what is a historical perspective essay

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What is Historical Perspective?

Coherence and Plausibility
Organization
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It is crucial that all your writing for this course (including quizzes and exams) be based on sound historical perspective. What do I mean by this?

To understand historical perspective, it is important to consider an obvious, but still often overlooked fact about the study of history that distinguishes it from other academic disciplines. Historians are most concerned with uncovering how things change over time. They choose a variety of subjects to explore: politics, diplomacy, economics, societal custom and practice, cultural norms and social customs. No matter what the precise topic, however, historians are chiefly engaged in an exercise of clarifying the particular historical context of the issue at hand. It is impossible, for instance, to explain the dynamics of monarchical power in the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century without first explaining the beliefs, rules and customs that governed that form of government. And it would not make sense to critique a seventeenth-century monarchy on the grounds that it did not afford its citizens democratic rights, since the very idea of democracy was not established until much later. Arguments of this type show a poor understanding of the dynamics of historical change and are easily labeled anachronistic.

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Understanding Historical Perspective

Historical perspective.

All historians bring to their works their own historical perspective. That perspective might be determined by his or her political bent or by the use of social theories in the analysis.

Every historian’s ideas are somewhere on the political spectrum. Historians may be described as conservative, liberal, or anywhere in between. Rarely do scholars acknowledge their political perspective in their works; however, that does not mean that a perspective does not exist. For instance, these historians differ significantly in their political views of Columbus and his world:

“The Spain that Christopher Columbus and his crews left behind just before dawn on August 3, 1492, as they sailed forth from Palos and out into the Atlantic, was for most of its people a land of violence, squalor, treachery, and intolerance. In this respect Spain was no different from the rest of Europe.” David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 57. “Columbus personified the modern spirit. A modest capitalist, he invested some of his own money in the venture. When his tiny vessels dipped below the horizon in 1492, they carried with them a transcendent faith in the individual–and a passion for wealth, power, and glory.” Thomas Greer, A Brief History of Western Man, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), 210.

Some historians’ works are informed by social theories. These theories most frequently include Marxism and feminism. The use of the specific vocabulary of a theory, such as “patriarchy” and “exploitation,” often indicate an author’s use of that social theory in his or her analysis.

For instance, feminist works often discuss patriarchy and the subordination of women:

“Historically, the generative capacity of women has been the material basis for their subordination and oppression. Men, ruling classes, and states have sought to manipulate this capacity to suit their economic and political needs at various periods. This study presents one example, that of a planter class attempting to control the reproductive capacity of slave women in order to further its economic interests.” Rhoda E. Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective,” Latin American Perspectives 44 (Winter 1985): 76-77. “The purpose of this article is to suggest that the burdens shouldered by slave women actually represented in extreme form the dual nature of all women’s labor within a patriarchal, capitalist society: the production of goods and services and the reproduction and care of members of a future work force.” Jacqueline Jones, “‘My Mother Was Much of a Woman’: Black Women, Work and the Family under Slavery,” Feminist Studies 8 (1982): 236.

Marxist works frequently describe relationships in terms of class structure and capital:

“In the Old South extensive and complicated commercial relations with the world market permitted the growth of a small commercial bourgeoisie. The resulting fortunes flowed into slaveholding, which offered prestige and was economically and politically secure in a planter-dominated society. ” Eugene Genovese, “The Slave South: An Interpretation,” Science and Society 25 (1961): 323. “Similarly in Cuba slave mothers returned to work about six weeks after childbirth, at which time the child was turned over to the plantation nursery . . . . This illustration lays bare the realities of marriage and the nuclear family. In this period in Caribbean history, this form of social organization did not meet the needs of capital.” Rhoda E. Reddock, “Women and Slavery in the Caribbean: A Feminist Perspective,” Latin American Perspectives 44 (Winter 1985): 68-69.

See here for more tips on analyzing historiographically.

