How I Do History

One of my favourite history publications is Contingent Magazine, an online magazine written by historians for public audiences. Articles range from longer features about particular historical topics, to source-focused columns, to short essays about how historians do their work. I love that the magazine celebrates the process of learning about the past and invites others in to experience it. The writers typically have advanced degrees in history--usually PhDs--but do not have full-time, permanent academic jobs; the magazine was founded by and takes its name from the term 'contingent faculty', the people who make up an increasing number of historians working at universities today. 

My favourite part of the magazine is its column, How I Do History, which contains interviews with scholars outside the traditional academy about their jobs and how being a historian factors in. Seeing the range of jobs other historians do has been huge source of inspiration for me and I urge you to check out some of their columns, and share them with others. As it happens, I am currently working on a How I Do History column, and provided that it is accepted, will be coming to a screen near you with a bit more about how I do what I do, and why, and how being a librarian factors in.

"Library warning poster" by Phil Bradley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The hardest question for me to answer has been

What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work? 

So far my answer is:

Historians are storytellers, but people sometimes seem to think we are fact-checkers or trivia buffs. Knowing facts and dates is important of course, especially the latter, since it helps a historian understand a sequence of events in order. But timeline tells a pretty limited story and an isolated fact has little meaning without context. Particularly for the Middle Ages, where our supply of facts and dates is more limited than for historians who study other periods, I wish more people knew about the detective side of our work—with limited information, we put together a fragmentary puzzle to tell stories of how people lived and why they made the choices that they did. Sometimes we develop new tools for how we put those pieces together, and sometimes we get new pieces when librarians and scholars find unknown manuscripts, or archaeologists dig up something new, but we are always, always coming up against the limits of what we know and what we can know.

It's my favorite thing about studying the period.

I'm not entirely satisfied with the answer--for one thing, I think that most people actually work under the misconception that we have fewer medieval sources than is actually the case; but more importantly, popular narratives about the Middle Ages: chivalry was a guide to behaviour, knights in shining armor rode around saving fair maidens, the Church told everyone what to do, nobody bathed, Everyone Was White, say more about modern culture than they do about what the Middle Ages were really like.

Science fiction, one of my other favourite things, strikes me as similar to this sort of medievalism--reflecting similar prejudices, oppression, and blind spots--but also being notoriously inaccurate. It seems to be truism in scholarship about science fiction that its writers almost never succeed in accurately predicting the future but are usually quite good at reflecting their own contemporary anxieties. The Middle Ages, for some reason, seems to inspire a similar approach. 

To put what I said above differently, it's the combination of brain-bending weirdness and scope for the imagination which keeps me coming back.