Unwritten Histories

The Unwritten Rules of History

Tag: Academic Research

Guest Post: Checking Cows to Find the Crow: How Oral History Influenced my PhD Research

January 23, 2018 / / 0 Comments
An image of Crow's Nest Pass, during the spring or summer. There are rocky outcroppings in the foreground, a green valley in the middle, and the Rocky Mountains in the distance, with some cloud cover.

By dave_7 from Lethbridge, Canada (Crowsnest Pass) CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Note from Andrea: Today we have a very special guest post from Laura Larsen on the adventure that is oral history! As a fellow oral historian, this is right up my alley. Enjoy!

 

Laura Larsen

Laura Larsen is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan. Her dissertation explores rail rationalization and agricultural policy under the Pierre Trudeau government. It focuses on the tensions between government, farmers, grain companies, and railways created by attempts to modernize the grain handling and transportation system as well as the substantial changes to the underlying structure of prairie agriculture caused by these changes.

It would not be an exaggeration to say that oral history changed my life. If I had not conducted oral histories I probably would be doing a different dissertation project than I am.

On paper, doing oral history sounds relatively straight forward. Do some background research. Come up with a list of questions. Find a person. Ask them your questions. However, in reality, oral history is a messy and complicated process that, while at times extraordinarily difficult, is immensely rewarding on both a professional and personal level. In this blog post, I’m going to talk about my personal experiences doing oral history, how the interviews I conducted for my master’s thesis shaped my doctoral dissertation, and, hopefully, convince you to integrate some into your future research.

 

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Paleography à la Française

January 16, 2018 / / 8 Comments
excerpt of seventeenth century trial of Anne Lamarque, June 1682. Taken by author at the archives of BANQ Vieux-Montréal

Signatures from the first deposition in the Anne Lamarque case. Fonds Judiciaire BANQ Vieux-Montréal, June 1682. Photo taken by author.

Note From Andrea: Today we have another special post by Stephanie Pettigrew! Enjoy!

When I first started doing my research, the biggest problem I encountered was simply deciphering my texts. As many of you already know, I work on documents from sixteenth and seventeenth New France. In North America, there are far more resources available specifically for English etymology and paleography, the study of historic handwriting and handwritten texts. Christopher Moore contends in a recent blog post that paleography is dying a slow and painful death, and I don’t completely disagree with him; the growing dependence on crowd-sourcing transcription projects is a huge concern. But even when sources are transcribed for you, as a historian you are still expected to consult the original source. Several universities offer undergraduate courses in medieval English and middle English. One school that I attended even had a course on reading medieval Scottish handwriting (complete with its own textbook!). Leah Grandy also has already done some fantastic blog posts introducing the issue of paleography, which I highly recommend (“What Does That Say?!”: Getting Started with Paleography is particularly helpful!) While all of these are valuable resources, they aren’t really helpful when it comes to dealing with my documents. So in today’s blog post, I’m going to talk about some of the main challenges of working with early modern French written texts and provide you with some tips and tricks that will hopefully make this work a little bit easier!

 

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The Historical is Personal – Redux: Positionality

November 7, 2017 / / 0 Comments
Image of a maple tree canopy. Behind is a blue sky, the sun shining through the shadowed leaves.

The maple tree that used to stand outside my parents’ place. Photo by author.

I recently re-read Pamela Sugiman’s wonderful article, “A Million Hearts from Here,” in preparation for a discussion group on WW2. If you haven’t read this piece yet, I highly recommend it. I often find myself rereading texts, whether they are academic articles or novels, and each time I do, I always find something new to think about. This time, I was particularly struck by Sugiman’s personal connection to her research.  As the daughter and granddaughter of Japanese-Canadian internees, she is closely connected to her own research on this subject. And now, as a mother, she is an active “maker of memory” for her daughter.[1] As Sugiman was working on this project, her daughter also wrote a short story about a little girl who was interned. She selected the title, “A Million Hearts from Here,” explaining

“I called it “A Million Hearts from Here” because it is about a million people, well, a lot of people, that were interned. And they all had a heart somewhere. And “from here”? They were a long way away [from home]. And how would you feel if you were away, for about four years?”

Sugiman goes on to explain how her own research was in turn influenced by her grandmother, an internee, who, though she has passed, lives on in the memory of Sugiman’s daughter.

While Sugiman uses this story to set up her argument about “the ways in which our memories of historical injustices travel across generations and are strongly shaped by our most intimate relationships,”[2] to my mind it also speaks to an unspoken truth about much historical research: its personal connection to our own lives. So, in today’s blog post, I am going to share my own personal connection to my research, talk about subjectivity/objectivity and, and the importance of positionality.