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HISTORICAL THINKING STANDARD 3

The student engages in historical analysis and interpretation:

Therefore, the student is able to:

Compare and contrast differing sets of ideas , values, personalities, behaviors, and institutions by identifying likenesses and differences.
Consider multiple perspectives of various peoples in the past by demonstrating their differing motives, beliefs, interests, hopes, and fears.
Analyze cause-and-effect relationships bearing in mind multiple causation including (a) the importance of the individual in history; (b) the influence of ideas , human interests, and beliefs; and (c) the role of chance, the accidental and the irrational.
Draw comparisons across eras and regions in order to define enduring issues as well as large-scale or long-term developments that transcend regional and temporal boundaries.
Distinguish between unsupported expressions of opinion and informed hypotheses grounded in historical evidence.
Compare competing historical narratives.
Challenge arguments of historical inevitability by formulating examples of historical contingency, of how different choices could have led to different consequences.
Hold interpretations of history as tentative , subject to changes as new information is uncovered, new voices heard, and new interpretations broached.
Evaluate major debates among historians concerning alternative interpretations of the past.
Hypothesize the influence of the past , including both the limitations and opportunities made possible by past decisions.

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What information is given about the author? Is the author an historian?
Can you identify the historian's school of thought?
Read the table of contents, preface and other introductry material. Does the author set up his/her thesis (or point of view) in these sections? Who is the intended audience? Is it written for historians or for a general audience?
What is the date of publication? If the book or article is old, it will not highlight recent scholarship. Is this important? Is it a reflection of the histories of the time or does it deviate from the norm?
What primary source material does the author use? What primary source material may have been available to the author at the time?
Consider the bibliography. Do the sources listed indicate serious works that are relevant to your topic? You may want to consult works used by the author.

All materials from: Historiography: Ramapo College, https://libguides.ramapo.edu/HIST201rice

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Writing a Good History Paper

Top Ten Reasons for Negative Comments
Making Sure your Paper has Substance

Common Marginal Remarks on Style, Clarity, Grammar, and Syntax

Word and phrase usage problems, analyzing a historical document, writing a book review, writing a term paper or senior thesis, top ten reasons for negative comments on history papers.

(Drawn from a survey of the History Department ) 10. You engage in cheap, anachronistic moralizing . 9. You are sloppy with the chronology . 8. You quote excessively or improperly . 7. You have written a careless “one-draft wonder.” (See revise and proofread) 6. You are vague or have empty, unsupported generalizations . 5. You write too much in the passive voice. 4. You use inappropriate sources . 3. You use evidence uncritically. 2. You are wordy . 1. You have no clear thesis and little analysis.

Making Sure your History Paper has Substance

Get off to a good start..

Avoid pretentious, vapid beginnings. If you are writing a paper on, say, British responses to the rebellion in India in 1857, don't open with a statement like this: “Throughout human history people in all cultures everywhere in the world have engaged in many and long-running conflicts about numerous aspects of government policy and diplomatic issues, which have much interested historians and generated historical theories in many areas.” This is pure garbage, bores the reader, and is a sure sign that you have nothing substantive to say. Get to the point. Here’s a better start: “The rebellion in 1857 compelled the British to rethink their colonial administration in India.” This sentence tells the reader what your paper is actually about and clears the way for you to state your thesis in the rest of the opening paragraph. For example, you might go on to argue that greater British sensitivity to Indian customs was hypocritical.

State a clear thesis.

Whether you are writing an exam essay or a senior thesis, you need to have a thesis. Don’t just repeat the assignment or start writing down everything that you know about the subject. Ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to prove?” Your thesis is your take on the subject, your perspective, your explanation—that is, the case that you’re going to argue. “Famine struck Ireland in the 1840s” is a true statement, but it is not a thesis. “The English were responsible for famine in Ireland in the 1840s” is a thesis (whether defensible or not is another matter). A good thesis answers an important research question about how or why something happened. (“Who was responsible for the famine in Ireland in the 1840s?”) Once you have laid out your thesis, don’t forget about it. Develop your thesis logically from paragraph to paragraph. Your reader should always know where your argument has come from, where it is now, and where it is going.

Be sure to analyze.

