History Skills

A Student's Handbook

Mary Abbott, Mary Abbott, Mary Abbott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134035595
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Degree-level history is characterized not only by knowledge and understanding of the human past, but by a battery of skills and qualities which are as directly applicable to employment as to professional postgraduate training or academic research. History Skills gives frank and practical help to students throughout their university course with advice on:

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• research methods

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• taking notes

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• participating in class

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• coursework

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• examinations

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• the dissertation.

Designed as a guide to success, the book helps to develop the critical skills that students need to get the most out of their course.

This second edition has been thoroughly updated to take into account digital resources and the benefits and risks associated with online research. New chapters on the first-year experience and employability help students to adjust to the way history is taught at university and explore the opportunities available to them after graduating.

Offering an unrivalled 'insider's view' of what it takes to succeed, History Skills provides the comprehensive toolkit for all history students.

1 The first-year experience

Seán Lang

Embarking on university study has always been exciting and disorientating in almost equal measure. The celebrated eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon went up to Oxford full of high hopes only to find that his tutors took no interest in him beyond the rather vague recommendation that ‘You must read.’ He left Oxford after 14 months, looking back on his time as ‘the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life’. University life has changed a lot since then, but it is still the case that many students risk Gibbonian levels of disappointment by arriving with only a vague notion of what to expect of university and what will be expected of them.

What is a university?

A university is not a school. Although, confusingly, the word ‘school’ is used in universities, as an alternative to ‘faculty’ or ‘department’, as in ‘School of Education’ or to denote trends in thinking, as in ‘the revisionist school’, or sometimes as a technical term for final examinations, university and school in the normal sense of the word are two very different institutions and experiences. Schools are heavily influenced by the examination boards that devise courses, set exam papers, draw up the mark schemes and mark the examination scripts. Universities have a significantly different history. In the Middle Ages they were self-sufficient communities of scholars. Their purpose was to study the world and, by so doing, to both extend the sum of human knowledge and learn more of the workings of God. The gowns and hoods worn at university graduation ceremonies are a reminder of universities’ medieval origins. So is the concept of academic freedom.

One of the biggest differences between school and university is that lecturers do not have to guess what will be on the exam papers, since they set and mark them – overseen by External Examiners who ensure that standards are maintained. Many first-year courses, which often introduce students to broad themes such as ‘western civilisation’, are designed and assessed centrally. Second- and, particularly, third-year topics usually relate to the areas of the lecturers’ own research. This close relationship between research and teaching can be very fruitful: there is an undeniable ‘buzz’ to be had from working close to the cutting edge of research. It also represents a fundamental difference between the experiences of school and university.

Teachers and students

The relationship between university lecturers and students is very different from that between teachers and pupils in school. Undergraduates are subject to university rules governing attendance, submitting work, conduct and so on, but they are also adults; indeed, some of them are mature students who are older than their lecturers. This does not just mean that students enjoy the liberty to drink or smoke; it is a sign of a fundamentally different learning relationship. Universities do not offer lessons. A school lesson, if it is well planned, is a varied, interactive learning session, with a balance between explanation from the teacher, questions from pupils, group work and other activities. But the teacher retains at all times a role of leadership and authority, however lightly it might be worn. A university lecture, by contrast, is a set-piece performance, where the lecturer speaks for about an hour. A gifted lecturer can so enthral an audience that the subject comes alive and the hour flies by; not all lecturers, however, are gifted, as generations of students will confirm. A seminar is a smaller discussion group, for which it is usually necessary to prepare by reading materials or by writing a paper. A tutorial is a meeting between a lecturer and one or two students, generally to offer individual support. You can expect to encounter any or all of these in your first year of university study.

