Synthesis in History: The Version in Prose (A Series: 3/5)

Background

In the previous entries in this set of blogs (click here for blog one) I postulated that the study of history is an excellent area for investigation by students of synthesis and synthesizing. More so than most other scholarly disciplines, history requires the collation of vast amounts of information, its organization into useful formats, and its presentation in coherent and illuminating form. Historians seem to be natural (and/or highly trained) synthesizers.

Accordingly, I’ve read a score of books about the study of history. In the process, I learned a great deal about the kinds of epistemological and methodological issues that engage historians. In the second blog in the series (click here), I described these issues briefly; I then illustrated how they are highly visible in current controversies about the early colonization of North America. At the same time, I conveyed a regretful conclusion: my investigations of historians and historiography have not—to this point—provided as much insights about the historical mode(s) of synthesis as I might have expected or hoped for.

In this and the following blog, I present what I have pieced together about the process of synthesizing in history.  I make no claim that these descriptions are original discoveries—but they were unfamiliar to me.

I’ve organized these contentions under two rubrics—Prosaic (this blog) and Poetic (the succeeding blog). In making this distinction, I do not intend to be invidious—both ‘Prose’ and ‘Prosaic’ can be important and illuminating.  At the same time, I would be disingenuous if I did not indicate that I am more excited by the Poetic findings—and I suspect that they will be more intriguing for readers as well.

Learning to be An Historian

Whatever lessons are picked up deliberately or ‘in passing’ in the early years of reading historical works, serious preparation for the professional historian typically begins in graduate school.  It’s there that historians learn about how to access and use archives, take and organize (and re-organize) notes, write them up informally, then organize them more formally, and then, finally, write papers, monographs, and, in many cases, books.

I located two good source books for students of history –one by Anthony Brundage, the other by Robert Shafer. Here’s the Table of Contents from Brundage—it clearly conveys its foci:

  • The Nature and Variety of Historical Sources 

  • Finding Your Sources; The Online Library Catalogue

  • Getting the Most out of History Books: Critical Reading and Assessment

  • Beyond Textual Sources: Historians Use of other media (e.g. movies, images)

  • History’s Public(s) and Public History (Journalism)

  • Exploring Changing Interpretations: The Historiography Essay

  • Engaging with Primary Source: The Research Paper

  • Conclusion: The Open-Ended Nature of History

Aspiring historians are not taken seriously unless they know how to locate, read, and make appropriate use of documents along the lines outlined by Brundage. And indeed, historians distinguish trained ‘serious’ historians (who typically publish with a university press) from popular historians (who typically issue trade books). Books by popular historians may be well written and engaging, but they are based primarily on secondary sources, with occasional dips into the scholarly literature and archives.

In his introduction to the study of history, Robert Shafer covers similar ground in a similar way. But having laid out the steps needed to collect and organize data, Shafer takes one further step—he singles out what he calls the “final synthesis.”  

On Shafer’s account, the final synthesis cannot simply occur once one has collected and organized the relevant data and sources. Rather, that culminating account entails the digestion and the evaluation of evidence, which includes mastering the work of other scholars. And so, to draw on an example mentioned in the previous blogs, an account of the original settling of the American colonies should take into account syntheses that have already been put forth.  As Shafer puts it, “the successful synthesis involves the capacity to judge the quality of other syntheses”—and, indeed, “synthesis is generalization whether one likes it or not” (159).  

According to Schafer, a synthesis has the following facets:

  1. Interpretation—your best explanation of causation and your value judgments

  2. Emphasis—the amount and intensity of your focus

  3. Arrangement—how you take into account -chronological, geographical  and topical factors: “in a large synthesis it is common to combine two or all three of these schemes” citing another authority—“arrangement is argument”

  4. Inference—or informed invention   needed to fill in any gaps in the record

Schaefer then lists 15 elements of synthesis, divided into five categories:

  • Category One: Items preliminary to synthesis—such as literal meanings, reporting details, addressing biases

  • Category Two: Initial synthesis—corroboration, probability, working hypotheses

  • Category Three: Secondary synthesis—causation, motivation, contingency

  • Category Four: Final synthesis—inference and speculative connectives

  • Category Five: Implementation of the synthesis at the highest level

I wish that I could say that these definitions and elements are clear to me—or would be clear to students—but I am skeptical.  They are simply too far away, too abstract, too schematic from the worktable of a student.

To be sure, if you seek to acquire the tools and the ‘mentality’ of an historian, such guidebooks to research and synthesis can be useful. Certainly, they can serve as a basis for fruitful discussion. As befits the genre, such books are written so that the individual student can pursue historical work even in the absence of direct guidance from others.

But of course, in a propitious educational environment, one learns history at the feet of mature historians (teachers of history and historiography) and in the company of peers (who may one day become colleagues, competitors, or both).  The mentor-student relation can be the place to give substance and texture to Schaefer’s categorical scheme.

My colleague Robert Darnton, a distinguished historian of 18th century France, asks his graduate students : "What is the problem?”  “ What are the relevant sources?” and ‘How will you use them?” Students are enjoined to delineate a problem that can be addressed and illuminated in a monograph—for the doctorate, a student should not ordinarily undertake a broad synthesis of an area or issue.  

As the student moves toward a dissertation, Darnton asks for a short summary of the thesis argument, as well as a Table of Contents.  His deceased colleague Bernard Bailyn (our principal guide in the next blog) asked his graduate students, “What is a historical problem?” He had enjoined them to study specimen historical texts and challenged the students to detect the flaws in these sacrificial texts and indicate how they would repair them.  

From such training, I will suggest, a more poetic account of synthesizing may emerge.


References

Brundage, A., 2017. Going to the Sources: A guide to historical research and writing, London: Blackwell.

Shafter, R. J., 1969. A Guide to Historical Method, Homewood, Illinois: The Dorsey Press.

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Tackling the Mystery of History: The Poetic Perspective (A Series: 4/5)

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Historians Reflect on History: Broad Strokes (A Series: 2/5)