Buried Under a Mountain of Books

No, I haven't fallen off the face of the earth! But I have been buried under a mountain of books!

Upon my return from Prague I had to prepare a 20 minute paper on my thesis topic (Propaganda, Persuasion, and Public Opinion in the Scottish Reformation: Or how the Protestants convinced people to stop being Catholic in Sixteenth-Century Scotland) for the Reading Weekend at the end of February. Reading Weekend is an annual event when all the faculty and postgrads from the University's Reformation History department go off to a hotel the Highlands for a semi-informal conference. Its an opportunity for folks to get to know each other better and for people to share about their latest research, so everyone knows what

everyone else is working on. It is usually a lot of fun, and quite relaxed, but I was extremely nervous about the whole ordeal. The head of the Institute published a book on my topic about three years ago, though he focused on the European reformations as a whole and barely even mentioned Scotland (and my topic is exclusively Scottish). But he wrote the book. And he would be there. Plus I didn't want to look like a moron in front of all of my lecturers, professors, and classmates. But I needn't have worried myself sick, as God answered my frantic prayers and the presentation went smoothly! All of the feedback I received was positive, including a very nice complement from the head of the Institute. And he doesn't complement freely, so I have been told. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

In addition to the Reading Weekend Paper, I have been working on the 15,000 words (about 50 pages) due for my Progress Review on April 15th.  5,000 are to be methodological and historiographic. Blah. "Historiography" is a fancy word for the history of how History is written. So I basically have to explain what has been written by other scholars about my thesis topic and how I'm going to be different. Then I have to write about exactly how I'm going to go about accomplishing that: what kind of sources am I going to look at (sermons, ballads, hymns, plays, poems, letters, etc) and how I will interpret them, how the thesis will be organized, what  some of the potential chapters might be about, etc. Basically I have to justify my existence as a scholar in 15 pages. THEN I have to write a 10,000 word sample chapter, analyzing a set of sources and addressing questions that my thesis as a whole will address. Whew.

The frustrating bit is that due to the changeful nature of research, there is no guarantee that any of these 15,000 words will end up counting as part of my final 80,000! I could find something in my sources next year that disproves all of my work from this year. Or someone at another university could beat me to it, and publish a similar study before I do. And then I'd have to completely change my angle and approach, if not the entire topic! I had two friends who had to do this last semester. Andy opened a book and discovered that the author had already done what Andy had hoped to do. He beat him to it by 2 years. And my friend Katherine was reading a thesis finished last year at another university, and found that the writer had written on exactly what she was going to write on. So we'll just have to see what happens these next 2 1/2 years.  

Contrary to what many people might think, History is NOT unchanging or set in stone. Its not black and white, or even sephia-toned. Its technicolored, multi-faceted, constantly shifting, and often full of gaping holes. If 25 people witness an event, there are 25 different perspectives (think about the investigation following JFK's assassination). So when 25,000 people experience a battle or a plague, or a coronation, there are 25,000 different views of that event. And it is impossible to get all 25,000 stories. Even if you could get all of the witnesses accounts, any lawyer can tell you that you can't always believe the testimony of a witness!

All we as historians have to go on are the documents and scraps of paper left behind that survive the centuries. And even then, those scraps are subject to change. How events played out could be confirmed by the available sources and be accepted as "what really happened" for decades, and even centuries. And then, a letter or diary that disproves it all could be found in an old trunk in someone's attic in Ohio.

In addition to the sources, there is the changeful nature of the historical profession to consider. During different time periods, those writing about an event may only find a handful of the existing/surviving stories to be worth telling. For example, in the early part of the 20th century it was historically fashionable to only tell the story of the Battle of Gettysburg from the perspective of the elite: the officers. Then, around the 1940s and 50s, with such a large percentage of the population having been immediately affected by WWII it became fashionable to tell the story of Gettysburg from the perspectives of the soldiers in the trenches: the farmer/cobbler/factory worker-turned-soldier. Then in the 60s and 70s, as the present was caught up in the Civil Rights movement, it was time to tell the stories of the African Americans and other minorities who fought in that battle. And by the 1980s, as women were demanding equality in the workforce, we were hearing about the women who operated make-shift hospitals and cared for the wounded in the midsts of and on the fringes of the battle, or those who dressed as soldiers and fought themselves. 

The ways which each generation of historians experience their own present affects how they view and interpret the past. And over time, those gathered interpretations form a more complete picture of the past, albeit a mosaic with large sections of tiles still missing.  Now I just have to figure out where I fit in.  Preferably before April 15th.