Paul Harvey
I have just completed another Senior Thesis course with a group of 16 very game and able students who produced some wonderful works of history based on original research. Sometimes other department heads and people at other institutions have asked me, “why do you make all your majors do a SEnior Thesis? Shouldn’t that be for the Honors students”?
The answer, I think, is beautifully explained in this piece by renowned historians James Grossman and Anthony Grafton, entitled “Habits of Mind: Why College Students Who Do Serious Historical Research Become Independent, Analytical Thinkers.” Here is a brief excerpt, which I hope will entice you to read all of it. And this is a good place to send anyone to who questions the values of work that we do in the Humanities, and specifically in History:
Why do we teach these students—fresh, bright young undergraduates—to do research? Why take people who are forming themselves, who should be thinking about life, death, and the universe, and send them off to an archive full of dusty documents and ask them to tell us something new about the impact of the Civil War in a country town in Pennsylvania or Virginia, or the formation of Anglo-Norman kingship, or the situation of slaves in the Old South?
The answer is so simple that we sometimes forget to give it, but it matters. We teach students to do research because it’s one powerful way to teach them to understand and appreciate the past on its own terms, while at the same time finding meaning in the past that is rooted in the student’s own intellect and perspective. Classrooms and assigned readings are necessary to provide context: everyone needs to have an outline in mind, if only to have something to take apart; and everyone needs to know how to create those outlines and query them constructively. Reading monographs and articles is vital, too. To get past the big, generalized stories, you have to see how professional scholars have formed arguments, debated one another, and refined theories in light of the evidence.
But the most direct and powerful way to grasp the value of historical thinking is through engagement with the archive—or its equivalent in an era when oral history and documentary photography can create new sources, and digital databases can make them available to anyone with a computer. The nature of archives varies as widely as the world itself. They can be collections of documents or data sets, maps or charts, books with marginal notes scrawled in them that let you look over the shoulders of dead readers, or a diary that lets you look over the shoulder of a dead midwife. What matters is that the student develops a question and then identifies the particular archive, the set of sources, where it can be answered.
Why do this? Partly because it’s the only way for a student to get past being a passive consumer and critic and to become a creator, someone who reads other historians in the light of having tried to do what they do. Partly because it’s the way that historians help students master skills that are not specific to history. When students do research, they learn to think through problems, weigh evidence, construct arguments, and then criticize those arguments and strip them down and make them better—and finally to write them up in cogent, forceful prose, using the evidence deftly and economically to make their arguments and push them home.
The best defense for research, however, is that it’s in the archive where one forms a scholarly self—a self that, when all goes well, is intolerant of weak arguments and loose citation and all other forms of shoddy craftsmanship; a self that doesn’t accept a thesis without asking what assumptions and evidence it rests on; a self that doesn’t have a lot of patience with simpleminded formulas and knows an observation from an opinion and an opinion from an argument.
Liz Turner, an outstanding recent graduate of the UCCS History Department, is having her Senior Thesis published in IEEE A & E Systems Magazine. The thesis is entitled “Women Air Force Service Pilots: An Army Air Corps Experiment.” Turner’s work made the cover, and they are running it as a two-part series in the January and February issues. Congratulations to Ms. Turner, and to her Senior Thesis supervisor, Barbara Headle.
Secondly, our M.A. graduate Captain Adam Morgan was recently appointed as the official historian of the Colorado National Guard. Morgan has been involved in a number of projects with his new assignment, including dealing with two of the most difficult issues of Colorado history, the Sand Creek Massacre and the Ludlow Massacre (1864 and 1914).