dalrymple’s book is narrative history rather than meta-history: Dalrymple sets out to construct stories rather than to deconstruct them. Like Mukherjee, however, Dalrymple aims to challenge accepted historical interpretations. Both books set out to effect ‘instructive reversals’, to cite the poet Azan, one of Dalrymple’s many Indian sources. Mukherjee sets out to recover ‘Kanpur’ – the site of Indian experiences and actions – from the Anglocentric texts that constructed ‘Cawnpore’ (the English term for Kanpur) as a symbol of atrocity. Dalrymple, on the other hand, sets out to tell a Mughal story, rather than a British imperial one, about the events that unfolded in Delhi in 1857-58. Mukherjee reads the imperial archive ‘against the grain’, asking questions that it was not constructed to answer. His interest is in the symbolic logic of rebel actions – something he reconstructs from British texts that sought only to record atrocity 35


36

The paragraphs that follow draw heavily on Chapman (2011d).

37

This is a second, revised, edition of a work originally published in 1998.

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and outrage. Thus, for example, Mukherjee differentiates between the two most notorious massacres that took place in Kanpur in 1857, the massacres of Satichaura Ghat and of the ‘House of the Ladies’. Whereas, Mukherjee argues, the former was public and an assertion of collective power at a moment of triumph in which British authority had to be conspicuously obliterated, the latter was private (literally ‘behind closed doors’), was motivated by fear and a desire to remove incriminating evidence, and took place at a moment when the unity of the ‘rebels’ was evaporating in the face of defeat. The massacres were not simply ‘savagery’, then, but had different political logics. Dalrymple innovates not so much by reading conventional sources in new ways as by seeking out and interpreting ‘new’ sources of evidence. Dalrymple’s book is the first in English to make significant use of ‘The Mutiny Papers’ in The National Archives of India, a collection of 20,000 Persian and Urdu documents, many of which are written in Mughal court shorthand which requires particular skills to decipher. Interrogating these materials and others like them, allows Dalrymple to present a very nuanced account of events in Delhi in 1857 and one that destabilises any straightforward narrative with binary protagonists. Dalrymple shows that simple polarisations – such as ‘Indian: English’ – do not work, and he dramatises the power struggles and political differences within the uprising. The differences between the two books are perhaps most clearly brought out through the detail of their writing, as these two passages, chosen at random, indicate. The British… in Delhi were… eccentric… Emily Metcalfe was particularly struck by… Dr Ross (‘short and corpulent and very ugly… a shocking bad doctor’)… and… the Principal of Delhi College whose wife… used to hide her husband’s trousers to prevent his going out in the evening and leaving her alone. (Dalrymple, 2006, p.105) Williams said he had succeeded in persuading forty-two persons to come forward and testify. Yet, if one looks at the depositions… there are actually sixty-three… It appears that after the enquiries were completed… Hulas Singh… gave himself up…. [and] implicated some people by name… but nobody corrected Williams’ forwarding memorandum… (Mukherjee, 2007, p.105) These passages very clearly use their source materials to do different things. Whereas Dalrymple uses his sources to weave a narrative description, Mukherjee’s interest is in the ways in which narratives of the Mutiny have been constructed – he is evaluating the descriptions and explanations that Victorians and later authors created about the Mutiny rather than making a Mutiny narrative of his own. Activity 16 38 Present students with short passages from two texts that deal with the same or similar topics but that represent contrasting types of history and that are written in different ways (e.g. extracts from Dalrymple’s narrative history and from Mukherjee’s critical analysis of earlier historians’ narratives). Ask students to see what they can work out about differences in the historians’ methods or general approaches from how they write and to consider questions such as ‘What do these historians’ styles of writing reveal about their aims?’ or ‘Do they use sources in the same way or are they asking contrasting questions about their sources?’

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5.3.v Assumptions and interpretive frameworks Groping comes before grasping. Seeking before seeing. (Gombrich, 1979, p.5) One cannot approach the world with an entirely open mind because, if one did, it would be impossible to say anything meaningful about it. An entirely open mind would, in effect, be an empty mind. (Novick, 1988, p.35) Just as a question is needed before an enquiry can begin, so assumptions are necessary before a question can even be asked. Without ideas about how the world works, about what is important in it, and about how we can go about making sense of it, one cannot so much as ask a question, since assumptions of these kinds guide us in deciding on a focus and on a problem to explore. Assumptions are also necessary when interpreting data because it does not speak for itself – we have to make sense of it. There is, in Megill’s memorable phrase, no ‘immaculate perception’ (Megill, 2007, p.83) and, as Jordanova has argued: No empirical activity is possible without a theory, or at least elaborate presuppositions…, even if these remain implicit, perhaps unconscious. All historians have ideas already in their minds when they study primary materials – models of human behaviour, established chronologies, assumptions about responsibility, notions of identity and so on. (Jordanova, 2000, p.63) History cannot begin without assumptions about what it is worth finding out about. Like almost everything else that matters, ‘what matters’ is contested, and ideas about what matters in history have changed dramatically over the last hundred years, and often for historical reasons. The dominance of political history ‘from above’ in Lord Acton’s time, framed in terms of the histories of nation states, for example, arose from the fact that the growth of academic history in the nineteenth century was sponsored by the nation state (Berger and Lorenz (eds.), 2010). In the ‘age of nationalism’ it was felt necessary to show how and why each ‘nation’ was a distinct entity – which meant, in effect, an entity linked to a particular place, culture and set of institutions through history. Chairs of ‘History’ were, accordingly, established with great rapidity in Europe and America in the closing years of the nineteenth century (Gellner, 2006; Hobsbawm, 2010). Nationalism is the proposition that each ‘nation’ should be self-determining, which is to say that, for nationalists, each nation needed a ‘state’, or set of political institutions that would allow the nation to express itself and to secure its identity and interests against threats from ‘outside’. Nineteenth-century nation states (or aspirant nation states) were dominated by male elites which meant, in practice, that much of the history of these nations was understood as a history of the ways in which national male elites had achieved, secured and carried forward the interests of ‘their’ nations through political action – such history tended, in other words, to be masculinist high political history ‘from above’. The history of the twentieth century called all of these assumptions about doing history into question. The history of the twentieth century could be organised around any of a number of themes, including, for example, democratisation (including social democratisation), globalisation and decolonisation. The assumption that national ‘high politics’ was what was historically significant and, thus, what history should focus on, came to be questioned by the growth of labour history, social history, women’s history, gender history, post-colonial history, and a 36

number of other modes of constructing historical significance. All these approaches insisted on broadening and diversifying the themes and topics that merited the attention of historians. These new approaches often mirrored demands put forward by social and political movements seeking to democratise their contemporary present as well as the past. Assumptions about what should be studied are often linked to ideas about how to conduct enquiry and how to write history. High political assumptions yielded the propositions that the key sources for historical enquiry were the archives of states, governments and political movements, and the assumption that proper historical methods were simply those best suited to interpreting political archives. The proposition that history should be written as a political narrative – of decisions and moments of decision – followed from the same set of assumptions. As we have seen in the case of Harrison’s Common People, a shift in the object of study yields a shift in the archives studied and / or in the methods used to interrogate and interpret those archives. A key growth area in twentieth-century historiography was quantitative statistical history developed by economic historians, demographic historians, and social historians. Typically, this history focused on mapping and mastering large-scale changes in the lives of societies beyond the politics of their elites. Social scientific history, more generally, aimed to explore the dynamics of change at scale in social, economic, cultural and political dimensions of the past. Often, the purpose of this understanding was explicitly present and future-oriented: one studied the past, to borrow the title of one of Eric Hobsbawm’s last books, in order to understand ‘how to change the world’ (Hobsbawm, 2012). Activity 17 39 The subjects of historians’ verbs can give us an insight into how they are thinking about ‘agency’. Grammatically, verbs are ‘doing words’ and the subjects of verbs are the ones who ‘do things’ and have agency in prose. Select some pages or long paragraphs from works from different time periods that deal with the same issue – for example, books about the British Labour Movement – and ask students to highlight the subjects of verbs. Who is doing what to whom in the texts? Does this analysis surface differences in agency? Are collective nouns (e.g. classes) or individuals in charge of the verbs. Explore whether this reveals something significant about the assumptions with which the authors approach their topics, bringing in additional information about the authors and / or the texts from which the passages are chosen. In the last generation these ‘social scientific’ assumptions began, in turn, to be questioned, in a development that one might link to ‘postmodernism’ and to a collapse in belief in the stories of progress that were so influential in the midtwentieth century (Lyotard, 1984; Furedi, 1992). New ‘postmodern’ narrative histories, emphasising contingency, unintended outcomes and – often – chaos and violence resulting from attempts to change the world, became increasingly common. Social scientific history – linked to progressivism and to the belief that collective political action could realise ‘the Great Society’ – looked hollow in the 1970s as the twentieth century’s ‘Golden Age’ of sustained post-war growth came to an end (Hobsbawm, 1994; Mann, 2013). Assumptions are often simply taken for granted and not explicitly stated. Whether explicitly stated or not, assumptions shape the ‘interpretive frameworks’ that historians use to organise their research. Ideas about how the world works and 39


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ideas about how to write history are often inter-related. Consider the set of ideas mapped on Figure 2, for example. Figure 2: Two dimensions of contrast in interpretive frameworks

A topic that has been much debated by historians in recent years is the role and importance of counter-factualism in historical explanation. To take a ‘counterfactual’ approach to historical explanation is to ask: ‘What would have happened if X, Y or Z aspect of the past had been different?’ Counter-factual history has vocal advocates (for example Ferguson, (ed.) 1997) and equally vocal critics (Evans, 2014). Advocates of counter-factualism tend to emphasise the role of contingency (chance) in history and to argue that it is very probable that things would have turned out very differently if a particular decision had not been made, if a particular historical agent had not been in a key position at a crucial time – and so on. Counter-factual history tends, accordingly, to focus on the particular details of states of affairs, actions or chains of events when constructing explanations and to write narrative history to convey the ways in which one event led (but might very easily not have led) to another. One might ask, for example, ‘What would have changed if Georg Elser had succeeded in his attempt to assassinate Hitler in 1939?’ – a question posed by a recent review of Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film 13 Minutes about this failed assassination attempt: Had that attempt on his life succeeded… it might well have saved the lives of 40 million people, because Hitler’s senior henchmen — including Himmler, Goebbels, Hess, and… Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust — were also there, sitting in the front row, and they would have been killed along with him. (Farndale, 2015) Whilst accepting that chance can be crucial in determining the shape of historical events and developments, critics of counter-factualism often argue that a focus on chance and on the actions of individuals draws attention away from, and tends to 38

trivialise, large-scale and impersonal forces which, they argue, play a much more significant role in shaping development and change in the past (Evans, 2014). Most events in history, the argument goes, depend on a context and this is shaped by large-scale processes, changes and developments that are the result of the interaction of numerous decisions taken by large numbers of people such that outcomes often have very little to do with what any one individual wanted to happen or could have changed. History, on this account, is largely the story of collective not individual agents: a narrative in which the ‘characters’ are classes, states, social movements, shifts in culture and ideas rather than individual people and a story in which outcomes are better understood as determined rather than open. One might ask, from this perspective, if we really can account for the occurrence and violence of the Second World War entirely in Nazi-centric terms, without considering wider social, economic and technological trends, as Farndale does in his review. Activity 18 40 Select short passages from texts of different types or from different time periods that explain why the same historical event or development took place. Ask students to look at the language that the historians use when writing their explanations. Do they use language that implies that what happened had to happen – do they make it sound inevitable? On the other hand, is there evidence that they think that things could very well have turned out differently? Are conditional sentence structures of the ‘if…. then…’ or ‘if not…. then not…’ present and do they make use of modal verb phrases such as ‘might have…’ and ‘could have…’? Explore whether language use reveals something significant about the assumptions with which the authors approach their topics, bringing in additional information about the authors and / or the texts from which the passages are chosen. Determinism and collectivism have had significant impact on historical practice and writing in the twentieth century – through, for example, the influence of Marxism on historical writing, an influence that is palpable, for example, in the narrative structure of classics of the genre like Christopher Hill’s Century of Revolution. Hill’s chapters covering the seventeenth century are all structured hierarchically and in the same way, beginning with political events (‘Narrative of Events’) but leading subsequently to underlying structural changes that Hill considered key in determining the shape of the century as a whole and in driving the social ‘revolution’ that he narrated – principally, ‘Economics’ (Hill, 1961). Determinism – with its emphasis on large-scale agencies driving change – was particularly influential also in social scientific history more generally, exemplified, for example, by Ferdinand Braudel’s classic The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1996). The Mediterranean is a monumental book, running to 1244 pages excluding bibliography. We can learn a great deal about it, however, simply by looking at an abbreviation of its chapter structure, which illustrates determinism and collectivism graphically: Part 1: The Role of The Environment, p. 25 Part 2: Collective Destinies and General Trends, p.355 Part 3: Events, Politics, People, p.904