Experience, supported by research, suggests that most A level students look to their teachers to give them ‘the facts’, wrapped up in as much clear explanation as possible. Teachers will certainly try to make sure that their lessons cover everything that might come up in the exam. Such is the pressure to get through the course that they may feel obliged to exclude anything else, however interesting. There is no obvious equivalent of this sort of lesson in university teaching and learning. A good lecture can certainly explain key concepts and give examples to illustrate them, but there is no sense in which even a whole course of lectures is expected or designed to ‘get you through the exam’. Students are expected to see lectures as a starting point for reading far more widely. No lecturer is impressed by an examination script that consists entirely of material given in lectures, especially if he or she originally gave them. In seminars and tutorials, the lecturers assume students already know the outline of facts and events; there is no question of stopping the discussion to teach them.

At the same time, it is expected that students will speak out and challenge both each other and the lecturer. This can be daunting with people with ‘Dr’ and ‘Professor’ in front of their names who may have written important books on the subject under discussion, but it is important not to be overawed by academic titles or distinction: university is about a learning partnership between lecturer and student; it is not about the student being taught by the lecturer.

From school history to university history

For a complex set of interconnected reasons the school history curriculum has become very narrow in recent years. Not only do pupils study fewer topics than in the past, but there has also been a marked tendency to repeat topics at different levels. The most notorious example is the study of Nazi Germany, which often comes up in English schools in each year from Year 9 to Year 13. Students coming to university straight from school or college should appreciate that they have so far only scratched the surface of what history has to offer, in terms of period, geographical area, and type of study. Some universities address this by obliging students to study unfamiliar periods in their first year; students who were grappling with Hitler’s foreign policy for A level in the summer might thus find themselves getting their heads round eighteenth-century Whigs and Tories or Anglo-Saxon saints and kings by Christmas. It is important to see this as an opportunity to widen historical horizons: new periods are no more intrinsically ‘difficult’ than familiar ones and opting to study the same topics at university as you studied at school does not make for a good historical education and is a poor preparation for the outside world. A good historian may know lots about a little, but the best historians know lots about lots.

Is university history harder than school history?

An Advanced or Higher level qualification in history is not generally required of applicants to university courses in the subject. Understandably, those coming to university history without having done the subject at school can feel at a disadvantage, especially if the first-year course overlaps with topics other students in the class covered recently. Any disadvantage seldom lasts long, however, and is certainly not reflected either in how such ‘non-A level’ students cope on university history courses or in their final results. Indeed, it could be argued that having studied a period at school can lead the unwary student into overconfidence.

There is, inevitably, much talk of a ‘leap’ or ‘step’ up from A level or history Highers to university history. It is undoubtedly true – and right – that university history is more demanding than school history. The gap is in fact quite manageable, but some important features of university history can throw the first-year student who is not expecting them. At first, many aspects of university history might seem familiar, even if the period you are studying is a new one: after all, power politics or social problems such as poverty or crime operated in much the same way at different periods of history. Lectures may be different in format from lessons, but there is the same talk of sources and evidence and the need for wider reading that you will be familiar with from school or college. However, underneath this superficial similarity lurks a major difference, though it may take a week or so to sink in: at university students are expected to take command of their own learning.

It is often only in the first year of university that many undergraduates come to realise the extent to which they were spoon-fed at school. Publishers produce books and resources tied ever more closely to the specific requirements of particular exam courses, badged with the exam board logo and often written by a senior examiner. Teachers often identify exactly which pages, even which paragraphs and sentences, students need to read. Although many A level students learn about different historians’ opinions or theories, very few actually read more than a few lines on a teacher’s handout of what these people actually wrote. Indeed, few A level history students use any books that were not specifically designed for A level study – the very different situation at university can therefore come as something of a culture shock. Students’ guides and textbooks are certainly available but, since each university designs its own curriculum, they cannot be as closely aligned to the specific requirements of a particular course as A level resources are. In any case, lecturers expect students to read much more widely and to do so without being prompted. I deal with how best to respond to this exhortation to read (one aspect of university life that has not changed since Gibbon’s time) later in this chapter.

