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6 - Teaching and Writing History
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 176-210
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Teaching, writing, and reading are the universal undertakings of historians. Of the three, teaching and writing require a concentration of will, a summoning of imagination, and an extension of self unimaginable to those who have attempted neither. Moreover, to be pursued well, teaching and writing require preparation and, above all, practice. Yet despite the innate difficulties associated with teaching and writing and the centrality of both to the professional lives of historians, they are activities for which aspiring professional historians are still too little schooled. Teaching and writing are also activities to which historians-in-training are asked to give too little formal or concentrated thought, except perhaps when they struggle to prepare their first classes or push ahead with their dissertations (although there is evidence that this neglect is gradually being addressed in graduate programs). It may be, as some allege, that skilled teaching and writing, if not already possessed as a natural gift, cannot be taught, that one can become skilled in each solely through solitary practice. Even if so (and the validity of the claim is doubtful), these basic components of professional history work warrant more serious attention than they are typically given.
One is not a historian, academic or public, unless one teaches – in front of a class; through books, articles, museum exhibits, or films; or by the very example, visible to others, of pursuing historical knowledge. In fact, a nonteaching historian is a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, historians rarely think of their vocation as teaching or announce themselves by using the term that defines what all of them are – teachers. They are, they prefer instead to say, “professors,” “scholars,” “curators,” or “editors”; they are “members of the history faculty,” “National Parks historians,” or “producers of history films.” One cause of this terminological quickstep is historians’ frequent desire to elevate themselves above the “mere” status of schoolteacher – a distinction that reflects ill on those who dance it, especially since a fair number of schoolteachers are also scholars and writers of note and as knowledgeable about the past as their colleagues on college and university faculties.
1 - The Discipline and Professions of History
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 1-33
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History is a single discipline practiced in many professions – in many places, in many ways, and through many means. Historians share the same discipline but not the same profession. In fact, they never have, unless an unwarrantedly limited definition of the term “discipline” is used. Throughout history's American history, even some of the most illustrious and ostensibly “academic” of academic historians have ventured to practice history, however episodically, in other occupations. This fact, until recently omitted from the taught history of history, lies at the heart of almost everything that touches the organized practices of the discipline today – just as it characterized those same practices more than a century ago, before historical study had become a clearly demarcated subject of inquiry and instruction. A full history of the efflorescence of history into many professions, one that goes beyond the elementary distinction between academic and public history, is yet to be written or yet to be incorporated into the way we normally speak of history and prepare students for careers in it. What follows is a sketch of how that history might be told.
Before the emergence of recognizably modern professions in the nineteenth century, historical knowledge was deeply implicated in the learning and arguments of lawyers, doctors, and clerics whose learned callings and occupations would be the first to form themselves into professions. No less significantly, argumentation from history was the stock-in-trade of statesmen and politicians. But from the late nineteenth century on, when the norm that governed a career in service to history came increasingly to be the creation, transmission, and evaluation of historical learning by specially trained people working full time as historians on college and university faculties, professional history became roughly coterminous with academic history. Yet it is now becoming clear that, rather than being a terminal point in the history of the discipline of history, history's main residence in the academy, although a century long, ought to be considered provisional and, while still the center of gravity in a larger constellation of professional locations, only one among many places from which history has begun to reemerge into the larger society. The consequences of ignoring the implications of these historical facts – of thinking that the history of the discipline in the United States is solely a correlative of the history of research universities – haunt historians’ bearing, work, and thought and make difficult their adaptation to rapidly changing professional realities.
8 - Being Oneself as Historian
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 238-260
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Oh, Hell! To choose love by another's eyes.
A Midsummer Night's DreamOne purpose of this book has been to emphasize the great variety of pursuits now undertaken professionally in history's name, as well as the responsibilities that fall on the shoulders of those who take any of them up. I have also tried to make clear my conviction that, barring widespread changes in university-based graduate instruction, historians must now prepare themselves on their own more consciously and intently than they have in the past both for the many, broadened kinds of professional historical work on which they can embark and for the obligations that work entails. Because probably never before have so many contributions to historical understanding originated from so many quarters, in so many forms, and for so many uses, so probably never before have the burdens of determining the courses of their professions and careers in history fallen so heavily and directly on those who practice any of the historical arts. Surely never before have the choices, decisions, and responsibilities facing aspiring and experienced historians at all points in their working lives been so great.