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Part 3 – the part of the book where human agency arises – is 27.3% of the whole – a statistic that clearly indicates the relative un-importance that Braudel assigned to individual agency in his history. Activity 19 41 Select passages from histories of different types – for example, social scientific history (such as Braudel or Harrison), on the one hand, and 1990s narrativist history (such as Figes or Schama), on the other. The passages should be describing something taking place over time (an event, a change, a development, and so on). Ask students to explore the senses in which the texts are ‘narrative’. 42 Are there ‘characters’ and ‘actions’? If yes, are they human scale (individual people) in most passages or ‘collective’ agents (classes, and so on)? What time scales are used in the passages (are some passages narrating events on human hour-and-day scales and others looking at things on a larger time scale)? Many of the ‘classic’ histories of the last generation – such as Figes’ People’s Tragedy (1996) mentioned above – have distanced themselves from Braudel’s assumptions and from deterministic models of historical development associated with social science. The interpretive assumptions of this new narrative history – principally an emphasis on the importance of chance, of events and of individual actions in shaping the past – are reflected in the form (narratives of actions and events) as well as in the content of these histories, as the following, from the preface to Simon Schama’s Citizens: A chronicle of the French Revolution, shows. Schama began by distancing himself, and contemporary historical research into the French Revolution, from social scientific and determinist models of how history works. He went on to argue as follows: I have chosen to present… arguments in the form of… narrative… the Revolution was a much more haphazard and chaotic event and much more the product of human agency than structural conditioning… As artificial as written narratives might be, they often correspond to ways in which historical actors construct events…. (Schama, 1989, pp.xv-xvi) Like Figes, and the work of many other contemporary historians, Schama makes very different assumptions about humanity’s capacity to ‘make history’ and ‘change the world’ than those embodied in earlier ‘social scientific’ histories. Where many social scientific historians assumed that history was process to be mastered and directed (Furedi, 1992; Hobsbawm, 2012), narrativist historians tend to see history as a cautionary tale in which ‘revolutions’ are attempts to ride a juggernaut that led to naught – to tombs and hecatombs. Exploring interpretive frameworks with students can be tricky. If we set the task up badly it is very easy for students to assimilate interpretive frameworks to simplistic ideas about bias and to tacitly assume, naively, that if only historians could maintain an ‘open’ mind and be sufficiently ‘objective’ interpretive differences might evaporate. This is particularly likely to happen, it seems to me, if students are offered ‘schools of history’ summaries that present conflicts of interpretation as 41


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Chapter 4 of Megill (2007) is a really useful resource for teachers on this issue. 40

unexplained choices of ‘position’ (Marxist, Feminist, Revisionist, and so on). The net effect of approaches like this can be to make historians seem little more than capricious ideologues. The assumptions and frameworks that historians use can be rationally compared, explored and debated (see the discussions in Sections 5.1.i and 5.5.ii above) and historical debate frequently turns on debating them. We need to plan learning about interpretations carefully so that students come to fully appreciate this and, indeed, to make their own developed assessments that debate the detail of what historians say and that avoid simplistic attributions of bias. Assumptions and interpretative frameworks shape how histories are written and are themselves shaped by the wider context from which they emerge. Understanding how what historians do is linked to the time and context in which they do it is an important dimension of thinking about differences of interpretation. Again, however, there are real dangers here. As Howells has argued, nothing could be less historical than getting students to label ‘interpretations’ as ‘Victorian’ (Howells, 2005). Victorians – like ‘Marxists’ or ‘Postmodernists’ or any other large category that we might use – are heuristic simplifications. In reality, ‘Victorians’ (by which, it is worth remembering, we mean millions of people who lived through all or part of a 64-year reign) were highly diverse in their views, interests, beliefs, and so on. Stereotyping – the problem with ‘schools of history’ labelling – is the enemy of detail which, in turn, reveals complexity. Questions that require students to engage with the detail of what historians are doing – such as the questions posed in historians’ and moderators’ feedback in the HVA project (see Section 5.1.ii above) – are likely to be helpful in avoiding stereotypes, as is detailed comparison of what historians actually do when they write (see the discussion of Dalrymple and Mukherjee’s texts in Section 5.3.iv above).

5.4 Understanding that differences in interpretation can be legitimate If students have been introduced to and have understood some of the range of considerations explored in the previous sections of this guide then they are likely, already, to have an appreciation of the fact that histories frequently differ and, indeed, of the fact that our default expectation should be to expect histories to differ, depending on their purposes, methods, context and so on. A key dimension of difference is given by the notion of ‘decision’. Histories are made (not found) and historians have to make decisions about the questions that they want to pursue, how they pursue them and how they go about writing the histories that they construct. If historians were aiming to do the same things and in the same ways, using the same archives and the same questions, assumptions and interpretive frameworks then we might view differences in their writings with concern. There is always room for debate, however, about all of these decisions and about how to make them. In any case, in addition, many of the assumptions, frameworks and decisions that are possible change with time and the decisions that seemed most defensible at one time may themselves come to seem questionable some years later. Because historians’ decisions have a rationale, they can be rationally appraised. It seems probable that raising students’ awareness that there are decisions to be made and their knowledge and understanding of the ways in which particular historians have made decisions will help them to see that differences in the decisions that historians make are legitimate and that these decisions can be evaluated comparatively. It does not follow from the fact that differing interpretative decisions can be legitimate that all decisions are equally defensible. It is worth emphasising this fact because it is often falsely assumed that the only alternative to absolute clarity is 41

vertiginous relativism. Decisions must always be evaluated in relative terms – relative to alternative decisions that might have been made, relative to the purposes at hand, relative to the context in which they were made, and so on. It by no means follows, however, that ‘anything goes’. When does a difference in interpretation become a problem? Differences in historical argument are not mere differences in opinion – you can believe what you like in your personal life and ‘everyone is entitled to their own opinion’ but, in history, you are only entitled to conclusions that you can support through argument, that take due note of relevant evidence and that you are willing to subject to the open and critical evaluation of your peers. Differences in argument are natural – historians can legitimately explore different topics, ask different questions, use differing research strategies, and so on, and the assumptions underlying all these decisions can change with time, as we have seen. We are not forced to make decisions about which historians’ conclusion to accept most of the time – historians may address the same problem and topic and come to differing conclusions that are contrasting or complementary without their readers being forced to reject one or the other. Differences become a problem, however, where historians attempt exactly the same task (understood in the same terms) and produce contradictory conclusions.

5.5 Evaluating interpretations Students can find evaluating historical interpretations challenging and a number of problems can present themselves, including the following: • •

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‘Fence-sitting’, when students systematically avoid discriminating between accounts and insist on finding undifferentiated value in all the historical arguments that they are asked to consider; Simplistic evaluation, when students make superficial judgements based on naive criteria that do not really require them to read the texts they are evaluating (of the kind, for example, that say ‘X is best because it is published by Cambridge University Press’ or ‘Y is best because it was published most recently and new evidence may have come to light’); Overstated judgements, when students dismiss or endorse arguments in an ‘all or nothing’ way, without nuance or a sense that arguments can have strengths and weakness of different kinds.

To overcome problems such as these, we need to help students to appreciate: • • •

that evaluation is relative not absolute (it depends upon our purposes); that evaluation requires detailed engagement with historians’ arguments; that evaluation is a matter of applying criteria rather than simply ‘checking the facts’.

5.5.i Purpose Evaluation in a vacuum does not make sense. There are thousands of history books and articles on the French Revolution, for example, including the following randomly selected sample identified by searching for books on the French Revolution on Amazon.co.uk. Books have been selected here. As the Edexcel specification makes clear, there is no expectation that students should analyse entire books. Book titles are used here to help scaffold students’ understanding of types of historical writing – the titles of articles in magazines or of book chapters could equally well be used. 42

George Rudé (1968) The Crowd in the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Linda Kelly (1989) Women of the French Revolution. Edinburgh: Hamish Hamilton Ltd. Marisa Linton (2015) Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship, and Authenticity in the French Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dylan Rees and Duncan Townson (2015) Access to History: France in Revolution 1774-1815. London: Hodder Education. It makes no sense whatever to ask ‘Which is best?’ of this sample of historical writing, since, as the titles reveal, they are different types of writing – three academic monographs and one sixth-form textbook – and they also represent different types of history and are doing different things. Rudé’s text is ‘history from below’ looking at the people of Paris, Kelly’s text is women’s history looking at women’s experiences of the revolution and Linton’s text is political history exploring and contextualising choices made by revolutionary leaders. To evaluate any examples of historical writing we need a purpose. If my purpose was to enquire into women’s experiences of the revolution, then it is obvious that Kelly’s would be most the valuable of the titles above. If my purpose was to understand the September Massacres, however, then it seems likely that all four texts would be valuable in differing degrees. Each book is accompanied by a marketing summary online and based on that information, it looks like Rees and Townson’s text might provide an overview of events and be valuable in providing that if we did not know it already. Kelly’s text might give us insights into how that period of the revolution was experienced by observers or the relatives of victims and perpetrators. Rudé’s text might yield insights into the popular dynamics of the massacres – of how the mobs who took part in them acted. Linton’s text might help us understand how revolutionary leaders drove, reacted to and / or sought to exploit the panic in Paris in September 1792. There are other ways in which all four texts might be compared and evaluated. We might, for example, be aiming to find the most robust and up-to-date research findings, in which case we would need to find out about the research the authors had done, their methods of working, the quality of their reasoning, and so on. Alternatively, our purpose might be to identify works that have been groundbreaking or original in approach. To consider that we need to investigate the wider history of the historiography of the revolution – the kind of investigation that might allow one to appreciate how the kind of quantitative history ‘from below’ that Rudé’s book exemplifies, was highly innovative at the time that the book was published, or that might allow us to locate Linton’s book in the context of the historiographic zeitgeist exemplified by Schama or Figes, discussed above. The key point to note is that evaluation must be relative to a purpose and involve criteria. What the evaluation criteria are will depend upon our purpose – we may prioritise relevance to a particular issue, rigour of methodology, use at a particular phase of our enquiry, originality, and so on (see below for further material on criteria).