A similar surprise can await students among the historical sources. You will certainly have done source papers at school but, unless you have undertaken an Individual Study (a piece of research undertaken by a student working alone), it is unlikely that you will actually have worked with any real historical sources, even in transcription. At university, historical sources come in the shape of whole documents or books that you will find yourself required to read. This can come as a bit of a shock after the neatly packaged source extracts used at Advanced and Higher level. Many sources are in foreign languages. Few universities have a formal requirement for history students to read foreign languages, but it is well worth your honing any language skills you may have. Facility with a language is highly appreciated in undergraduates, not least because it is so relatively rare. If, once you have graduated, you decide to do a research degree involving foreign countries or cultures, you will be expected to master the relevant language or languages (and for English history topics earlier than about 1700 this includes Latin).

Perhaps the most important attribute to develop, however, is a sense of genuine historical awareness and curiosity going well beyond the strict boundaries of your course. You should certainly make time to visit museums, galleries and historic sites near your campus. If there is an exhibition on a topic directly relevant to your course it is doubly important to go. After all, it may feature in the next assessment. Similarly, it is important to keep an eye and ear open for relevant history programmes on television and radio. It can be hard to keep up with historical literature on top of the reading required for your course, but there are plenty of useful shortcuts. History Today, BBC History Magazine, which appear monthly, and the weekend quality newspapers all carry book reviews that often take the form of a short essay on the book’s subject; The Times Higher Education Supplement and The Times Literary Supplement also carry reviews and historical articles and offer a painless way to keep up to date. Book reviews in academic journals are aimed at a university readership; the broadest selections are those in History and the Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature, both published by the Historical Association.

Learning and working

University learning has changed considerably in recent years, taking many of its cues from practice in schools. Once students were fed a fairly unvaried diet of essay tasks; now it is common for first-year undergraduates to be set smaller assignments such as reports on visits to historic sites or book reviews, often as a way of building up towards essay writing. Seminar contributions and PowerPoint presentations are similarly working their way into the pattern of assessment. Various aspects of these different forms of work are dealt with elsewhere in this book; here I want to stress two points: note-taking and referencing.

Note-taking

Advice on note-taking has become a virtual industry. Study skills tutors will offer you advice on mind maps, spider diagrams, flow charts and many other ways of note-taking. Sometimes students can feel a bit harried by this. Let me say at once that I for one have never been able to use or follow a spider diagram and it has not yet held me back either in my historical understanding or in my career. You, however, may find a spider diagram matches your way of thinking perfectly. Whichever method you adopt, it is important to be aware that note-taking serves two different purposes, and you need to deal with both of them.

The first purpose is to help fix the details in the mind of the note-taker. At this point someone usually cracks a joke about a lecture being the transfer of information from the lecturer’s notes to the student’s without passing through the mind of either, but this has never been entirely fair. The mere act of writing something down can help it to lodge in the brain. However, there is a huge difference between taking notes on a new topic and on a topic you already know. In the latter case you need only note down things that are new to you; indeed you may not need to write anything down at all.

The second purpose of note-taking is to provide a basis for writing assignments or revising for exams, possibly many months later. If you are planning to refer to your notes later, do not leave it until ‘later’ to get them into an easily usable form. Typing them up will make it easer for you to cross-reference or to retrieve details quickly. At the very least, files should be sorted and arranged logically by topic or theme, using whatever colour coding or file dividers will help you. There is nothing more frustrating than a desperate search through files of messy, ill-kept notes for a vital quotation or date. Doing all this requires a bit of self-discipline: this is another aspect of the difference between university and school.

