What Happened and Why? Helping Students Read and Write Like Historians'

Abstract

JVIOST HISTORIANS know how important questions are to their enterprise. The poet W.H. Auden understood that good scholarship can only come from good questions, saying "history is, strictly speaking, the study of questions." Others have concurred. The great British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote, "the function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions." But where do good questions come from? In history, as in most social sciences and humanities, this is a key concern, though one often neglected in the teaching of our disciplinary methodologies. How do historians—or, for that matter, all good scholars—use questions to frame their analyses? More practically, how can students' understanding of this process of "problematizing" help them read and write history more effectively? What follows are my thoughts on the subject, thoughts that have emerged from a decade of teaching undergraduates at a liberal arts college in New England. Additionally, years of working with high school educators who teach advanced placement United States history have convinced me that the principles of good scholarly investigation are also applicable to students at the high school level. The key to improving the asking of good questions at either level, it seems to me, is developing a better understanding of how professional historians do their work.