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Activity 20 43 First, reassure students that you are not expecting them to evaluate entire books in their coursework and explain that the purpose of this exercise is to allow them to understand how to go about making judgements about historical works in general. Second, identify your topic (e.g. the causes of the French Revolution). Task students to make a list of four or five books that they think are relevant to the topic using Amazon (or Google Books or another electronic database) based on the titles of the books, the marketing summaries provided (on Amazon) or samples of their tables of contents (on Amazon or via Google Books). Task them to come up with one group list of four or five books based on their criteria. Finally, change the enquiry (so that it becomes the September Massacres or some other aspect of the revolution) and ask them to repeat the exercise. Has their selection remained the same? If yes, why? If no, why not?

5.5.ii Argument Argument is crucial to history – as Allan Megill and others have shown (Megill, 2007; Goldstein, 1976). This is so for a fundamental reason that it is critical to grasp and appreciate. We cannot create knowledge of the past by observation or experience (it is no longer) and we are forced, instead, to construct claims about the aspects of the past that we are investigating by drawing inferences from the traces that remain. History, as Goldstein has argued, is all about ‘explaining the evidence’ and coming up with models, theories and scenarios that help us make sense of the past whose fragments and traces we have before us. The tool with which these models, theories and scenarios are built is argument and these things are only as strong as the arguments which construct them. We modelled arguments earlier in this guide (see Section 5.2.i above). It is one thing to model an argument – to make explicit the logic of what an historian claims (students should be given a number of opportunities to practise doing that). It is another thing to test an argument’s logic, however, and we cannot evaluate an argument without doing that. A good argument is one whose reasons do in fact provide grounds for accepting its conclusions. Most of the time most of the arguments that historians provide meet this test – which is, perhaps, one reason why students find it difficult to evaluate what historians say. We need a tighter question than ‘Does it make sense?’ if we are to evaluate arguments with precision. Two questions – developed by authors specialising in critical thinking (van den Brink-Budgen, 2000) – can help us here, perhaps. Evaluating argument: The ‘alternative conclusions’ test Once we have modelled an historian’s argument, and are clear about the conclusions that are drawn and the evidence from which they are drawn, and once we have established that the ‘reasons’ given do provide grounds that make the conclusion plausible, we can then ask the following question: ‘Can alternative and equally plausible conclusions be drawn from this evidence?’ If equally credible alternative conclusions can be drawn, then the argument is not a very convincing one. If, on the other hand, the only really credible conclusion that can be drawn is that one that has been drawn then we have a strong argument.

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Activity 21 44 Select a chapter or chapter section from a work of history or a history article. Make sure that students are clear about the question or problem that is being addressed – e.g. ‘Was A.J.P. Taylor right in his interpretation of the Hossbach memorandum?’ (they need to know the problem to recognise the solution that the historian is arguing for). Task students to identify the conclusion that the historian wants you to accept on the issue and the reasons that the historian offers in support of their conclusion (see the activities in Section 5.2.ii on reasons and conclusions). Task students to try to think as creatively as possible and to identify alternative conclusions. In other words, ask them to see if they can think of new inferences / concluding statements based on the reasons given. If they can think of alternative conclusions, the next task is to evaluate them. How plausible are they? Plausibility can be understood in various ways – e.g. which seem realistic possibilities, given what we know about the period? Rank their alternative conclusions on a 0-5 plausibility scale and then do the same for the historian’s conclusion. Ask students to compare the scores – how do their conclusions and the historian’s conclusion line up? If the historian’s conclusion scores highly and the others do not, then the text they are analysing has passed the ‘alternative conclusions test’. To exemplify with a practical example, look back to the summary of one of Robert Gellately’s arguments about ‘terror’ in Nazi Germany summarised in Section 5.2.ii above. 45 One item of evidence that Gellately adduces is the following fact, established by his research in the archives in Würzburg. Around 80-90% of the ‘crimes’ in the Würzburg Gestapo’s files were reported to them by ordinary people, not identified by Gestapo employees (in other words, Germans seem to have denounced each other to the Gestapo frequently). What can we infer from this ‘fact’ about relationships between the people of Würzburg and the Gestapo? Gellately’s inference from this (as summarised in Section 5.2.ii above) is the following: Gellately concludes that the Gestapo operated with the cooperation of the German people. Are alternative and equally plausible conclusions possible? Here is one sixth former’s reaction to this claim that both posits an alternative conclusion and supports it with reasons. Denunciations are clearly an example of the German people hiding from the Nazi authorities, it is likely that the average German person believed that by telling on neighbours around them, they themselves would be cleared of any suspicion and would not be arrested and sent to the concentration camps. (Cooper and Chapman, 2009, p.141) Whether or not this alternative conclusion is as plausible as Gellately’s is debatable. A lot turns on whether or not Gellately would include cooperation through fear in his definition of cooperation (if yes then, arguably, his argument is impervious to this objection). This point also shows the importance of debating assumptions, 44


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As is explained in the summary of this argument in Section 5.2.ii above, Gellately’s words are summarised here. His exact phrasing can be found in the BBC documentary cited earlier in this guide.

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concepts and criteria when evaluating historians’ arguments: students should be asked to debate and evaluate definitions of key terms when looking at historical debates – what, for example, would they consider the most defensible definition of ‘cooperation’ to be? Evaluating argument: The ‘assumptions’ test A second tool is the assumptions test. We all make assumptions when we argue (when someone says ‘Don’t do that, it’s unhealthy’ for example, they assume that you want to remain healthy). The problem is that the assumptions that people make, when considering complex historical questions, are often questionable. The second item of evidence that Gellately adduces in support of the conclusion in (see Section 5.2.ii above) is the following: There were 28 Gestapo for 1 million people in Würzburg (in other words, there was a low ratio of secret police to people in this part of Germany). The phrase ‘low ratio’ embodies an assumption about how terror works and clearly assumes that a higher ratio than ‘28:1,000,000’ (or ‘0.000028: 1’) is likely to be necessary if you are to rule such large numbers of people by terror. Is this a credible assumption? Arguably not. Since 2001 we have come to understand terror rather better than we might wish to and students would very probably be able to debate the question ‘How many people would you need to terrorise a city of 1,000,000+?’ in quite an informed manner. The answer – if the 2001 Anthrax scare is anything to go by – is that less than ‘1’ person can be sufficient to terrorise many millions of people. It is arguable, also, that further assumptions are made in Gellately’s argument at this point. First, one might ask: ‘Is it important that the Secret Police were secret?’ Historians, scrutinising Gestapo files in the archive now, can know how many Gestapo there were in the Nazi period. Is this something that ‘ordinary Germans’ could have known at the time? It is also assumed (again, in the simplified version of the argument embodied in interview comments to the BBC) that we can draw conclusions about terror from data about the Gestapo alone. Here are two arguments by sixth formers on this topic that suggest that fuller contextual evidence needs to be adduced before a conclusion can be drawn. Well evidence can be interpreted in different ways, for example the Gestapo in Germany was very short numbered and some people could say they could still terrorise because there’s people in camps. (Chapman, 2009(c), p.166) The oppressive nature of the police force within the Nazi state… led to a climate of fear. As Michael Burleigh states ‘Terror both neutralised political opponents and repressed the wider population through a more pervasive insecurity’… (Cooper and Chapman, 2009, p.141) Activity 20 46 Build on the previous activity (in which students modelled how an historian’s argument worked). This time, ask the students to look for assumptions that are present in the argument (these can be of a number of types – assumptions about how key ideas should be understood, for example, or assumptions about how the world works – see the discussion of Gellately’s assumptions for a worked example).

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See Appendix 1 at the end of this guide for a full statement of this and all subsequent activities.

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Next, ask students to evaluate these assumptions. How plausible do they think they are? What happens to the argument if they change some assumptions? Does the argument still work? If the assumptions are credible and alternative credible assumptions do not significantly change the conclusions that can be drawn, then the argument is a strong one. A case study of contrasting conceptualisations and assumptions: The Peterloo ‘Massacre’? There are many examples, in historiography, of disagreements that turn upon conceptualisations and assumptions – about key concepts and also about how an issue should be explored. An example is the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ – an event on 16 August 1819 during which a peaceful pro-democracy meeting was dispersed using cavalry and resulting in the death of at least 15 people and 650 injured. Norman Gash (1979, pp.94-96) and E.P. Thompson (1981, pp.734-769) represent the events of Peterloo in strikingly different ways. Thompson focuses on the events on the ground in St Peters Field in his account (on the violence, the bloodied clothing, and so on) and on the actions of soldiers and militia men (many of whom were reportedly vindictive in their actions whilst dispersing the crowd). Gash, by contrast, focuses on the wider political context and on the actions of the magistrates. Thompson is emphatic that the event was ‘a massacre’. Gash contradicts this analysis – ‘it was a blunder; it was hardly a massacre’. This apparent contradiction actually turns on conceptual issues. First, how do we know that a ‘massacre’ has occurred? Both authors accept the deaths (although Gash does try to minimise them) so that is not the issue. Intention figures in massacre. Thompson’s focus is largely on the intentions of the people on the field on the day and he provides evidence of malice. Gash focuses largely on the magistrates who gave orders and Thompson’s evidence of malice is not relevant there. The key question that arises, then, is about conceptualisation and about what we need to analyse here – those who did the killing or those who gave the orders – an issue that students could readily debate and that one can resolve without looking at the sources.

5.5.iii Evaluation criteria We cannot judge works of history simply by asking if they ‘fit the facts’. This is because many differing works of history may equally well ‘fit the facts’ but draw different conclusions about the meaning and significance of the same ‘facts’. It is also very difficult to find a pure ‘fact’ against which to measure an interpretation, since even the simplest of phrases can embody an interpretation. As Reinhart Kosellek has observed: [in] the historiographic context, facts are… conditioned by judgement… whether Louis XVI was murdered, executed, or even punished is a historical question; but the “fact” that a guillotine of a given weight separated his head from his body is not. (Kosellek, 2004, p.149) It is not that accuracy of content is not important – it is and historians are usually very scrupulous about this indeed. The problem is that this ‘criterion’ is not sufficient. We need a set of criteria – rather than one criterion – if we are to evaluate histories effectively.