Contents
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp vii-viii
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Index
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 261-267
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2 - The Structure of the Discipline of History
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 34-62
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Like much else in the world, the discipline of history has taken the sedimented form of the times in which its major institutions and practices came into being. How it functions now is the result not of decisions made yesterday but of long-ago events, decisions, and actions whose full significance could not be foreseen and whose layered consequences continue to be many and diverse. We live with those consequences in the structure and ways of a discipline grown increasingly complex. Yet while historians are likely to function best and to make choices consonant with their interests and skills when they understand the discipline's organization in relation to the sequence of its development and when they can locate themselves in its present configuration, there exists not even an introduction to the structure of history in the United States. I know of no work that explores how the discipline is shaped, why it came to have the organizational structure it does, what problems arise from its current form, and what might be done about them. As a result, historians typically enter on their careers without understanding how the discipline's institutional structure affects their ways and with a kind of easy acceptance of the discipline's given shape and practices. When they then gradually accumulate an understanding of their particular worlds of work and develop critical postures toward them, they often do so without seeing the discipline whole or engaging themselves with its totality. This chapter tries to present an outline of that whole discipline, especially of its institutional structure and operations. But because it is the first such attempt, and an attempt made in the absence of a substantial literature, it is a sketch only, intended more as an orientation to its subject rather than as a full exploration of it.
It would be easy enough to assume that the institutional origins of history in the United States were to be found in the colonial colleges. But that assumption would be wrong. Well into the nineteenth century the early colleges’ curricula, which were centered on philosophy, classical languages, and mathematics and almost entirely prescribed, made no room, except for some ancient history and exemplary lessons drawn from the past, for history as an independent subject.
7 - Professional Principles, Responsibilities, Rights
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 211-237
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Historians are typically not diffident in expressing their views about the conduct, beliefs, and ethics of others, whether of their fellow historians or of those in other disciplines and professions. Yet they have a tendency to run for the exits when the phrase “professional ethics” is uttered or when they are asked to evaluate, against established standards of rights and responsibilities, the professional behavior of other historians. Because it is difficult to rid discussions of historians’ professional behavior of moralism, self-righteousness, and “oughts” and because few like to stand in open judgment of their peers, uneasiness infuses all attempts to come to terms with ethical issues. And because all historians believe that they adhere to professional principles (as most do), they often resist suggestions that the topic could bear some clarification – except when egregious cases of unethical behavior break into the news. They also tend to want emphasis in any discussion of ethics to fall principally upon the protection of historians’ rights.
Accordingly, save for moments of crisis (like the era of McCarthyism) or in response to major instances of, say, plagiarism, historians rarely debate the problematic nature of professional rights and duties. Moreover, there exists little sustained professional literature on the subject, an absence hard to justify any longer, given that more than thirty years have elapsed since professional associations of historians began to develop codes of practices for their members and created some at least elementary disciplinary mechanisms and enforcement procedures to accompany those codes. The canons of professional conduct can now be examined in their own right. They rarely are. The reflections that follow are meant more to focus attention and elicit discussion about some subjects that rarely receive formal attention than to propose any particular lines of action. I suspect that even raising them will arouse dissent and the argument that, in the absence of any immediate crisis, little worry about professional principles is warranted. Even if so, no reason exists not to subject these matters to debate during the preparation and careers of all historians.
5 - History outside the Academy
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 121-175
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Those who enter upon graduate study in history are not preparing themselves simply to undertake research and produce scholarship that advances human knowledge. They are – or at least should be – also commencing their preparation to be historians in the full sense of that term, people whose aim it is to discover meaning in the past and to create meaning in the present for all who seek to find in historical knowledge an anchor in the world or a source of knowledge and pleasure. Such students ought to be seeking to gain not only the skills of research scholarship but also the ability to convey historical knowledge to others through whatever means are appropriate and the capacity to help their fellow citizens understand life by reference to its origins in times before their own. Yet most graduate history programs prepare their doctoral candidates only to become scholars – to undertake historical research and to produce written scholarship. Few graduate faculties in history encourage their students to consider as career choices all professional pursuits that are open to them, pursuits among which they should be prepared to make reasoned, rather than reflexive, choices. Consequently, graduate students in history are usually left to learn of many, perhaps of most, components of their discipline on their own, and they have to struggle especially hard to learn of those professions of history and occupations for historians that are not academic.
That should not surprise us. The weight of inertial forces, especially those that can reasonably be said to have brought about more than serviceable results over time – great scholarship, for instance – are always due more than grudging respect. Perhaps, too, given the ever-increasing variety of historical subjects and practices, we should realistically expect graduate schools to select and then emphasize in their programs of instruction only a fraction of what might be offered in a curriculum that already requires many years to complete – providing that these emphases exhibit evidence of conscious deliberation, not inadvertence or convention, in their selection. Nevertheless, to create research scholars is how most Ph.D.-granting history departments envisage their principal function. More, but still too few, prepare their students to teach, although teaching is, after all, what a majority of those entering academic employment will do and be paid to do on receipt of their degrees.
