Undergraduate Research in History

A Guide for Students

Molly Todd

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000530223
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Undergraduate Research in History offers a blend of theory and practice for undergraduate researchers in history, relevant to new routines of the digital age. Explaining how research conducted by undergraduate students fits into the broader contexts of the discipline of history and the expanding realm of undergraduate research, this book presents the major phases of substantive research projects, and offers practical advice for work in specific historical areas as well as in interdisciplinary projects. The volume addresses key issues facing researchers, including finding relevant sources, funding research projects, and sharing results with diverse audiences. Supported by dozens of examples of real-world undergraduate research projects, this book is an indispensable reference for any student embarking on historical research and for professors guiding and collaborating with undergraduate researchers.

Part 1The Big Picture

Introduction to Part 1Behind the Smoke and Mirrors: Uncovering the Tricks of the Historian’s Craft

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003024774-2

Curiosity is the foundation of research. Think about a movie or book series that you are hooked on, an animal or event you love learning about, or a sport or hobby that fascinates you. You devote time to watching said sport, meeting with your equivalent of “Potterheads,” and following social media groups dedicated to your passion. Through different mediums, you gradually become an expert—and it does not feel like work. You think critically without thinking about it: you certainly don’t trust the information that that person shares about Star Wars (they have never even seen it!) and you fact check blog posts expounding theories about the moon landing that conflict with the knowledge you already have. You see where we are going: all of this is research. You already do research to learn about your passions, to cook dinner, or to drive somewhere new.

So why does the word research have the power to conjure up such fear when used in an academic context? One answer to that question is: smoke and mirrors. Although many of us follow our curiosities to conduct research on a daily basis, we may not be fully aware of the process we move through to discover information and draw our own conclusions based on that information. We do it seemingly without thinking. Unfortunately, some university instructors push us further down that path; they require historical research for papers and projects, but leave us on our own to figure out the logistics. We can end up stumbling through the assignment without truly recognizing the value and significance of the steps we take that ultimately allow us to successfully complete the task. In this way, for many students, academic research takes on a grey means-to-an-end hue rather than the vibrant color splash of a rainbow.

This is unfortunate. But take note: these instructors are not intentionally reneging on their guide duties. The fact is that they find it difficult to speak through the smoke and mirrors, to interpret the tricks of their trade for non-specialists. Chances are they did not receive explicit guidance from their own mentors. But now that they have been doing history for years, it comes as second nature to them.

And, so, we might expect the smoke to continue wafting well into the future. Except, luckily, there is a growing movement to “uncover” the tools of the historian’s craft. As renowned military historian John Lewis Gaddis noted in his book The Landscape of History, historians have come to “the belated discovery that our methods have been more sophisticated than our own awareness of them.”¹ Lendol Calder, an award-winning professor of history at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, drew more attention to this fact in a 2006 article in the Journal of American History—one of the top peer-reviewed journals in the discipline. (We’ll cover peer review later in Part 1.) In that article, Calder called on his colleagues to develop a “signature pedagogy” for history—one that intentionally exposes the basic moves of “doing history” that often are difficult for novices to see.² Calder is not alone; many other professionals are urging methodological transparency in the teaching and writing of history.

Partially in response to calls like this, the American Historical Association, the largest and oldest professional association for historians who work in or study the United States of America, launched the History Tuning Project in 2011. This is an ongoing collaboration between faculty members at more than 100 colleges and universities around the United States (in conversation with other stakeholders, including students and alumni) to identify and clearly describe “the skills, knowledge, and habits of mind that students develop in history courses and degree programs.” ³ Every few years, the History Tuning Project releases an updated report profiling the discipline, its core concepts, and its learning goals. More and more faculty members and history programs are integrating the History Tuning Project’s findings into their own courses, majors, and degrees, further clarifying the historical craft for students, faculty, and the broader society.