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As has been noted, histories are built through argument and good history must comply with canons of historical argument. A good historical argument, as has been indicated earlier in this guide, is one that is open to evaluation by the community of historians – in other words, an argument whose evidential basis can be scrutinised (which is why historians place such weight on bibliography and referencing). This is one source of the objectivity that histories can claim – typically, histories are written by individuals (and subjective in that sense) but they are usually written in a manner that is open to evaluation by the interpersonal (and, hence, non-subjective) community of scholars. There is more to objectivity than footnoting and archival transparency, however. A good argument is a clear argument (in response to a precise question) and also an argument that is coherently and logically constructed and that, for example, takes care to distinguish degrees of certainty in the claims that it makes. Objectivity relates also to canons of debate – to how one replies and responds to criticism of one’s arguments. An historian who ignores criticism or who discounts it without fully addressing the objections that critics have raised demonstrates a subjective, rather than an objective, approach, and ignores the norms of inter-personal discussion and scholarly historical debate. Criteria that can help us compare and make comparative judgements about the qualities of historical arguments in terms of their objectivity have been developed by a number of authors (for example, Goldstein, 1976; McCullagh, 1984; Bevir, 1993; Megill, 2007). Here is a set of possible criteria that draws, loosely, on Bevir (1993). We can evaluate competing constructions of the past by asking questions such as the following: • Do the interpretations accurately refer to relevant source materials (Archives)? • How comprehensive are the interpretations in considering all relevant source materials? • How consistent are the claims that interpretations advance o in themselves (internal consistency) and o with other claims that we already have good reason to accept (external consistency)? • What methods have been used and are their advantages and disadvantages associated with these methods? • How well-argued are the interpretations (see previous section on evaluating argument)? • How original and generative is an interpretation (Does it open up new possibilities for research and /or generate new questions)? Sources and archives The first two criteria are about archives. There is room for debate here, since just what the relevant sources are for a particular topic is often disputed and it also changes with time. To apply the criterion one has to have clarity about what the relevant range of archival sources is for a particular historical topic. Once we have clarity on this, then the criteria are relatively easy to apply. It is simply a question of asking has the historian in question consulted the full range of source material relevant to the issue and have these materials been used accurately? These can be difficult questions to ask, particularly if one is a novice rather than an expert in a topic. However, it is easy to see how students might apply these criteria intelligently, particularly if the historical texts that they are examining spread over time and if they have acquired background knowledge about the historiography of the issue they are studying. 48

To illustrate, using some of the examples that have already been discussed in this guide. Applying comprehensiveness criteria Dalrymple, as we have seen, has expanded the archive that it is relevant to study when exploring the Mughal court during the Indian Mutiny. The Last Mughal is the first book in English to have made significant use of 20,000 Persian and Urdu documents in ‘The Mutiny Papers’ in The National Archives of India and, thus, sets a new standard for comprehensiveness that earlier books (such as Hibbert’s The Great Mutiny, 1978) now clearly fail to meet. The idea of the ‘cycle of interpretation’ is useful here also. Now that Dalrymple has drawn attention to these new sources, new work on Delhi and the Mughal court in 1857/58 will need to pick-up where he has left off and take due account of ‘The Mutiny Papers’. Activity 23 47 Present students with two or three short extracts from historical book chapters or articles on the same issue spread over a period of time. Ask students to try to work out what sources the historians have drawn upon to write their passages by looking very closely at what they say (e.g. quotes in their texts) and by looking at the references that the historians give to support their arguments (footnotes). Are the historians referring to source materials or to other historians’ arguments? If they are referring to source materials, are they all referring to the same ones or does one historian make reference to sources that the others do not make use of? What kinds of source materials do they make use of (for example, one historian might draw heavily – like Gellately does in his work on Würzburg – on a particular local archive). Ask students to model this over time (e.g. literally by drawing a graph). Has the number and range of sources drawn upon by the historians changed over time? Finally, ask students to rank the historians in terms of comprehensiveness. Who is most comprehensive and who is least comprehensive? Accuracy is difficult to assess – it is difficult for academic historians to check each other’s sources and way beyond the resources of sixth formers (who, in any case, will lack the necessary skills – such as the ability to read Mughal court short-hand, in the case of Dalrymple and ‘The Mutiny Papers’). Much of the time, historians take accuracy on trust. Where questions arise about it – because claims are controversial or where they contradict claims that others have advanced and that have been accepted – then it is not uncommon for the archival checking that footnotes enable to take place. 48 The idea of ‘objectivity’ can help us here: an historian who makes claims on the basis of new sources needs to provide sufficient exemplification from the sources for their readers to decide if the sources can support the inferences that are advanced. 47


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Evans (1997) discusses controversial cases (such as David Abraham’s The Collapse of The Weimar Republic). Evans (2001) is an extended example of the line by line and footnote by footnote deconstruction of arguments that were presented as rigorously historical by David Irving. Hoffer (2007) discusses accuracy and objectivity controversies in American history (for example, over Michael Bellesiles’ Arming America (2006)).

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Applying accuracy criteria It is difficult to evaluate (say) Dalrymple’s work for accuracy – without learning Mughal court short-hand and spending several months in the archives. We can do three things with extracts from the book in our hands, however: first, we can check to see that quotes and references to sources that are used as evidence to support key claims are fully referenced (Are they all footnoted?); second, we can decide how far the claims that Dalrymple makes are supported by the extracts from sources and the other data that he quotes in his main text (Do we think his quotes support his claims?); third, we can compare the use that Dalrymple makes of sources with the use that other historians have made of the same sources and ask ‘Are they both consistent?’ Activity 24 49 Use the same extracts as in the previous exercise but ask students to assess them for accuracy this time. As with the Dalrymple example of accuracy assessment, students could check to see if key sources are fully referenced, evaluate how far sources quoted in extracts do in fact support all the claims that they are used to help make and, finally, cross-reference between their extracts to see where the same materials are used (if they are) and then to check to see if they appear to be consistent in all texts where they are used. If the texts score well on all three criteria, then we can be confident that they meet the accuracy criterion (or, rather, we can be as confident as it is possible to be without actually looking up the source materials ourselves). Consistency Consistency is a logical property: to be inconsistent is to contradict yourself (to maintain in one place what you deny in another). Consistency can be considered internally (Are all the claims that an historian makes consistent with each other?) and externally (Are the claims that an historian makes consistent with the claims that are made in work by other historians?). These issues can, in turn, be considered methodologically and substantively – by asking, on the one hand, whether a work is internally and externally consistent in its research strategy, and by asking, on the other hand, whether the work’s claims about the past are all consistent with each other and with claims that we already accept. Internal inconsistency is likely to be a problem – if an historian contradicts themselves then this impacts their credibility. Internal inconsistency over time, however, may be a virtue: historians should change their minds in the light of new evidence, for example. External inconsistency can be a problem (in the sense that two flatly contradictory claims cannot both be true so one must be wrong) but it is not necessarily so. Again, time may be a good reason for inconsistency (new research can contradict earlier findings). Inconsistency of approach – where historians adopt strikingly different methods – should not be a concern since, as we have seen, there are many possible ways of ‘doing history’.

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A case study of external inconsistency: ‘Thuggee’ Dramatic external inconsistencies are quite common in historiography. Consider the case of ‘Thuggee’ (Macfie, 2008), a concept familiar to all who have watched films like Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Thugs, according to administrators in British India in the early decades of the nineteenth century, were a religious group who ritually murdered travellers by strangulation and stole their goods. Nineteenth-century historians and novelists wrote frequently about Thugs and the campaign to suppress Thugs was one engine of the expansion of British police powers in India. In the twentieth century, however, and particularly since Indian independence, the concept has come into question. Many historians have argued that ‘Thugs’ were an invention of the British imperialist imagination and that hunting Thugs was a mechanism for expanding British power. These historians, accordingly, dismiss the validity of the large bodies of material about Thugs in British imperial archives. Despite this revisionism, dismissing ‘Thuggee’ as an imperialist fiction, there are contemporary historians (such as Dash, 2005) who make rigorous arguments for the reality of ‘Thuggee’ based on a positive evaluation of aspects of the archival sources. This is a case where historians disagree (a) about the validity of archival materials and (b) how they should be interpreted and one where they disagree in a very dramatic way (some write about a group that others claim did not exist). The only way to address this is to take a view on which arguments about source validity and which conclusions from the sources are most plausible and best argued. Activity 25 50 Ask students to look again at the texts that they have examined in the earlier activities that looked at comprehensiveness and accuracy. Ask them, this time, to look at what is said and for consistency and inconsistency in the texts. Are all historians internally consistent in what they say? Are the historians consistent with each other in what they claim? If there are inconsistencies (internal or external): (a) are they serious (in other words, must they indicate that at least one historian is simply ‘wrong’) or is it just a matter of differences (say) in types of history written by different historians?; and (b) how can the inconsistencies be explained (do they reflect the ways in which the ‘interpretive cycle’ has moved on, for example)? Methodology Where historians differ in their methods and research strategy, interesting questions arise. One research strategy, may, for example, enable insights that really add to what we know – in which case, we could say that this appears to be very beneficial in moving debate on. On the other hand, one might argue, that a particular research strategy has flaws that make it an ineffective tool for understanding the issue that is being debated. A case in point is the heated debates that took place in the mid-twentieth century over the ‘Standard of Living’ of the British working classes during the Industrial Revolution. Some historians insisted that this was an economic question and pursued it by looking at prices and wages, however, others argued that this was a question about the ‘quality’ of life 50


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and that research strategies focused on interpreting textual materials (such as evidence given to Factory Commissioners) were more appropriate to the issue, since materials like these could give us insights into the experiences of people living through this period of dramatic change. We should aim to help students see that the value of a particular historical approach is a matter of degree rather than an absolute question (all methods have costs and benefits in terms of the understandings of the past that they make possible and preclude). We should also aim to help them see that the value of particular methods is a relative matter, in the sense that the value of particular methods is relative to the question and the issue being explored. Activity 24 51 Present students with a contrast developed in Teaching History articles by Gary Howells (2005) and Kate Hammond (2007) that relates to the merits and demerits of different research strategies used to understand slavery in the American South. Ask them to consider what is gained and what is lost, in terms of understandings of the historical phenomenon of plantation slavery, when it is investigated solely by collecting and exploring large scale economic data – by, for example, ‘comparison of the average daily food consumption of slaves and free people in 1860’ in the manner of a classic of cliometrics, Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross (Hammond, 2007, p.7). Ask them to consider what is gained and what is lost, in terms of understanding, by exploring the plantation slavery through microhistorical study of exceptional individual narratives, that provide depth insight into individual experiences of slavery, such as Frederick Douglas’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, written by himself (Hammond, 2007, p.6). On balance, which approach do they think has more advantages than disadvantages? Are there questions about slavery that cliometrics is better placed to answer than microhistory (and vice versa)? Originality, openness and generativity Openness and generativity relate to how a work of history sits in the wider history of research on its topic. A work can be called ‘generative’ if it helps to generate further work and open up new approaches – if, for example, it (a) shapes what later historians write and/or (b) if it results in a change in the direction of the research on the topic. The point of historical debate and discussion is to enable the growth of knowledge by testing ideas. Frequently debate can result in the entrenchment of positions rather than the opening-up of new questions and the development of new answers. Typically, when this happens, debate has become ‘dispute’ (repeated assertion and counter-assertion). Originality is closely related to generativity. An ‘original’ argument is a new argument that differs from what has gone before. In terms of the ‘interpretive cycle’, an original argument is one that can re-start the whole process by saying, in effect, that the lines of research that have been followed in the past need to be wound-up and new lines of approach need to be developed. There are many ways in which an historian can be original and generative – by developing new research strategies and approaches (as in the case of Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross discussed above); by generating new data sources 51


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(as in the case of Johnson and Reuband, discussed in Section 5.3.iv above); by discovering and using new sources that have hitherto been ignored (as in the case of Dalrymple, discussed in the same section); and so on. Activity 27 52 A ‘generative’ work is easy to identify after the fact – if a work is generative it will have shaped what came later and will be widely referenced by other people. There are two ways in which one can explore this. First, you could present students with two or three extracts from articles or book chapters on the same topic that follow each other in time and ask them to skim through the later items to see if they mention the earliest item. The quickest way to do this would be with e-copy of the texts and using the ‘find’ function in Word to look for the first text’s name or author’s name in the later texts – did the first author become a key reference point for later ones or was their work ignored or forgotten? Second, you could ask students to use ‘Google Scholar’ to see if a particular historical work has been cited in subsequent works (a search for ‘E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class’ in Google Scholar on the 20 August 2016 returned ‘11,667 results’, indicating that this is a work that many later historians have made reference to).