Acknowledgments
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp xix-xx
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4 - The Academic Trinity
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 96-120
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Although the proportion of academics among professional historians continues slowly to decline, a solid majority of all practicing historians remains employed as faculty members, and more than 60 percent of the known doctoral recipients in history continue to become academics, at least at the start of their professional careers. Equally significant, although an increasing number of historians pursue nonacademic professional work, academic standards continue to be those against which history work is measured in all the occupations in which history is practiced. Even were academics to become a minority among historians – a situation not so unthinkable as it was thirty or forty years ago – it is highly unlikely that standards born in the academy and long proved in their utility both there and elsewhere would become irrelevant to practicing historians, whatever the nature of their work. So thoroughly do academic norms permeate the entire discipline of history, so deeply do they influence the ways in which all efforts at historical understanding are regarded, that no historian can escape their influence. Even those who spend their entire professional lives outside the academy, including those who, as writers of history without doctorates, often scoff at academic conventions and writing, are forced by the strength of academic standards to pay rough obeisance to them. No history work is now conceivable without adherence to these standards.
In most respects, across the entire academic spectrum the strongest of these norms – the creation of knowledge, its diffusion by publication, and the critical evaluation of both by peers – is the research ideal. It is central to the academic enterprise, and it has come to characterize academic work for most people who know little else of a professor's world. Yet research, publication, and criticism hardly exhaust the range or categories of expectations that shape academic work or academic influences on historians’ professional lives. Other expectations and responsibilities, to which most historians are acculturated to some degree early in their careers by virtue of their graduate education in university history departments, equally affect how historians conceive of their work even if that work does not require the uniform application of these other norms.
Frontmatter
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Book:
- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp i-v
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Being a Historian
- An Introduction to the Professional World of History
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012
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Based on the author's more than 50 years of experience as a professional historian in academic and other capacities, Being a Historian is addressed to both aspiring and mature historians. It offers an overview of the state of the discipline of history today and the problems that confront it and its practitioners in many professions. James M. Banner, Jr argues that historians remain inadequately prepared for their rapidly changing professional world and that the discipline as a whole has yet to confront many of its deficiencies. He also argues that, no longer needing to conform automatically to the academic ideal, historians can now more safely and productively than ever before adapt to their own visions, temperaments and goals as they take up their responsibilities as scholars, teachers and public practitioners. Critical while also optimistic, this work suggests many topics for further scholarly and professional exploration, research and debate.
3 - A Multitude of Opportunities
- James M. Banner, Jr
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- Being a Historian
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- 05 June 2012
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- 30 April 2012, pp 63-95
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When people conceive of becoming historians in our era, it is difficult for them to imagine how many types of work a career in history can entail, in how many places it can be pursued, the forms that the results of historical thinking can take, and the number and variety of the audiences desirous of historical knowledge that exist. Moreover, historians in the seedtime of their careers often fail to learn – because they are rarely prepared to see – how the choices that they face are necessarily determined substantially by each other. The kind of history work one undertakes, say as college faculty member or museum curator, affects the freedom of choice of one's intellectual pursuits, just as the audiences to which one seeks to appeal, say film viewers or readers, affect the ways in which the fruits of one's knowledge are presented. While this may go without saying, the preparation of historians in fact rarely takes these interlocking considerations into account even though they all hold freighted consequences for the larger discipline as well as for individual historians.
Without doubt, the principal choice each historian must make is the kind of history work to pursue. Yet despite the significant broadening of professional historical pursuits in the past fifty years and the increased prospect of having one's professional self-respect remain intact outside the academy, the gravitational force of all history preparation continues to draw historians overwhelmingly to careers as academic faculty members. Precisely because of this force, the most searching examination of one's own hopes, talents, and personality ought to go into a choice of profession; becoming an academic should not occur by default. Nevertheless, that most aspiring historians envisage themselves as academics without much thought should not be surprising. It was around the academic ideal that professional history first took form in nineteenth-century Germany. Those who prepare other historians – the knights of the discipline – are themselves faculty members who serve at the lectern and seminar table as exemplars, albeit usually of one kind only, of what historians can do and become. Alternative models of historians – professional knights errant – are rarely seen in graduate school classrooms, and if, as some do, nonacademic historians teach graduate courses in universities, when they do instruct others they serve in the role of what students know and expect; that is, they serve as faculty members.