The Undergraduate Research Movement is also playing a role in this clarification process. In some ways, of course, research is nothing new to undergraduate education in history. Many schools have a long history of engaging undergraduate students in research. This is especially true in the sciences, but even in the discipline of history, generations of students have produced research papers for every kind of course in the catalog, from the History of Ancient Greece to the History of Sport (some of these might even survive in your institution’s archives and special collections). Most seniors wrap up their history major with a capstone or thesis experience, through which they design and carry out an independent research project (check your history department’s bookshelf for these). Many students have had the opportunity to assist their professors with research for books and articles (their names often appear in the acknowledgments).

But in the past few decades, undergraduate research has evolved beyond a kind of cottage industry and into a broad-based and institutionalized movement. In the United States, national organizations now exist, including the Council on Undergraduate Research and the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research, to support and promote creative inquiry. And a growing number of colleges and universities have created offices, administrative positions, funding pools, and symposia focused on undergraduate research. Similar developments are happening in other countries around the world, creating a global network dedicated to undergraduate research. (Chapter 24 explores the evolution of the movement in more detail.)

All of this has created many new opportunities for students to seek mentorship, develop their critical and creative thinking skills, further their career aspirations, and meaningfully contribute to academic conversations. And students are taking advantage of these opportunities. We see evidence of this in the number of people participating in the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, which takes place each spring at a different school in the United States. Whereas in 1987, the conference brought together 400 student presenters, by 2020, conference organizers reviewed more than 4,139 abstracts submitted from students in 48 US states and five countries around the world.⁴ We also see evidence of student interest in the widening array of undergraduate research journals that are designed, edited, and published by undergraduates with assistance from faculty advisors.

This boom in undergraduate research is producing a new generation of critical thinkers, innovators, and change-makers. And, if you’re reading this book, you are interested in being part of it all.

Part 1 of this book is designed to help you do that. More specifically, the chapters in Part 1 will help you to see the big picture of historical research through brief discussions of its key stages. We approach the discipline of history as a grand conversation, with historical research a means of participating in that dialogue. And just like communications specialists, lawyers, or actors, historians have many tools and tricks that they use in their everyday work. These are their methods and methods are at the heart of the chapters of Part 1.

Collectively, the chapters in Part 1 will help to disperse the smoke and shatter the mirrors that so often hide the process of historical research. We designed this part of the book to strike a balance between the theoretical and the practical, to help you do what you already know how to do in a different context and for slightly different reasons. You are curious; you know how to find reliable answers to questions about your favorite music groups or sports teams, or how to use public transportation, or when and where to look for the constellation Orion or the comet NEOWISE. Part 1 helps you transfer your curiosity and skills into the academic realm of history, empowering you to make meaningful and sound contributions to historical conversations.

Notes

1. John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 92.
2. Lendol Calder, “Uncoverage: Toward a Signature Pedagogy for the History Survey,” Journal of American History 92, no. 4 (March 2006), 1363. For a digital iteration, see Lendol Calder, “History Gateways Webinar: Uncoverage,” American Historical Association, streamed live on April 21, 2020, and now archived on YouTube at https://youtu.be/​UxHALBhTkos.
3. “AHA History Tuning Project: 2016 History Discipline Core,” Tuning the History Discipline, American Historical Association, accessed July 6, 2020. https://www.historians.org/​teaching-and-learning/​tuning-the-history-discipline/​2016-history-discipline-core. See also the “About Tuning” page for information about the Project’s history.
4. “Final Report, National Conference on Undergraduate Research 2020,” Montana State University, November 2020.

1Getting Started with Research in History

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003024774-3

Introduction

This chapter helps to demystify the research process by explaining how historical research fits into a much bigger picture. The chapter is divided into two sections. The first part presents two ways of seeing history: as a profession with certain norms and standards, and as a conversation or debate. Seeing history through these lenses helps us better understand what history is and, consequently, why historians do what they do. The second section of this chapter offers insights into how historians work. Among the big ideas you’ll find here are:

• All historians experience research-related anxieties. This is normal!
• Historians can use their own curiosities and questions to help their research projects mature. This is true even when a professor assigns a specific topic for a class.
• Research is an iterative process, a journey rather than a straight and easy jump from start to finish.