Referencing

The requirement to produce full references marks university work off very visibly from school work. It is easy to think that the lecturer who marks you down because you put the title of a journal article in italics instead of ‘quotation marks’ really ought to get out more. However, the reason for this insistence on correct referencing is that the historian has not only to show that the material is not made up but also to allow anyone who might wish to, to check it. Research students often start their work by following up the references in standard books or articles. And you must expect your lecturers to do it with your work on occasion. Sometimes the original source can be surprisingly different from the version quoted in the book or article; the writer David Irving lost his libel action against Penguin Books for labelling him a Holocaust denier because Penguin’s main witness, Professor Richard Evans, had gathered a team of researchers together to check Irving’s footnotes. Proper referencing is undoubtedly a chore but it is the courtesy the historian pays his or her readers, sources and subject; it is important to learn it from the start.

That said, there is no general consensus about the correct form of referencing in history. Many universities insist on the Harvard system, in universal use in the social sciences though seldom seen in history books. The Harvard system, which lists sources in a simple alphabetical list at the end and refers to them within the text by name and date – for example, (Lang, 2008) – is easy for the writer to use but can be obtrusive for the reader. Footnoting is easier on the eye. If you are given the choice, choose the convention you feel most at ease with; otherwise, follow the system you are told to use – to the letter.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is not quite the same as simply copying. It means taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own. Universities take plagiarism very seriously; in extreme cases a student may even be expelled. However, you may not be entirely clear about what is so wrong with plagiarism. After all, we all have to get our information from somewhere. There is nothing wrong with quoting from someone else’s work, even occasionally at length, but the quotation(s) should not be so long as effectively to constitute the main body of your work: imagine, for example, an essay on Dickens that consisted almost entirely of a chapter copied out from Oliver Twist. And they must be acknowledged and references provided. Not to do so is at best lazy and at worst deliberately fraudulent; indeed, at its very worst, where you are seeking financial gain from your writing, it is a criminal offence. Cutting and pasting material from the internet is an extremely unwise thing to do, not least because it can be unmasked by a simple Google search. There is no need to feel intimidated by these strictures: as long as you acknowledge your sources you cannot be accused of plagiarism. I deal in a bit more detail with using the internet in the next section.

Reading

It’s not that long since an instruction to read had people reaching for books. Nowadays, students turn first to the internet. The advantages of having such a vast store of information sitting on your desktop are too obvious to require outlining here, but you may also find that some lecturers are hostile to excessive use of the internet. Some ban students from using popular sites such as Wikipedia and even the Google search engine. You may think that this is an extreme reaction. But many students use the internet badly, getting material from the first couple of sites that come up on a Google search and never cross-checking or even finding out where the information came from in the first place. If the internet is used in this unthinking, uncritical way, it can be almost as haphazard as asking for historical information from passersby in the street.

Before reading anything – book, journal or website – ask yourself what you are reading for. Frequently, you will be looking for factual information: What actually happened? Who were these people? What, in short, is the story? Encyclopaedia internet sites can often be very good for this sort of task, though you should always be aware of their limitations: even quite major themes can be omitted. But you should also look at printed encyclopaedias, which usually sit unopened on library shelves but often carry far more information than their web versions. University libraries will also have biographical reference works, especially the excellent Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which also exists online. Such reference materials do not usually need to be footnoted or referenced within your text, but they should be included in your bibliography; for websites, the home website address will usually be sufficient unless it is a particularly difficult page to find. The rule is: if you used it, include it.

Alongside fact-checking there are two other main types of reading to undertake: contemporary reading from the period you are exploring, and secondary works.

Contemporary works

Students do not do anything like as much of this type of reading as they could do, yet it is at once the most fruitful and the most enjoyable form of historical reading there is. An inspector’s report on a workhouse tells you far more about attitudes towards the nineteenth-century poor than any secondary work can. I recently got a much better idea of popular attitudes in Britain towards appeasement from reading the letters people sent to the candidates in the first by...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• 1 The first-year experience
• 2 Benchmarks
• 3 Sources and resources
• 4 Libraries – physical and virtual
• 5 Making notes
• 6 Classes – preparation and participation
• 7 Writing assignments
• 8 Examinations
• 9 The dissertation or major project
• 10 Employability
• 11 Historical terms