5.5.iv Understanding historical debates It is possible to examine originality, generativity, and related issues, in a static way – by looking at one individual work. It is best, however, to explore these issues ‘in motion’ through historical debate, not least because this reinforces the key learning point that history is an inter-personal practice. Most A level topics address issues that historians have debated with vigour – such as the ‘Fischer Thesis’ about the origins of the First World War, the ‘Intentionalist / Structuralist’ controversy in the history of Nazism or its equivalent in the historiography of Stalinist terror, and so on. These debates could be approached by looking at controversial historians – who are often controversial precisely because they challenged existing beliefs. E.P. Thompson is a case in point. His Making of the English Working Class (Thompson, 1981) was highly ‘generative’ precisely because it challenged many accepted assumptions – about what ‘class’ was and about how it should be understood and studied, about how standards of living of the working classes in the early nineteenth century should be measured, about the extent to which Britain was on the brink of revolution in this period, about the role of Methodism in the lives of the working class, and so on. Thompson’s work led to debates and to new research on all of these topics and influenced historical practice in different contexts (for example, in India). Reviews of the book were often highly critical, to the extent that Thompson included a lengthy ‘Postscript’ to the second edition responding to his critics. The second edition of the book is, therefore, a resource for exploring the manner in which Thompson responded to his critics and, hence, for exploring his objectivity as an historian. One might ask, of his ‘postscript’ (1968), whether it simply re-asserted his initial position (1963), without seriously engaging with the arguments of his critics or did he accept some criticisms but simply add new qualifications and ‘ad hoc’ arguments to shore up his original claims? Did he, alternatively, accept key criticisms and modify arguments in significant ways to take account of points that were raised and acknowledged? Questions like these help to highlight the function of historical debate – in helping 52


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to keep enquiry and knowledge construction moving forward rather than stalling or fixing positions where they started out from. Criticisms and responses to criticism can be explored in a number of ways – through exchanges in academic journals – such as the exchange between Robert Findlay (1988) and Natalie Zemon Davies (1988) over Finlay’s review of The Return of Martin Guerre (Davies, 1983) – or through ‘readers’ that collect together key articles on historical topics (such as Bartov (2000) does on the Holocaust and Ward (1998) does on Stalinism). Short and very readable reviews are often accessible in the press (for example, Gewen’s (2000) review of Johnson, 2000), however, these tend to be reviews only (rather than reviews and replies to reviews) and thus miss key aspects of historical debate (notably ‘replies’ to criticism). The Institute for Historical Research’s ‘Reviews in History’ website is a very valuable freely accessible resource (www.history.ac.uk/reviews). It contains numerous reviews by historians of historical writing and authors’ replies to their reviewers’ criticisms. For example, the site contains: • • • • •

•

Lawrence Freedman’s review of Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 and Hobsbawm’s response (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/28) Peter Gattrell’s review of Geoffrey Hosking’s Russia: People and Empire 15521917 (1997) and Hosking’s response (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/34) Jay Winter’s review of Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War (1998) and Ferguson’s response (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/72) Dianne Purkiss’ review of Robert Poole (ed.) The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories and Poole’s response (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/348) Peter Grant’s review of Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas’ edited volume The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences since 1914 (2014) and the authors’ response (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1916) David Andress’ review of Timothy Tackett’s The Coming of the Terror in the French Revolution (2015) and Tackett’s response (http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1783).

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Exemplification: The Lancashire witch trials of 1612 Like many other episodes and events in history, we have very limited source material for the witch trials that took place in Lancaster in 1612 and that resulted in ten executions in Lancaster and one in York (Poole, 2012). The principal source for the trials and the events surrounding them is The Wonderful Discovery of Witches in the County of Lancaster (1613) written by Thomas Potts, a clerk to the court in the trial. As Robert Poole remarks ‘everything we know about the affair starts and often finishes with Thomas Potts’ book’ (Poole, 2011, p.2). Diane Purkiss reviewed a collection of articles on the witch trials, The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Poole, ed., 2002), in Reviews in History in 2003 (Purkiss, 2003). Purkiss’ review raises a number of issues. I will focus on one – the question of evidence. Purkiss notes that ‘accounts must rest shakily on Potts’, regretting that we are not in a position to cross-reference Potts with other contemporary sources (since none exist). She goes on to ask: If the Potts pamphlet isn't evidence, then what exactly is the book about? If it is to be treated as evidence, then how can we decide which parts are reliable, and which not? These questions are often ducked rather than tackled head-on. (Purkiss, 2003) Poole’s response is as follows. He begins by acknowledging the fact that Potts is the key source for the trials but disputes Purkiss’ contention that this fact makes Potts a weak foundation for historical accounts. Poole notes that two chapters in the book explicitly address the nature of Potts’ account as a source and that these chapters consider: how his account was constructed and what this construction has to tell us…. They also show that, carefully read, Potts does contain a great deal of 'evidence', albeit defined more broadly than Purkiss seems to envisage it. (Poole, 2003) This exchange raises interesting questions. What is historical evidence? How do historians use evidence? What is to be done when we depend, as it were, on ‘Just One Witness’ (Ginzburg, 2012)? Purkiss’ comments appear to imply that historians use evidence as testimony – looking for ‘reliable’ witnesses on whose accounts their narratives can ‘rest’. Poole, on the other hand, takes the view that you can learn a lot from ‘unreliable’ witnesses and that historical sources become evidence when interrogated rather than simply when read (Potts’ efforts to ‘construct’ a particular kind of case, for example, can tell us a lot about what he was trying to do and about how his book was meant to work in its context). Poole notes elsewhere, for example, that Potts makes great efforts to make his book look definitive and official (Poole, 2011, p.2-3) and suggests that perhaps we can infer from this that ‘Potts’ patent concern with presentation hints at disquiet over the proceedings’ at the trial (Poole, 2011, p.4). Activity 28 53 Task students to explore an exchange on Reviews in History (such as the Purkiss / Poole exchange discussed in this guide). Ask students to identify the kinds of issue that the reviewer raises (if they do) – for example, do they raise questions of substance, questions of conceptualisation or (as in the aspects of the Purkiss / Poole exchange that this guide has focused on) questions of method?

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How does the author respond to the reviewer? Does their response reveal differences of view on the issues raised? Does the author modify their position, in response to the reviewer’s comments, clarify their position (in the case of misunderstanding) or raise further questions that reveal differences in approach on key questions relating to how we can ‘do’ history? Which of the two historians – the author or the reviewer – do students feel has made the most credible arguments in the exchange? Do the students consider the exchange to have been ‘generative’ or, on the other hand, merely a dispute in which positions have been entrenched rather than developed?

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6. Appendix 1: Activities to develop understandings of historical interpretations This Appendix collects together all the activities contained in the main text of this guide in one place, for ease of reference, and states all activities fully. It will be useful, to understand the individual activities to refer to the main text sections in which they appear as well as to the material in this Appendix. The activities are organised in the order in which they appear in the guide and they are organised under the same sections headings used in the guide, again, for ease of reference.

5.1 Interpretations, representations and constructions 5.1.i Designing tasks that focus attention on historians’ concepts and criteria Activity 1 54 Aim: To draw attention to the necessity of making decisions of a conceptual, methodological and practical nature when constructing accounts of the past. Tasks 1. Ask students to imagine that two research teams have set out to answer an identical question about a contemporary location but have come up with dramatically divergent answers. Ask them to explain why such divergent answers may have come about. For example: Two research teams have been instructed to count the exact number of people in Cathedral Square, Peterborough, at precisely 2.45pm on Saturday 16 July 2016. One team reports the number as 125.5 people and the other as 1,011. How on earth do we explain this dramatic discrepancy? 2. Once students have made some suggestions, debate these and introduce students to criterial and conceptual issues (see Section 5.1.i, above) – e.g. what’s a person? What are the boundaries of the square? The key points to note are (a) that you cannot conduct even a simple task without agreed criteria for concepts and (b) that these can be debated. What do the students think, for example, the most sensible definition of ‘a person’ is for this task? 3. Transfer the task to an historical context (e.g. establishing the number of ‘Chartists’ who attended the Kennington Common meeting of 10th April 1848 using the daguerreotype – see the discussion in Section 5.1.i, above). Task students to devise (defensible) historical methodologies for solving the problem in groups. How can the relevant terms (e.g. ‘a Chartist’) be defined and put to work? Debate the strategies that the students come up with as a whole class. 4. Bring out the key learning points in discussion (you cannot do history without a methodology, this involves practical and conceptual decisions, different people may take different approaches to these decisions, the sources do not speak for themselves). Ask students to explain where they think decisions of these kinds might arise in a more complex historical problem (instead of counting people at a meeting, in a movement, and so on – which is a descriptive task – they could be set an explanatory task, such as ‘Why did the Kennington Common meeting fail?’).

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Based on Chapman, 2011(b). 57

5.1.ii Scaffolding reading to draw attention to historians’ decisions Activity 2 Aims Diagnostic: To clarify the assumptions students are making about interpretations. Developmental: To move away from initial and simplistic ideas (such as ‘bias’, ‘schools of history’ stereotypes, and so on) and to move them towards an appreciation of what historians do when constructing interpretations. Tasks 1. Ask students to write down some initial ideas about ‘why’ historians’ interpretations might differ (and to retain this list to revise and update later). 2. Present them with two contrasting interpretations of an event or issue (ideally, ones that differ dramatically) and to list what the differences are. 3. Ask them to write down a bullet-pointed explanation of ‘Why’ these differences may have arisen and to consider if their initial ideas allow them to explain the differences. 4. Give students the scaffold of questions (see Section 5.1.ii) and ask them to re-read the texts and to modify their original bullet-pointed explanations as appropriate. 5. Ask students to redraft the lists they have produced at point 1 above and to produce a new collective list as a class of reasons why historical interpretations can differ and to discuss the questions ‘What new ideas have they developed?’ and ‘Which of the ideas they have explored seem to be the most powerful?’

5.2 Comprehending and analysing interpretations 5.2.i What historians are saying – comprehending histories Activity 3

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Aim To develop understanding of what particular historical works are saying and doing before they think critically about them. Tasks 1. Present students with cards containing evidence from an historical interpretation (an article, a chapter, etc.) focused around (say) evaluating the success of a reform or new law (for example, in the case of Eamon Duffy’s

The Voices of Morebath (2001) acceptance or resistance to the reformation).

2. Ask students to classify the information under headings, for example ‘evidence of acceptance’ and ‘of resistance’ of the reform. 3. Students then consider the implications of the evidence that they classified and draw their own conclusions about the issue, for example (in the case of Duffy’s book) to draw their own conclusions about the overall success or failure of Reformation policy.

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Based on Ward (2006). 58

4. Present students with extracts from your chosen historian’s argument in which they draw conclusions, for example the sections where Duffy draws conclusions about the success and failure of the Reformation. 5. Ask students to compare their conclusions with the historians and to evaluate both sets of conclusions.

Activity 4 56 Aim To develop understandings of

historical writing and historians’ arguments.