Ways of Seeing History

History as an Academic Discipline

A first step in demystifying the work of a historical researcher is to understand the big picture of history as a profession—in this case, an academic discipline. Of course, historians have existed in every place and time. We know this from different types of record-keeping through the ages. Pictographs, glyphs, quipus, oral traditions, and codices offer proof that everywhere, always, humans have felt the need to record information about their lives and times. In many societies, individuals served as caretakers of those records, ensuring that important information was passed from one generation to the next.

As a formal discipline in the modern, Western tradition, history can be traced back to the great thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome. Men like Herodotus and Thucydides set the groundwork for much of what historians do today in terms of collecting, organizing, and analyzing historical materials in ways that contribute to a deeper understanding of our world.

The discipline of history has evolved over time, as one generation of practitioners developed certain “accepted” practices and ways of thinking, and the next generations made adjustments to those norms and perhaps added new ones. As part of their quest for knowledge, historians all over the world have participated in organizations, societies, and “invisible colleges.” By the 19th century, these coalesced into many of the professional associations that continue to function today, including the Royal Historical Association in the United Kingdom and the American Historical Association in the United States.

Organizations like these helped to advance the scholarly study of the past and to further define the contours of the discipline. An important aspect of their work has been to develop and promote best practices in the field through the creation of professional standards and codes of ethics. Even more specialized historical associations appeared through the 20th century, helping to define specific areas of study and niche subfields like environmental history and oral history. These groups, too, prepared formal documents outlining their core principles and values, ethical responsibilities, standards of professional conduct, and more—all to guide the work of practitioners.

These guidelines—these professional standards—are a fundamental part of academic life. They are the very things that professors intend to share with their students. To be successful historians, then, we need to understand the codes that are specific to our chosen field and we need to apply those codes if we want our work to be taken seriously by others. For example, we need to know that there are set standards for what kinds of sources are valid, how they should be collected and organized, and how we should go about interpreting, analyzing, and citing them. We also need to understand how to pass on our own research findings to others, in order to engage in the larger process of knowledge-building.

Later chapters will walk you through some of these codes. For now, though, let’s take a look at another clue to understanding the work of the historian: conversation.

History as a Conversation

A second step in demystifying the research work of historians is to understand history as a process and, more specifically, a grand conversation based on ongoing cycles of questions, answers, and responses. Much of the conversation and debate happens in writing, through various forms of publication, although oral presentations are important as well. One historian makes a claim, supports it with evidence, and explains why it matters. Other historians read (or hear) the claim, evaluate the evidence provided, and decide to what extent they agree. In response, these other historians make their own claims, support them with evidence, and explain why their approaches are significant. Perhaps, in drawing from a different source base, they came up with a very different conclusion. Or maybe they drew from the same source base as the first scholar, but they examined the materials from a different perspective, with different research questions in mind, and, so, were able to add layers to the earlier study, making the big picture more complex and nuanced.

It is important to note that scholars in all disciplines—from history to art to psychology to biology—engage in these kinds of conversations. Even though each discipline has unique characteristics and lingos, all scholars participate in conversations with their peers in similar ways. In fact, the moves they make are so common that Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, two specialists in English and education, wrote a book about it: They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing. The preface to that book is titled, “Demystifying Academic Conversation,” and throughout the book, the authors show their readers tips and tricks for entering that conversation. The point here is this: like all academic disciplines, history is, at base, one huge and ongoing conversation. To paraphrase Graff and Birkenstein, the be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Walking in the World of Historical Research
• PART 1 The Big Picture
• PART 2 Specialized Fields & Methods of Historical Research
• PART 3 Appendix
• Index