Students are often puzzled when their professors mark them down for summarizing or merely narrating rather than analyzing. What does it mean to analyze? In the narrow sense, to analyze means to break down into parts and to study the interrelationships of those parts. If you analyze water, you break it down into hydrogen and oxygen. In a broader sense, historical analysis explains the origins and significance of events. Historical analysis digs beneath the surface to see relationships or distinctions that are not immediately obvious. Historical analysis is critical; it evaluates sources, assigns significance to causes, and weighs competing explanations. Don’t push the distinction too far, but you might think of summary and analysis this way: Who, what, when, and where are the stuff of summary; how, why, and to what effect are the stuff of analysis. Many students think that they have to give a long summary (to show the professor that they know the facts) before they get to their analysis. Try instead to begin your analysis as soon as possible, sometimes without any summary at all. The facts will “shine through” a good analysis. You can't do an analysis unless you know the facts, but you can summarize the facts without being able to do an analysis. Summary is easier and less sophisticated than analysis—that’s why summary alone never earns an “A.”

Use evidence critically.

Like good detectives, historians are critical of their sources and cross-check them for reliability. You wouldn't think much of a detective who relied solely on a suspect’s archenemy to check an alibi. Likewise, you wouldn't think much of a historian who relied solely on the French to explain the origins of World War I. Consider the following two statements on the origin of World War I: 1) “For the catastrophe of 1914 the Germans are responsible. Only a professional liar would deny this...” 2) “It is not true that Germany is guilty of having caused this war. Neither the people, the government, nor the Kaiser wanted war....” They can’t both be right, so you have to do some detective work. As always, the best approach is to ask: Who wrote the source? Why? When? Under what circumstances? For whom? The first statement comes from a book by the French politician Georges Clemenceau, which he wrote in 1929 at the very end of his life. In 1871, Clemenceau had vowed revenge against Germany for its defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War. As premier of France from 1917 to 1920, he represented France at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. He was obviously not a disinterested observer. The second statement comes from a manifesto published by ninety-three prominent German intellectuals in the fall of 1914. They were defending Germany against charges of aggression and brutality. They too were obviously not disinterested observers. Now, rarely do you encounter such extreme bias and passionate disagreement, but the principle of criticizing and cross-checking sources always applies. In general, the more sources you can use, and the more varied they are, the more likely you are to make a sound historical judgment, especially when passions and self-interests are engaged. You don’t need to be cynical as a historian (self-interest does not explain everything), but you do need to be critical and skeptical. Competent historians may offer different interpretations of the same evidence or choose to stress different evidence. You will not find a single historical Truth with a capital “T” on any matter of significance. You can, however, learn to discriminate among conflicting interpretations, not all of which are created equal. (See also: Analyzing a Historical Document )

Be precise.

Vague statements and empty generalizations suggest that you haven't put in the time to learn the material. Consider these two sentences: “During the French Revolution, the government was overthrown by the people. The Revolution is important because it shows that people need freedom.” What people? Landless peasants? Urban journeymen? Wealthy lawyers? Which government? When? How? Who exactly needed freedom, and what did they mean by freedom? Here is a more precise statement about the French Revolution: “Threatened by rising prices and food shortages in 1793, the Parisian sans-culottes pressured the Convention to institute price controls.” This statement is more limited than the grandiose generalizations about the Revolution, but unlike them, it can open the door to a real analysis of the Revolution. Be careful when you use grand abstractions like people, society, freedom, and government, especially when you further distance yourself from the concrete by using these words as the apparent antecedents for the pronouns they and it. Always pay attention to cause and effect. Abstractions do not cause or need anything; particular people or particular groups of people cause or need things. Avoid grandiose trans-historical generalizations that you can’t support. When in doubt about the appropriate level of precision or detail, err on the side of adding “too much” precision and detail.

Watch the chronology.

Anchor your thesis in a clear chronological framework and don't jump around confusingly. Take care to avoid both anachronisms and vagueness about dates. If you write, “Napoleon abandoned his Grand Army in Russia and caught the redeye back to Paris,” the problem is obvious. If you write, “Despite the Watergate scandal, Nixon easily won reelection in 1972,” the problem is more subtle, but still serious. (The scandal did not become public until after the election.) If you write, “The revolution in China finally succeeded in the twentieth century,” your professor may suspect that you haven’t studied. Which revolution? When in the twentieth century? Remember that chronology is the backbone of history. What would you think of a biographer who wrote that you graduated from Hamilton in the 1950s?