Tasks 1. Select a historian’s work for close reading, for example Claudia Koonz’s Mothers in the Fatherland (1987). Students should read short extracts and annotate them with queries and explanations. 2. Students then summarise the key claims that the historian makes in these extracts. 3. Students label key passages of the text with adjectives to help identify and characterise the historian’s wider ‘world view’. 4. Students then explore similarities and differences between the historian’s claims, for instance about women’s lives under Nazism, and the views of other authors by organising cards that summarise key claims (for example, ‘Women’s health and welfare improved’) on a Venn diagram where the component circles stand for the different historians’ arguments. Activity 5 57 Aim To develop a sense of differences in explanatory accounts over time. Tasks 1. Give students an enquiry question to frame their reading, focused on an explanatory ‘why?’ question, for example ‘Why was Pitt able to secure his ministry by the end of 1784?’

2. Ask students to read a number of accessible secondary accounts, starting

with relatively simple accounts and keeping to chronological order (the oldest histories should be the first ones examined).

3. Ask students to make notes using cards or post-its, recording one type of explanatory factor per card/post-it (e.g. royal power, Pitt, Whig failings and the people). 4. Ask students to physically move these cards around to construct a visual model of the relationships that they find in their reading.

5. As new historians are introduced, students could be encouraged to think

about similarities and differences in the factors mentioned and how the different historians link their factors together. How has the historiography changed in approach over time?

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Based on Laffin, 2009, pp.60-68.

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Based on Howells (2011).

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Activity 6 58 Aim To understand and compare ‘the different narrative structures historians use’. Task 1. Present students with a number of different accounts in turn that narrate a development (e.g. the rise of Thatcher). 2. For each account they read, ask them to story-board the written narrative into scenes (as if scripting a film). 3. Doing this should make differences in narration and framing of the event very clear (e.g., in the case of the rise of Thatcher, whereas one historian’s ‘first scene’ might involve Keith Joseph, another’s opening scene might feature Enoch Powell, and so on). 4. Encourage the students to consider what the various story-boards have in common and what this tells us about how historians have explained the issue in question (e.g. in the case of Thatcher, do most historians focus on Thatcher or on other people and factors and what does this tell us about how historians have approached the issues?). 5. This strategy aims to scaffold reading, to help make historiographical differences clearly visible and also to highlighted some common threads in the historiography (e.g. Thatcher-centrism or the opposite).

5.2.ii What historians are arguing Activity 7 Aim To develop students’ ability to understand (a) what arguments are and (b) to recognise arguments. Task 1. Explain what argument is and what its component parts are (i.e. a conclusion and at least one supporting reason). 2. Present students with the table below of arguments, disputes, narratives and nonsense. Ask them to identify which text is an argument?

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Based on Howells (2011).

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Text 1: dispute; assertion and counter-assertion are exchanged without any supporting reasons Text 2: narrative; linked by sequence not inference Text 3: argument; a conclusion is offered – ‘apples are hideous things that should be feared and avoided’ – and a reason, the narrative, is offered in support of it Text 4: nonsense; statements are present but without sequential or logical connections. Activity 8 Aim To apply understandings of what an argument is by analysing simple and complex arguments in historians’ works. Tasks 1. Present students with a historian setting out their position on an historical issue (as Gellately does on the Gestapo in the BBC documentary discussed in the main text of this guide). This could be in writing, in comments in a documentary, in an historical magazine, and so on. 2. Give students cards or post-its on which they note down the elements of the case that the historian makes. When they have them all noted down they should model the logic of what is being said by physically moving the cards around. Which card merits the label ‘conclusion’ and which are the ‘reasons’? 3. Students will also need connectors (+ symbols) and a symbol to show that an inference (conclusion) is being drawn (the ‘therefore’ symbol). 4. It is possible that they will need more cards if the argument is a complex one – there could be a number of arguments leading to interim conclusions that then lead up to an overall conclusion.

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5. Start with simple arguments and build up to complex ones until your students have become confident about identifying what historians are arguing (a precondition for evaluating their arguments). 6. It is often the case that the sequential order of what historians say will differ from the logical order of their arguments (conclusions may come first, last or in the middle of narrative, regardless of logical order). This exercise aims to help students read / listen carefully and help them become confident in reorganising / transforming what they read to make logical form ‘visible’.

5.3 Explaining why historians arrive at differing interpretations 5.3.i What historians are doing – tasks and questions Activity 9 Aim To develop awareness of what historians are aiming to do when they write. Task Give students the title of a work of history (an article or a whole book). Ask them to see if they can work out from the title alone what ‘task’ the author may be trying to undertake and what questions they think the historian might be trying to answer. Once they have made some suggestions and discussed them, present them with a short extract – an opening paragraph, for example. Ask them to consider if this supports the conclusions that they drew from the title. Activity 10 Aim To develop awareness of what historians are aiming to do when they write. Task 62

Repeat the ‘title’ and ‘preface’ task (Task 9) but with a number of titles (of articles, books, documentaries, and so on). Ask students to see what they can work out from the titles alone about differences in the ‘tasks’ or ‘questions’ that the historians are focusing on. Again, once they have made some suggestions and discussed them, present them with short extracts – an opening paragraph, an abstract, the publishers’ ‘blurb’ – related to each titles. Ask them to consider if these support the 59 conclusions that they drew from the titles.

5.3.ii The ‘cycle of interpretation’ and where historical works sit within it Activity 11 Aim To develop awareness of the ways in which works of history relate to each other and sit in the ‘cycle of interpretation’. Task Understanding what an individual historical work is doing is not simply a matter of understanding the questions that its author is asking or the tasks that they are undertaking: it is a question, also, of locating that work in a wider interpretive process and understanding what it might be doing in relation to the wider field of knowledge production from which it emerges. Explain the ‘cycle of interpretation’ to students and ask them to locate a number of book or article titles in the cycle. What stage would they place Braddick’s work at, for example, and where might they place Weil’s or Clark’s? Activity 12 Aim To develop awareness of where historical texts sit in the ‘cycle of interpretation’. Task Explain the function of references / footnotes in history to your students. Then share one page each with them from two or three books or articles of different types. Ask the students to work out where the works that the pages are extracted from might fit in the cycle of interpretation, using the citations and references on those pages alone.

59 It is likely to be helpful, when selecting works for students to compare and explore, to ensure that the works selected approach the topic students are studying through contrasting questions and by writing histories of different kinds.

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Activity 13 Aim To develop awareness of where historical texts sit in the ‘cycle of interpretation’. Task Bring a collection of articles, chapters and books of different types into class and physically explore their textual features with students. Explore the conclusions that we can draw from these features about the nature of the scholarship that a work embodies. You can find a wide range of types of history article in magazine stands in supermarkets ranging from the more (e.g. History Today) to the less scholarly. An academic journal article could be used also (many are open access). 60 Books could range from monographs to popular history. Reassure students that they are not expected to analyse whole books for their coursework – the point of this exercise is (a) to help them understand that there are different types of historical writing (e.g. monographs, historiographic syntheses, ‘coffee table’ history books, and so on) and (b) to help them distinguish between them.

5.3.iii Types of history and historians’ purposes Activity 14 Aim To develop awareness of types of history and of relationships between historians’ aims and the contents of their works. Task The type of history that an historian is attempting to produce will have profound consequences for what they include (and exclude) and for how they organise their narrative (as the example of Harrison or Figes shows). Dramatise types of history for students (e.g. by showing them contrasting types of documentary – Hughes and Schama, for example) or through museum websites (How do the websites of The People’s History Museum in Manchester 61 and of Leeds Royal Armouries 62 differ and what does this tell us about the ‘types of history’ that the two museums present?). Ask the students to consider how one historical work (say, Schama’s A History of Britain documentary or The Peoples’ History Museum website) would differ if it had a different aim? Ask them to suggest what changes would need to follow if one or other of these ‘histories’ morphed into history of a different type (e.g. what if Schama was an economic historian – how might the content of his programmes have differed)? Finally, ask students to consider the strengths and limitations of ‘types’ of history. Writing history of a particular ‘type’ narrows vision (you only look for things that ‘fit the mould’). Are there advantages to having a narrow focus, however? What can you do with a microscope that you cannot do with a video camera, and vice versa? 60

For example, ‘open access’ articles in The Historical Journal can be accessed by clicking on the ‘open access’ tab at this link: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=HIS. 61

http://www.phm.org.uk/

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https://www.royalarmouries.org/leeds 64

5.3.iv Historians’ methods and research strategies Activity 15 Aim To develop understandings of historians’ research strategies and of their comparative strengths and weaknesses. Task Present students with summaries and short extracts from two historical works that deal with the same issue but that approach it using contrasting methods of research (such as those used, in the case of terror in Nazi Germany by Gellately and by Johnson and Reuband – see Section 5.3.iv in the main text of this guide). Ask them to consider the strengths and limitations of both of the contrasting approaches. They could consider, for example, the question ‘What does one approach allow you to explore that the other approach does not?’ Ask them to identify one important strength and one important weakness for each approach. Which one, overall, do they think is likely to add the most to our knowledge of the issue? Activity 16 Aim To develop understandings of historians’ research strategies and of ways in which these can be revealed in historians’ writing. Task Present students with short passages from two texts that deal with the same or similar topics but that represent contrasting types of history and that are written in different ways (e.g. extracts from Dalrymple’s narrative history and from Mukherjee’s critical analysis of earlier historians’ narratives). Ask students to see what they can work out about differences in the historians’ methods or general approaches from how they write and to consider questions such as ‘What do these historians’ styles of writing reveal about their aims?’ or ‘Do they use sources in the same way or are they asking contrasting questions about their sources?’

5.3.v Assumptions and interpretive frameworks Activity 17 Aim To develop awareness of historians’ assumptions and theoretical frameworks – the prevalence of individual and collective agents. Task The subjects of historians’ verbs can give us an insight into how they are thinking about ‘agency’. Grammatically, verbs are ‘doing words’ and the subjects of verbs are the ones who ‘do things’ and have agency in prose. Select some pages or long paragraphs from works from different time periods that deal with the same issue – for example, books about the British Labour Movement – and ask students to highlight the subjects of verbs. Who is doing what to whom in the texts? 65

Does this analysis surface differences in agency? Are collective agents (e.g. social classes) or individual agents (e.g. Keir Hardie) in charge of the verbs. Explore whether this reveals something significant about the assumptions with which the authors approach their topics, bringing in additional information about the authors and / or the texts from which the passages are chosen. Activity 18 Aim To develop awareness of historians’ assumptions and theoretical frameworks – chance and determinism. Task Select short passages from texts of different types or from different time periods that explain why the same historical event or development took place. Ask students to look at the language that the historians use when writing their explanations. Do they use language that implies that what happened had to happen – do they make it sound inevitable? On the other hand, is there evidence that they think that things could very well have turned out differently? Are conditional sentence structures of the ‘if…. then…’ or ‘if not…. then not…’ present and do they make use of modal verb phrases such as ‘might have…’ and ‘could have…’? Explore whether language use reveals something significant about the assumptions with which the authors approach their topics, bringing in additional information about the authors and / or the texts from which the passages are chosen. Activity 19 Aim To develop awareness of historians’ assumptions and theoretical frameworks – agents and narratives. Task Select passages from histories of different types – for example, social scientific history (such as Braudel or Harrison), on the one hand, and 1990s narrativist history (such as Figes or Schama), on the other. The passages should be describing something taking place over time (an event, a change, a development, and so on). Ask students to explore the senses in which the texts are ‘narrative’. 63 Are there ‘characters’ and ‘actions’? If yes, are they human scale (individual people) in all passages? What time scales are used in the passages (are some passages narrating events on human hour-and-day scales and others looking at things on a larger time scale)?