 

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Guest Post: Demystifying the ‘Access to Information Request’ Process

May 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments
LAC Headquarters

I. Padraic Ryan, “The headquarters of Library and Archives Canada on Wellington Street in Ottawa, Canada.” CC BY-SA 3.0.

 

Welcome to back to Unwritten Histories! As promised, this week we have a special guest post by Dennis Molinaro. You may know him better as the Canadian historian who uncovered top secret documents showing that the federal government approved wiretapping on Canadian citizens during the Cold War. Being something of an expert on the subject, he has kindly agreed to provide a short guide to submitting ATI Requests, or “Access to Information” Requests, something all historians should know! Enjoy!

 

Dennis Molinaro

Dennis Molinaro holds a PhD from the University of Toronto and his research focuses on the historical use of emergency powers and their effect on society. He is currently completing a second book on Canada’s role in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and its covert Cold War wiretapping programs. He teaches at Trent University.

 

 

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Managing Historical Research: Secondary Sources

October 18, 2016 / / 5 Comments

Managing Historical Research: Secondary Sources

If there is one topic that goes nearly completely “unwritten” in the field of history, it is managing research. Whether you are writing your dissertation or writing your latest article, managing your primary and secondary sources is extremely important. This is especially the case for historians since the sheer number of sources that we use is enormous.

Back when I was writing my dissertation (in the dark ages of 2009), your options for management were pretty limited. I initially tried printing everything out, but that created mountains of paper that I seldom read once, if at all. I also tried keeping pdfs on my computer, but those were the days before cloud storage, and too many pdfs was a problem. To say nothing of the difficulty of searching for the information I wanted.

However, as I began reworking my dissertation into a book manuscript, I quickly realized that I needed to have a better system. So today, I’m going to talk about the workflow that I’ve developed using reference management software.

 

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What do Historians Do, Anyways?

May 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

What do historians do?

TL; DR version: look at old stuff, think about it, write about it, and teach it.

I mean besides kicking butt at Trivial Pursuit. 😉 This seems to be something of a mystery, and historians haven’t done a great job of clearing things up. The answer that most historians give is that historians try to understand the past. But this isn’t really a satisfying answer for most people, since it sounds more like a philosophy than anything else. So in today’s blog post, following up from last week, I’m going to tell you exactly what historians do inside their little hobbit holes.

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Unwritten Histories – The Blog

March 29, 2016 / / 0 Comments

photo-1429051781835-9f2c0a9df6e4Welcome! This blog will focus on the unwritten rules to history, as both a discipline, a field of study, and as a career. The information that appears in this blog is the result of thirteen years of doing history at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as six years working as a sessional instructor.

Here’s a look at some of the series I’ll be featuring:

  • Undergraduate Corner:
    • How to find good secondary and primary sources and what to do with them once you have them
    • How to construct an argument
    • Dos and Don’ts for paper writing
    • The art of documentation
  • Graduate School
    • How to prepare for comps
    • Navigating your relationship with your supervisor
    • Applying for grants
  • How To Do Academic Research 
    • Tips and Tricks for effectively searching archives
    • What to do with your research material once you’ve found it
    • Useful software for historians (Evernote, Devonthink, Scrivener, Pages)
  • So You Want to be a Sessional
    • How to build your own course outlines
    • Selecting appropriate reading material
    • Coming up with lesson plans
    • Online resources for activities
    • Developing your pedagogy
    • Building relationships with students
  • The Academic Life
    • Age and seniority
    • Conferences
    • Building on online presence and social media profile (especially on Twitter!)
    • Finding love
    • Survival tips when moving to a new city and/or university
    • Staying sane, happy, and healthy
  • Good Reads
    • Fiction, non-fiction, academic books, articles, and blogs I’m enjoying
  • Historical Tidbits
    • Interesting stories
    • Latest historical or archaeological discoveries

This is the information that I wish I had known going into university, when I applied for graduate school, during graduate school, and in my early academic career. The kind of information that, as many historians would say, is taken for granted, and consequently rarely discussed. Few academic historians will teach you this information, believing that acquiring this knowledge is part of the process of becoming an academic. But I think this kind of attitude perpetuates the “professorial mystique” while also crippling young historians. I can tell you that I’ve learned so much more outside of graduate school than I ever did while enduring it, and that my understanding of the past now is consequently much deeper and richer.

While I will be focusing on Canadian history, since that’s my background, the information on this site will be useful, no matter your specific field.

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