Cite sources carefully.

Your professor may allow parenthetical citations in a short paper with one or two sources, but you should use footnotes for any research paper in history. Parenthetical citations are unaesthetic; they scar the text and break the flow of reading. Worse still, they are simply inadequate to capture the richness of historical sources. Historians take justifiable pride in the immense variety of their sources. Parenthetical citations such as (Jones 1994) may be fine for most of the social sciences and humanities, where the source base is usually limited to recent books and articles in English. Historians, however, need the flexibility of the full footnote. Try to imagine this typical footnote (pulled at random from a classic work of German history) squeezed into parentheses in the body of the text: DZA Potsdam, RdI, Frieden 5, Erzgebiet von Longwy-Briey, Bd. I, Nr. 19305, gedruckte Denkschrift für OHL und Reichsleitung, Dezember 1917, und in RWA, Frieden Frankreich Nr. 1883. The abbreviations are already in this footnote; its information cannot be further reduced. For footnotes and bibliography, historians usually use Chicago style. (The Chicago Manual of Style. 15th edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.) On the Writing Center’s website you can find a useful summary of Chicago citation style prepared by a former history major, Elizabeth Rabe ’04 ( Footnotes ). RefWorks (on the library’s website) will convert your citations to Chicago style. Don’t hesitate to ask one of the reference librarians for help if you have trouble getting started on RefWorks.

Use primary sources.

Use as many primary sources as possible in your paper. A primary source is one produced by a participant in or witness of the events you are writing about. A primary source allows the historian to see the past through the eyes of direct participants. Some common primary sources are letters, diaries, memoirs, speeches, church records, newspaper articles, and government documents of all kinds. The capacious genre “government records” is probably the single richest trove for the historian and includes everything from criminal court records, to tax lists, to census data, to parliamentary debates, to international treaties—indeed, any records generated by governments. If you’re writing about culture, primary sources may include works of art or literature, as well as philosophical tracts or scientific treatises—anything that comes under the broad rubric of culture. Not all primary sources are written. Buildings, monuments, clothes, home furnishings, photographs, religious relics, musical recordings, or oral reminiscences can all be primary sources if you use them as historical clues. The interests of historians are so broad that virtually anything can be a primary source. (See also: Analyzing a Historical Document )

Use scholarly secondary sources.

A secondary source is one written by a later historian who had no part in what he or she is writing about. (In the rare cases when the historian was a participant in the events, then the work—or at least part of it—is a primary source.) Historians read secondary sources to learn about how scholars have interpreted the past. Just as you must be critical of primary sources, so too you must be critical of secondary sources. You must be especially careful to distinguish between scholarly and non-scholarly secondary sources. Unlike, say, nuclear physics, history attracts many amateurs. Books and articles about war, great individuals, and everyday material life dominate popular history. Some professional historians disparage popular history and may even discourage their colleagues from trying their hand at it. You need not share their snobbishness; some popular history is excellent. But—and this is a big but—as a rule, you should avoid popular works in your research, because they are usually not scholarly. Popular history seeks to inform and entertain a large general audience. In popular history, dramatic storytelling often prevails over analysis, style over substance, simplicity over complexity, and grand generalization over careful qualification. Popular history is usually based largely or exclusively on secondary sources. Strictly speaking, most popular histories might better be called tertiary, not secondary, sources. Scholarly history, in contrast, seeks to discover new knowledge or to reinterpret existing knowledge. Good scholars wish to write clearly and simply, and they may spin a compelling yarn, but they do not shun depth, analysis, complexity, or qualification. Scholarly history draws on as many primary sources as practical. Now, your goal as a student is to come as close as possible to the scholarly ideal, so you need to develop a nose for distinguishing the scholarly from the non-scholarly. Here are a few questions you might ask of your secondary sources (bear in mind that the popular/scholarly distinction is not absolute, and that some scholarly work may be poor scholarship). Who is the author? Most scholarly works are written by professional historians (usually professors) who have advanced training in the area they are writing about. If the author is a journalist or someone with no special historical training, be careful. Who publishes the work? Scholarly books come from university presses and from a handful of commercial presses (for example, Norton, Routledge, Palgrave, Penguin, Rowman & Littlefield, Knopf, and HarperCollins). If it’s an article, where does it appear? Is it in a journal subscribed to by our library, listed on JSTOR , or published by a university press? Is the editorial board staffed by professors? Oddly enough, the word journal in the title is usually a sign that the periodical is scholarly. What do the notes and bibliography look like? If they are thin or nonexistent, be careful. If they are all secondary sources, be careful. If the work is about a non-English-speaking area, and all the sources are in English, then it's almost by definition not scholarly. Can you find reviews of the book in the data base Academic Search Premier? If the book was published within the last few decades, and it’s not in there, that’s a bad sign. With a little practice, you can develop confidence in your judgment—and you’re on your way to being a historian. If you are unsure whether a work qualifies as scholarly, ask your professor. (See also: Writing a Book Review )