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Chapter 4 of Megill (2007) is a really useful resource for teachers on this issue. 66

5.5 Evaluating interpretations 5.5.i Purpose Activity 20 Aim To develop understanding of how to evaluate historical writing in terms of purpose, focus and relevance. Task First, reassure students that you are not expecting them to evaluate entire books in their coursework and explain that the purpose of this exercise is to allow them to understand how to go about making judgements about historical works. Second, identify your topic (e.g. the causes of the French Revolution). Task students to make a list of four or five books that they think are relevant to the topic using Amazon (or Google Books or another electronic database) based on the titles of the books, the marketing summaries provided (on Amazon) or samples of their tables of contents (on Amazon or via Google Books). Task them to come up with one group list of four or five books based on their criteria. Finally, change the enquiry (so that it becomes the September Massacres or some other aspect of the revolution) and ask them to repeat the exercise. Has their selection remained the same? If yes, why? If no, why?

5.5.ii Argument Evaluating argument: The ‘alternative conclusions’ test Activity 21 Aim To develop understanding of how to evaluate historians’ arguments by applying the ‘alternative conclusions’ test. Task Select a chapter or chapter section from a work of history or a history article. Make sure that students are clear about the question or problem that is being addressed – e.g. ‘Was A.J.P. Taylor right in his interpretation of the Hossbach memorandum?’ (they need to know the problem to recognise the solution that the historian is arguing for). Task students to identify the conclusion that the historian wants you to accept on the issue and the reasons that the historian offers in support of their conclusion (see the activities in Section 5.2.ii on reasons and conclusions). Task students to try to think as creatively as possible and to identify alternative conclusions. In other words, ask them to see if they can think of new inferences / concluding statements based on the reasons given. If they can think of alternative conclusions, the next task is to evaluate them. How plausible are they? Plausibility can be understood in various ways – e.g. which seem realistic possibilities, given what we know about the period? Rank their alternative conclusions on a 0-5 plausibility scale and then do the same for the historian’s conclusion. Ask students to compare the scores – how do their conclusions and the historian’s conclusion line up? If the historian’s conclusion scores highly and the 67

others do not, then the text they are analysing has passed the ‘alternative conclusions test’. Evaluating argument: The ‘assumptions’ test Activity 22 Aim To develop understanding of how to evaluate historians’ arguments by applying the ‘assumptions’ test. Task Build on the previous activity (in which students modelled how an historian’s argument worked). This time, ask the students to look for assumptions that are present in the argument (these can be of a number of types – assumptions about how key ideas should be understood, for example, or assumptions about how the world works – see the discussion of Gellately’s assumptions for a worked example). Next, ask students to evaluate these assumptions. How plausible do they think they are? What happens to the argument if they change some assumptions? Does the argument still work? If the assumptions are credible and alternative credible assumptions do not significantly change the conclusions that can be drawn, then the argument is a strong one.

5.5.iii Evaluation criteria Sources and archives: Comprehensiveness Activity 23 Aim To develop understanding of how to evaluate the comprehensiveness of historians’ evidential arguments. Task Present students with two or three short extracts from historical book chapters or articles on the same issue spread over a period of time. Ask students to try to work out what sources the historians have drawn upon to write their passages by looking very closely at what they say (e.g. quotes in their texts) and, of course, by looking at the references that the historians give to support their arguments (footnotes). Are the historians referring to source materials or to other historians’ arguments? If they are referring to source materials, are they all referring to the same ones or does one historian make reference to sources that the others do not make use of? What kinds of source materials do they make use of (for example, one historian might draw heavily – like Gellately does in his work on Würzburg – on a particular local archive). Ask students to model this over time (e.g. literally by drawing a graph). Has the number and range of sources drawn upon by the historians changed over time? Finally, ask students to rank the historians in terms of comprehensiveness. Who is most comprehensive and who is least comprehensive?

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Sources and archives: Accuracy Activity 24 Aim To develop understanding of how to evaluate the accuracy of historians’ evidential arguments. Task Use the same extracts as in the previous exercise but ask students to assess them for accuracy this time. As with the Dalrymple example of accuracy assessment (see Applying accuracy criteria in Section 5.5.iii), students could check to see if key sources are fully referenced, evaluate how far sources quoted in extracts do in fact support all the claims that they are used to help make and, finally, cross-reference between their extracts to see where the same materials are used (if they are) and then to check to see if they appear to be consistent in all texts where they are used. If the texts score well on all three criteria, then we can be confident that they are accurate (or, rather, we can be as confident as it is possible to be without actually looking up the source materials that are cited). Consistency Activity 25 Aim To develop understanding of how to evaluate historians’ arguments for consistency. Task Ask students to look again at the texts that they have examined in the earlier activities that looked at comprehensiveness and accuracy. Ask them, this time, to look at what is said and for consistency and inconsistency in the texts. Are all historians internally consistent in what they say? Are the historians consistent with each other in what they claim? If there are inconsistencies (internal or external): (a) are they serious (in other words, must they indicate that at least one historian is simply ‘wrong’) or is it just a matter of differences (say) in types of history written by different historians)? (b) how can the inconsistencies be explained (do they reflect the ways in which the ‘interpretive cycle’ has moved on, for example)? Methodology Activity 26 Aim To develop understanding of the advantages and limitations of different research strategies. Task Present students with a contrast developed in Teaching History articles by Gary Howells (2005) and Kate Hammond (2007) that relates to the merits and demerits of different research strategies used to understand slavery in the American South.

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Ask them to consider what is gained and what is lost, in terms of understandings of the historical phenomenon of plantation slavery, when it is investigated solely by collecting and exploring large scale economic data – by, for example, ‘comparison of the average daily food consumption of slaves and free people in 1860’ in the manner of a classic of cliometrics, Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross (Hammond, 2007, p.7). Ask them to consider what is gained and what is lost, in terms of understanding, by exploring the plantation slavery through microhistorical study of exceptional individual narratives, that provide depth insight into individual experiences of slavery, such as Frederick Douglas’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, written by himself (Hammond, 2007, p.6). On balance, which approach do they think has more advantages than disadvantages? Are there questions about slavery that cliometrics is better placed to answer than microhistory (and vice versa)? Originality, openness and generativity Activity 27 Aim To develop understanding of how we can measure whether or not historical work has been generative. Task A ‘generative’ work is easy to identify after the fact – if a work is generative it will have shaped what came later and will be widely referenced by other people. There are two ways in which one can explore this. First, you could present students with two or three extracts from articles or book chapters on the same topic that follow each other in time and ask them to skim through the later items to see if they mention the earliest item. The quickest way to do this would be with e-copy of the texts and using the ‘find’ function in Word to look for the first text’s name or author’s name in the later texts – did the first author become a key reference point for later ones or was their work ignored or forgotten? Second, you could ask students to use ‘Google Scholar’ to see if a particular historical work has been cited in subsequent works (a search for ‘E.P. Thompson The Making of the English Working Class’ in Google Scholar on the 20th August 2016 returned ‘11,667 results’ indicating that this is a work that many later historians have made reference to).

5.5.iv Understanding historical debates Activity 28 Aim To develop understanding of historical debate and how historians evaluate each other’s work and respond to criticism. Task Task students to explore an exchange on Reviews in History (such as the Purkiss / Poole exchange discussed in this guide). Ask students to identify the kinds of issue that the reviewer raises (if they do) – for example, do they raise questions of substance, questions of conceptualisation or (as in the aspects of the Purkiss / Poole exchange that this guide has focused on) questions of method? 70

How does the author respond to the reviewer? Does their response reveal differences of view on the issues raised? Does the author modify their position, in response to the reviewer’s comments, clarify their position (in the case of misunderstanding) or raise further questions that reveal differences in approach on key questions relating to how we can ‘do’ history? Which of the two historians – the author or the reviewer – do students feel has made the most credible arguments in the exchange? Do the students consider the exchange to have been ‘generative’ or, on the other hand, merely a dispute in which positions have been entrenched rather than developed?

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7. Appendix 2: The History Virtual Academy project Further insights into how 16-19 year-old students may think about conflicts of interpretation and about how we can help to move their thinking on is provided by the History Virtual Academy (HVA) project. The HVA was a teaching development project that aimed to develop sixth form students’ thinking through discussion and feedback. In this project, students were presented with contrasting historical accounts on a topic and asked to explain how it was possible for differing accounts to arise and to adjudicate between the conflicting accounts. Students drafted and redrafted answers to discussion questions about differences of interpretation, having received feedback from academics and also from each other. The project showed that reflection prompted by formative feedback could help students make progress in their understanding of historical interpretations. 64 It is worth noting that these students had not been explicitly taught how to consider questions of this nature before, as they were not expected to engage with them in any depth in their examinations. The data reflect a formative process of developing student thinking and indicate what can be achieved through teaching that explicitly focuses on developing understandings of interpretation. Analysis of the HVA data provides good evidence that the interventions had positive impacts on student thinking (Chapman, 2009(b) and 2012; Chapman, Elliott and Poole, 2012; Chapman and Goldsmith, 2015). The discussion below focuses on the 2008 HVA in which the students were asked to explore a controversy about the Ranters. 65 Between their initial and their final posts answering the discussion questions, students’ received feedback from academic historians, from a history educator (the author of this guide) and from each other. The feedback provided by historians often challenged the initial explanations that students made and asked questions in order to develop their thinking further. In addition to feedback that challenged stereotypical use of ‘schools of history’ labels (quoted at the start of Section 5.1.ii above), the feedback also challenged initial and simplistic explanations for account variation that some students had provided (such as ‘bias’) and reinforced more promising ideas (such as differing contextualisation of events in the accounts) that other groups had raised. The historians also asked questions to promote more nuanced engagement with the details of the controversy that the students were exploring. To exemplify: I think this response takes us a bit further than the first suggestion, that historians with preconceived ideas 'manipulate' information. If so, how and why would they get such ideas in the first place? The suggestion that different people fit the same material into different contexts is more promising. In fact, the first historian is an historian of popular movements, with longstanding radical sympathies, while the second is an historian of religion and ideas – I don't know of what sympathies. Does that context explain anything more? (Chapman, 2012, p.196)

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The HVA project went through three iterations – in 2008, 2009 (Chapman, 2009(b); Chapman, 2012) and 2011 (Chapman, Elliott and Poole, 2012; Chapman and Goldsmith, 2015). I concentrate here, for reasons of space, on the 2008 iteration of the HVA. The pedagogic principles underlying the HVA are explored in Chapman (2013). 65

The texts used are available at Chapman, 2009(b), pp.85-86.

