In my reading post yesterday, I chatted a bit about reading widely and giving new authors and genres a chance. That isn’t solely limited to general reading, though. It can be very applicable to historians. Whether or not you are an academic historian, a public historian, an amateur historian, or any combination of those, you probably gravitate to the same subject areas. For myself, I focus on ballet history, royal history, and fashion history. However, there are benefits to studying a new area of history, and pushing yourself as an historian. So why bother branching out?
I firmly believe that people are meant to learn and grow and evolve as we go through life. And that absolutely applies to us as historians. There are benefits both personally and professionally to pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, and I think we all need to push ourselves.
New Ideas can lead to New Methods
If you read this blog regularly, the royal, ballet and fashion history won’t be any shock to you. They intersect in interesting ways, and I’ve found that work in one area often drives my research in another. However, these weren’t my original areas of study- I actually started my historical “career” in my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in early Irish history. Quite frankly, it really couldn’t be more different to what I study now. However, now that I’ve had time to reflect on my work, I think that is actually beneficial.
Different historical fields of study often have very different approaches. When I studied early medieval Ireland and had barely any surviving sources to work from (and needed multiple dead languages), I worked in one way. However, now that I’m working in a modern context with a plethora of sources to draw on, I take a drastically different approach. My original methods are still useful, though. When you have limited sources, you have to be creative in what can be a source, and all of the different ways that you can use them.
If you read an historian’s entire body of work, they probably didn’t write the exact same thing over and over. Their methods and focus changed and adapted throughout their years of work. That is really hard to do if you are only ever working in the same one area. (There are a few historians who can keep it exciting and fresh working on the same thing, but they are quite rare, frankly.) Push yourself out of your historical comfort zone and try researching in a new area. Maybe you never publicly publish it anywhere or share it, but think of it as exercising your brain in a new way.
Adaptation and Evolution
There is something to be said for fluency and familiarity in a subject area. Sometimes it is nice to not have to look something up or translate it. We all like comfort, right? Well, comfort can lead to complacency, and I am absolutely including myself in that. Stagnation is a real issue, though, and that applies to historians. We’ve all seen those historians that always write books on WWII events or the American Civil War or whatever topic, and it feels like half of the book was taken from the last one. There’s no point in reading it again, and it just makes the historian look lazy. (I didn’t have any particular historian in mind, it isn’t a jab!) If we want to keep growing and evolving as historians, taking the opportunity to study a new are of history can make a massive difference.
Removing the Blinders
Something that I’ve noticed in my own areas of study, and many of the historians that I follow, is that our areas often keep us segregated, in every sense of the word. I think that often we use it as an excuse to not study and include various groups. If you only study Henry VII, that keeps you pretty insulated. Insert whichever person/subject/event, and you will find that most of us stick to what we know. And that’s not right.
I am now myself looking at the ways that BIPOC histories and historians should be present in my own work, as I think many of us are. Looking back on my areas of study, there absolutely were BIPOC people there, but they aren’t represented in the historiography. And if I’m using the historiography to guide my work, it only further reinforces that. We can look at any marginalised group from history and see that they are largely “missing” from the historical record and scholarship. But we can actually do something about that. Let’s remove our historical blinders, and challenge ourselves to broaden our scope and change lenses.
I’m not arguing that you should completely abandon whatever areas you study right now, but perhaps instead of reading your eighth book in two years on the same dynasty, you turn to a new topic for a book or two. No one will take away your historian badge if you branch out, I promise.
Are you going to study a new area of history? How can we challenge ourselves as historians?
Cheers,
The Historian
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These are really good points (also your points on enjoying reading). I found while quarantine I couldn’t read biographies. non-fiction but now that I’ve started back at work I can as I have other things to focus on again. As for diversifying what I’m interested in- even reading ], studying my area of interest from a different angle can help. For instance I found a book called “Black Tudors” by Miranda Kaufmann which is about (you probably guessed) Black people in the Tudor era. It gets so whitewashed that (I know I did) we assume it’s very white in England during that time- and it wasn’t. Now I’m trying to find books about Canadian history but from BIPOC POV because I know what I learned was very white/ European- centric. Suggestion welcome (although my list at the library is very long now!)