Avoid abusing your sources.

Many potentially valuable sources are easy to abuse. Be especially alert for these five abuses: Web abuse. The Web is a wonderful and improving resource for indexes and catalogs. But as a source for primary and secondary material for the historian, the Web is of limited value. Anyone with the right software can post something on the Web without having to get past trained editors, peer reviewers, or librarians. As a result, there is a great deal of garbage on the Web. If you use a primary source from the Web, make sure that a respected intellectual institution stands behind the site. Be especially wary of secondary articles on the Web, unless they appear in electronic versions of established print journals (e.g., The Journal of Asian Studies in JSTOR). Many articles on the Web are little more than third-rate encyclopedia entries. When in doubt, check with your professor. With a few rare exceptions, you will not find scholarly monographs in history (even recent ones) on the Web. You may have heard of Google’s plans to digitize the entire collections of some of the world’s major libraries and to make those collections available on the Web. Don’t hold your breath. Your days at Hamilton will be long over by the time the project is finished. Besides, your training as a historian should give you a healthy skepticism of the giddy claims of technophiles. Most of the time and effort of doing history goes into reading, note-taking, pondering, and writing. Finding a chapter of a book on the Web (as opposed to getting the physical book through interlibrary loan) might be a convenience, but it doesn’t change the basics for the historian. Moreover, there is a subtle, but serious, drawback with digitized old books: They break the historian’s sensual link to the past. And of course, virtually none of the literally trillions of pages of archival material is available on the Web. For the foreseeable future, the library and the archive will remain the natural habitats of the historian. Thesaurus abuse. How tempting it is to ask your computer’s thesaurus to suggest a more erudite-sounding word for the common one that popped into your mind! Resist the temptation. Consider this example (admittedly, a bit heavy-handed, but it drives the point home): You’re writing about the EPA’s programs to clean up impure water supplies. Impure seems too simple and boring a word, so you bring up your thesaurus, which offers you everything from incontinent to meretricious. “How about meretricious water?” you think to yourself. “That will impress the professor.” The problem is that you don’t know exactly what meretricious means, so you don’t realize that meretricious is absurdly inappropriate in this context and makes you look foolish and immature. Use only those words that come to you naturally. Don’t try to write beyond your vocabulary. Don’t try to impress with big words. Use a thesaurus only for those annoying tip-of-the-tongue problems (you know the word and will recognize it instantly when you see it, but at the moment you just can’t think of it). Quotation book abuse. This is similar to thesaurus abuse. Let’s say you are writing a paper on Alexander Hamilton’s banking policies, and you want to get off to a snappy start that will make you seem effortlessly learned. How about a quotation on money? You click on the index of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations , and before you know it, you’ve begun your paper with, “As Samuel Butler wrote in Hudibras , ‘For what is worth in anything/ But so much money as ’t will bring?’” Face it, you’re faking it. You don’t know who Samuel Butler is, and you’ve certainly never heard of Hudibras , let alone read it. Your professor is not fooled. You sound like an insecure after-dinner speaker. Forget Bartlett’s, unless you're confirming the wording of a quotation that came to you spontaneously and relates to your paper. Encyclopedia abuse. General encyclopedias like Britannica are useful for checking facts (“Wait a sec, am I right about which countries sent troops to crush the Boxer Rebellion in China? Better check.”). But if you are footnoting encyclopedias in your papers, you are not doing college-level research.