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The history educator’s feedback took the form of the provision of lists of questions that the students might consider, reproduced in the figure in the main box of this guide (see the ‘Question prompts to scaffold students’ reading of different interpretations’ in Section 5.1.ii above). Overall the feedback aimed to develop simplistic ‘first draft’ ideas and to get students to look more closely at the historical texts they were reading. The history educator’s ‘question prompts’ aimed to focus students’ thinking on historical interpretation as an activity and to foreground processes that this interpretive activity necessarily involves, regardless of individual ‘biases’ – such as questioning, selection, contextualisation and conceptualisation. Overall, there was good evidence that aspects of the students’ thinking had developed between their initial and their final posts to the discussion board: explanations for variation in interpretation in terms of how historians constructed meaning and in terms of historians’ modes of enquiry increased and explanations in terms of historians’ sources and present context declined. Students tended also to model historians in more active terms at the end of the discussion than at the beginning, describing decisions that historians had made in greater detail (Chapman, 2012). The following pair of posts, by the same student group at the start and at the end of the exercise, exemplify changes of this type. [T]he historian of text 2 was writing the source in the late 1980s as compared to Historian 1 who wrote his extract in the mid-1970s. In this decade there may have been new evidence come to light regarding 'The Ranters' resulting in a shift in opinion between the two historians. Initial post extract [W]e haven't looked at whether the historians are actually answering the same questions. [U]pon reflection, I think the first text is more about who they were and what they believed in whereas the second text focuses more on the question 'were they?' instead of 'who they were'… [L]ooking back at the sources, I can see that they disagree as they have each interpreted the sources they have differently, leading them to two completely contrasting opinions. Again, I think this difference also depends on the hypothesis each of the historians is working on… Final post extract (Chapman, 2012, p.205) Whereas the first post attributes interpretive difference to factors beyond the historians control (‘new evidence’ coming ‘to light’), the second post attributes difference to the historians’ actions and decisions (‘focuses… have… interpreted… hypothesis… working on… answering different questions…’).

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8. Appendix 3: Suggestions for further reading Perhaps the single most useful and user-friendly resource for thinking about teaching historical interpretations is the ‘Polychronicon’ feature that appears in every issue of the Historical Association’s secondary journal for teachers, Teaching History. The feature is in two parts. The first is an update in 950-1200 words on changing interpretations in a particular field of research, usually written by an historian expert in the field. The second part consists of teaching suggestions for Key Stage 3 and Advanced Level written by the editors of Teaching History. The following exemplify the range of type of topic covered in the feature: Collins, M. (2009) Interpreting the Beatles. Teaching History, 135, pp.4243 Tuck, S. (2010) From a Great Man to a Great Man: writing the history of the civil rights movement. Teaching History, 138, pp.54-55 Cesarani, D. (2010) Adolf Eichmann: the making of a ‘genocidaire’. Teaching History, 141, pp.40-41 Brown, A. (2011) Interpreting the history of the modern prison. Teaching History, 145, pp.44-45 Watts, J. (2012) Uncivil Wars? Interpreting the Wars of the Roses. Teaching History, 148, pp.48-49 Vallance, T. (2013) The Unrevolutionary Revolution? Interpreting the Revolution of 1688. Teaching History, 151, pp.18-19 Tomkins, A. (2013) Changing interpretations of the workhouse? Teaching History, 152, pp.30-31 Teaching History contains some very useful articles on the teaching of historical interpretations, many of which are mentioned in the main body of this guide, and the journal is an essential point of reference for new teaching approaches to this and other historical concepts. An excellent book on teaching Advanced Level History that contains powerful strategies for teaching interpretations is: Laffin, D. (2009) Better Lessons in A Level History. London: Hodder Education. The book Debates in History Teaching contains two useful chapters relevant to the issues discussed in this guide: Chapman, A. (2011) Historical Interpretations. In I. Davies (ed.), Debates in History Teaching. London: Routledge. Foster, R. (2011) Using Academic History in the Classroom. In I. Davies (ed.), Debates in History Teaching. London: Routledge. Peter Lee’s seminal work on ‘accounts’ arising from Project CHATA is essential reading for thinking about children’s thinking on historical interpretations. Two easily accessible papers are particularly valuable, in my opinion: Lee, P.J. (1998) ‘A lot of guess work goes on’: children’s understanding of historical accounts. Teaching History, 92, pp.29-35.

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Lee, P.J. (2001) History in an Information Culture. International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 1(2). Retrieved from: http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/historyresource/journal2/journalstart.htm. Denis Shemilt and Peter Lee’s papers on accounts and on historical evidence draw on both CHATA and SCHP evaluation data (Shemilt, 1980) and are similarly essential reading on children’s thinking on these issues. Lee, P.J. and Shemilt, D. (2003) A scaffold, not a cage: progression and progression models in history. Teaching History, 113, 13-23. Lee, P.J. and Shemilt, D. (2004) ‘I just wish we could go back in the past and find out what really happened’: progression in understanding about historical accounts. Teaching History, 117, 25-31. There are many excellent academic books on historical interpretations. Two deserve particular note, in my opinion: Megill, A. (2007) Historical Knowledge / Historical Error: A contemporary guide to practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paul, H. (2015) Key Issues in Historical Theory. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. The reports arising from The History Virtual Academy project are useful reading on sixth form students’ thinking about historical interpretation and how we can move them on. They can be accessed as follows: Chapman, A. (2009) Supporting High Achievement and Transition to Higher Education through History Virtual Academies. Retrieved from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/heahistory/elibrary/internal/cs_ chapman_highachievement_20091001 Chapman, A., Elliott, G. and Poole, R. (2012) The History Virtual Academy Project: Facilitating inter and intra-sector dialogue and knowledge transfer through online collaboration. Warwick: History Subject Centre. Retrieved from: https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/heahistory/elibrary/internal/br _chapman_hva_20120117/

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9. References Abraham, D. (1986) The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis. Teaneck, N.J.: Holmes and Meier Publishers. Ankersmit, F.R. (1994) History and tropology: The rise and fall of metaphor. Berkeley: University of California Press. Appleby, J., Hunt, L. and Jacob, M. (1995) Telling the Truth About History. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Bartov, O. (ed.) (2000) The Holocaust: Origins, implementation, aftermath. London and New York: Routledge. Beiser, F.C. (2011) The German Historicist Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belchem, J. (1990) Industrialization and the Working Class: The English experience, 1750-1900. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Bellesiles, M. (2000) Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture. New York: Alfred A Knopf Publishers. Berger, S. and Lorenz, C. (eds.) (2010) Nationalizing the Past: Historians as nation builders in modern Europe. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Berger, S., Feldner, H. and Passmore, K. (eds.) (2010) Writing History: Theory and Practice. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Bevir, M. (1994) Objectivity in History. History and Theory, 33(3), pp.328-344. Black, J. (2014) Contesting History: Narratives of public history. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Booth, A. (2005) Worlds in collision: university tutor and student perceptions of the transition to university history. Teaching History, 121, pp.14-19. Braddick, M. (2008) God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A new history of the English civil wars. London: Penguin Books. Braudel, F. (1981) Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Volumes I-III. London: Collins. Braudel, F. (1996) The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Volumes I-II. Berkeley: University of California Press. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (1997) The Nazis: A Warning from History. London: BBC. Brown, A. (2011) Interpreting the history of the modern prison. Teaching History, 145, pp.44-45. Brown, R. (2010) Chartism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bullock, O., Nuttall, D. and White, A. (2015) Revolutions in Early Modern and Modern Europe. London: Pearson Education Limited. Burke, P. (ed.) (2001) New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Cambridge: Polity. Cannadine, D. (ed.) (2002) What is History Now? Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cesarani, D. (2010) Adolf Eichmann: the making of a ‘genocidaire’. Teaching History, 141, pp.40-41. Chapman, A. (2003) Conceptual awareness through categorizing: using ICT to get Year 13 reading. Teaching History, 111, pp.38-43.

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Chapman, A. (2009(a)) Making claims you can sustain: The importance of historical argument. Teaching History, 135, pp.58-59. Chapman, A. (2009(b)) Supporting High Achievement and Transition to Higher Education through History Virtual Academies. Retrieved from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/heahistory/elibrary/internal/cs_chapman _highachievement_20091001 Chapman, A. (2009(c)) Towards an interpretations heuristic: A case study exploration of 16-19-year-old students’ ideas about explaining variations in historical accounts. Unpublished EdD Thesis, Institute of Education, University of London. Chapman, A. (2011(a)) Historical Interpretations. In Davies, I. (ed.), Debates in History Teaching. London: Routledge. Chapman, A. (2011(b)) Twist and Shout? Developing sixth form students' thinking about historical interpretation. Teaching History, 142, pp.24-33. Chapman, A. (2012) ‘They Have Come to Differing Opinions Because of their Differing Interpretations’: Developing 16-19 year-old English students’ understandings of historical interpretation through on-line inter-institutional discussion’, International Journal of Historical Learning, Teaching and Research, 11(1), pp.188-214. Chapman, A. (2013) Using Discussion Forums to Support Historical Learning. In Haydn, T. (ed.) Using New Technologies to Improve Teaching and Learning in History. London: Routledge. Chapman, A. (2015) Thinking Historically Progression Map. Oxford: Pearson. Retrieved from: https://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/AssetsLibrary/SECTORS/Secondar y/SUBJECT/HistoryandSocialScience/PDFs/History2015/Thinking-HistoricallyProgression-Map-%281%29.pdf Chapman, A. and Goldsmith, E. (2015) 'Dialogue between the source and the historian's view occurs': Mapping change in student thinking about historical accounts in expert and peer online discussion. In Chapman, A. and Wilschut, A. (eds.), Joined Up History: New directions in history education research (pp. 1832010). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc. Chapman, A., Elliott, G. and Poole, R. (2012) The History Virtual Academy Project: Facilitating inter and intra-sector dialogue and knowledge transfer through online collaboration. Warwick: History Subject Centre. Retrieved from: https://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/heahistory/elibrary/internal/br_chapma n_hva_20120117/ Clark, J.C.D. (1986) Revolution and Rebellion: State and society in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coffin, C. (2006) Historical Discourse: The language of time, cause and evaluation. London: Continuum. Collins, M. (2009) Interpreting the Beatles. Teaching History, 135, pp.42-43. Collins, M. (2011) Historiography from below: how undergraduates remember learning history at school. Teaching History, 142, pp.34-39. Como, D.R. (2007) Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism. Past and Present, 196(1), pp.37-82.

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10. Author profile Dr Arthur Chapman is Senior Lecturer in History Education at the UCL Institute of Education, University College London where he works with trainee and experienced history teachers, leads the MA in Humanities Education and supervises doctoral students. Prior to becoming an academic, Arthur taught Advanced level History for 12 years and, where possible, aimed to follow specifications that enabled interpretation to be addressed systematically, such as the pre-Syllabus 2000 ‘London Syllabus E’. This guide is informed by that experience and also by the author’s involvement in systematic research into 16-19 year-old English history students’ understandings of interpretations (Chapman, 2001, 2009(c) and 2011) and by the author’s role in leading a teaching development project that focused on Advanced level students’ thinking about historical interpretation (Chapman, 2009(b), 2012 and 2013; Chapman and Facey, 2009; Chapman, Elliott and Poole, 2012; Chapman and Goldsmith, 2015). This guide cannot aspire to be definitive – the nature of our topic prevents that – but it does aim to stimulate questions and sketch some provisional answers.

11. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Jane Facey, Daniel Magnoff and Professor Peter Seixas for their comments on earlier drafts of this guide and, first and foremost, to thank Peter Lee for his advice and guidance about history and historical interpretations over the last fifteen years which has had a profound impact on my thinking. I would also like to thank the many teachers and students who have collaborated with me over the last 25 years in the fascinating task of making sense of history and historical interpretation.

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