Dictionary Abuse. The dictionary is your friend. Keep it by your side as you write, but do not abuse it by starting papers with a definition. You may be most tempted to start this way when you are writing on a complex, controversial, or elusive subject. (“According to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , liberalism is defined as...”). Actually, the dictionary does you little good in such cases and makes you sound like a conscientious but dull high-school student. Save in the rare case that competing dictionary definitions are the subject at hand, keep dictionary quotations out of your paper.

Quote sparingly

Avoid quoting a secondary source and then simply rewording or summarizing the quotation, either above or below the quotation. It is rarely necessary to quote secondary sources at length, unless your essay focuses on a critical analysis of the author’s argument. (See also: Writing a Book Review ) Your professor wants to see your ability to analyze and to understand the secondary sources. Do not quote unless the quotation clarifies or enriches your analysis. When in doubt, do not quote; instead, integrate the author’s argument into your own (though be sure to acknowledge ideas from your sources, even when you are paraphrasing). If you use a lot of quotations from secondary sources, you are probably writing a poor paper. An analysis of a primary source, such as a political tract or philosophical essay, might require lengthy quotations, often in block format. In such cases, you might need to briefly repeat key points or passages as a means to introduce the author’s ideas, but your analysis and interpretation of the text’s meaning should remain the most important aim. (See also: Using primary sources and Use scholarly secondary sources .)

Know your audience

Unless instructed otherwise, you should assume that your audience consists of educated, intelligent, nonspecialists. In fact, your professor will usually be your only reader, but if you write directly to your professor, you may become cryptic or sloppy (oh well, she’ll know what I’m talking about). Explaining your ideas to someone who doesn't know what you mean forces you to be clear and complete. Now, finding the right amount of detail can, admittedly, be tricky (how much do I put in about the Edict of Nantes, the Embargo Act, or President Wilson’s background?). When in doubt, err on the side of putting in extra details. You’ll get some leeway here if you avoid the extremes (my reader’s an ignoramus/my reader knows everything).

Avoid cheap, anachronistic moralizing

Many of the people and institutions of the past appear unenlightened, ignorant, misguided, or bigoted by today’s values. Resist the temptation to condemn or to get self-righteous. (“Martin Luther was blind to the sexism and class prejudice of sixteenth-century German society.”) Like you, people in the past were creatures of their time; like you, they deserve to be judged by the standards of their time. If you judge the past by today’s standards (an error historians call “presentism”), you will never understand why people thought or acted as they did. Yes, Hitler was a bad guy, but he was bad not only by today’s standards, but also by the commonly accepted standards of his own time. Someday you’re going to look pretty foolish and ignorant yourself. (“Early twenty-first century Hamilton students failed to see the shocking inderdosherism [that’s right, you don’t recognize the concept because it doesn’t yet exist] implicit in their career plans.”)

Have a strong conclusion

Obviously, you should not just stop abruptly as though you have run out of time or ideas. Your conclusion should conclude something. If you merely restate briefly what you have said in your paper, you give the impression that you are unsure of the significance of what you have written. A weak conclusion leaves the reader unsatisfied and bewildered, wondering why your paper was worth reading. A strong conclusion adds something to what you said in your introduction. A strong conclusion explains the importance and significance of what you have written. A strong conclusion leaves your reader caring about what you have said and pondering the larger implications of your thesis. Don’t leave your reader asking, “So what?”

Revise and proofread

Your professor can spot a “one-draft wonder,” so don't try to do your paper at the last moment. Leave plenty of time for revising and proofreading. Show your draft to a writing tutor or other good writer. Reading the draft aloud may also help. Of course, everyone makes mistakes, and a few may slip through no matter how meticulous you are. But beware of lots of mistakes. The failure to proofread carefully suggests that you devoted little time and effort to the assignment. Tip: Proofread your text both on the screen and on a printed copy. Your eyes see the two differently. Don’t rely on your spell checker to catch all of your misspellings. (If ewe ken reed this ewe kin sea that a computer wood nut all ways help ewe spill or rite reel good.)

Note: The Writing Center suggests standard abbreviations for noting some of these problems. You should familiarize yourself with those abbreviations, but your professor may not use them.

Remarks on Style and Clarity

Wordy/verbose/repetitive..

Try your hand at fixing this sentence: “Due to the fact that these aspects of the issue of personal survival have been raised by recently transpired problematic conflicts, it is at the present time paramount that the ultimate psychological end of suicide be contemplated by this individual.” If you get it down to “To be or not to be, that is the question,” you’ve done well. You may not match Shakespeare, but you can learn to cut the fat out of your prose. The chances are that the five pages you’ve written for your history paper do not really contain five pages’ worth of ideas.

Misuse of the passive voice.

Write in the active voice. The passive voice encourages vagueness and dullness; it enfeebles verbs; and it conceals agency, which is the very stuff of history. You know all of this almost instinctively. What would you think of a lover who sighed in your ear, “My darling, you are loved by me!”? At its worst, the passive voice—like its kin, bureaucratic language and jargon—is a medium for the dishonesty and evasion of responsibility that pervade contemporary American culture. (“Mistakes were made; I was given false information.” Now notice the difference: “I screwed up; Smith and Jones lied to me; I neglected to check the facts.”) On history papers the passive voice usually signals a less toxic version of the same unwillingness to take charge, to commit yourself, and to say forthrightly what is really going on, and who is doing what to whom. Suppose you write, “In 1935 Ethiopia was invaded.” This sentence is a disaster. Who invaded? Your professor will assume that you don't know. Adding “by Italy” to the end of the sentence helps a bit, but the sentence is still flat and misleading. Italy was an aggressive actor, and your passive construction conceals that salient fact by putting the actor in the syntactically weakest position—at the end of the sentence as the object of a preposition. Notice how you add vigor and clarity to the sentence when you recast it in the active voice: "In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia." I n a few cases , you may violate the no-passive-voice rule. The passive voice may be preferable if the agent is either obvious (“Kennedy was elected in 1960”), irrelevant (“Theodore Roosevelt became president when McKinley was assassinated”), or unknown (“King Harold was killed at the Battle of Hastings”). Note that in all three of these sample sentences the passive voice focuses the reader on the receiver of the action rather than on the doer (on Kennedy, not on American voters; on McKinley, not on his assassin; on King Harold, not on the unknown Norman archer). Historians usually wish to focus on the doer, so you should stay with the active voice—unless you can make a compelling case for an exception.

Abuse of the verb to be.

The verb to be is the most common and most important verb in English, but too many verbs to be suck the life out of your prose and lead to wordiness. Enliven your prose with as many action verbs as possible. ( “In Brown v. Board of Education it was the opinion of the Supreme Court that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ was in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.”) Rewrite as “ In Brown v. Board of Education the Supreme Court ruled that the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ violated the Fourteenth ”

Explain/what’s your point?/unclear/huh?

You may (or may not) know what you’re talking about, but if you see these marginal comments, you have confused your reader. You may have introduced a non sequitur ; gotten off the subject; drifted into abstraction; assumed something that you have not told the reader; failed to explain how the material relates to your argument; garbled your syntax; or simply failed to proofread carefully. If possible, have a good writer read your paper and point out the muddled parts. Reading your paper aloud may help too.

Paragraph goes nowhere/has no point or unity.

Paragraphs are the building blocks of your paper. If your paragraphs are weak, your paper cannot be strong. Try underlining the topic sentence of every paragraph. If your topic sentences are vague, strength and precision—the hallmarks of good writing—are unlikely to follow. Consider this topic sentence (from a paper on Ivan the Terrible): “From 1538 to 1547, there are many different arguments about the nature of what happened.” Disaster looms. The reader has no way of knowing when the arguing takes place, who’s arguing, or even what the arguing is about. And how does the “nature of what happened” differ from plain “what happened”? Perhaps the writer means the following: “The childhood of Ivan the Terrible has provoked controversy among scholars of Russian history.” That's hardly deathless prose, but it does orient the reader and make the writer accountable for what follows in the paragraph. Once you have a good topic sentence, make sure that everything in the paragraph supports that sentence, and that cumulatively the support is persuasive. Make sure that each sentence follows logically from the previous one, adding detail in a coherent order. Move, delete, or add material as appropriate. To avoid confusing the reader, limit each paragraph to one central idea. (If you have a series of supporting points starting with first, you must follow with a second, third , etc.) A paragraph that runs more than a printed page is probably too long. Err on the side of shorter paragraphs.

Inappropriate use of first person.

Most historians write in the third person, which focuses the reader on the subject. If you write in the first person singular, you shift the focus to yourself. You give the impression that you want to break in and say, “Enough about the Haitian revolution [or whatever], now let’s talk about me!” Also avoid the first person plural (“We believe...”). It suggests committees, editorial boards, or royalty. None of those should have had a hand in writing your paper. And don’t refer to yourself lamely as “this writer.” Who else could possibly be writing the paper?

Tense inconsistency.

Stay consistently in the past tense when you are writing about what took place in the past. (“Truman’s defeat of Dewey in 1948 caught the pollsters by surprise.”) Note that the context may require a shift into the past perfect. (“The pollsters had not realized [past perfect] that voter opinion had been [past perfect] changing rapidly in the days before the election.”) Unfortunately, the tense problem can get a bit more complicated. Most historians shift into the present tense when describing or commenting on a book, document, or evidence that still exists and is in front of them (or in their mind) as they write. (“de Beauvoir published [past tense] The Second Sex in 1949. In the book she contends [present tense] that woman....”) If you’re confused, think of it this way: History is about the past, so historians write in the past tense, unless they are discussing effects of the past that still exist and thus are in the present. When in doubt, use the past tense and stay consistent.

Ill-fitted quotation.

This is a common problem, though not noted in stylebooks. When you quote someone, make sure that the quotation fits grammatically into your sentence. Note carefully the mismatch between the start of the following sentence and the quotation that follows: “In order to understand the Vikings, writes Marc Bloch, it is necessary, ‘To conceive of the Viking expeditions as religious warfare inspired by the ardour of an implacable pagan fanaticism—an explanation that has sometimes been at least suggested—conflicts too much with what we know of minds disposed to respect magic of every kind.’” At first, the transition into the quotation from Bloch seems fine. The infinitive (to conceive) fits. But then the reader comes to the verb (conflicts) in Bloch’s sentence, and things no longer make sense. The writer is saying, in effect, “it is necessary conflicts.” The wordy lead-in and the complex syntax of the quotation have tripped the writer and confused the reader. If you wish to use the whole sentence, rewrite as “Marc Bloch writes in Feudal Society , ‘To conceive of...’” Better yet, use your own words or only part of the quotation in your sentence. Remember that good writers quote infrequently, but when they do need to quote, they use carefully phrased lead-ins that fit the grammatical construction of the quotation.

Free-floating quotation.

Do not suddenly drop quotations into your prose. (“The spirit of the Progressive era is best understood if one remembers that the United States is ‘the only country in the world that began with perfection and aspired to progress.’”) You have probably chosen the quotation because it is finely wrought and says exactly what you want to say. Fine, but first you inconvenience the reader, who must go to the footnote to learn that the quotation comes from The Age of Reform by historian Richard Hofstadter. And then you puzzle the reader. Did Hofstadter write the line about perfection and progress, or is he quoting someone from the Progressive era? If, as you claim, you are going to help the reader to judge the “spirit of the Progressive era,” you need to clarify. Rewrite as “As historian Richard Hofstadter writes in the Age of Reform , the United States is ‘the only country in the world...’” Now the reader knows immediately that the line is Hofstadter’s.

Who’s speaking here?/your view?

Always be clear about whether you’re giving your opinion or that of the author or historical actor you are discussing. Let’s say that your essay is about Martin Luther’s social views. You write, “The German peasants who revolted in 1525 were brutes and deserved to be crushed mercilessly.” That’s what Luther thought, but do you agree? You may know, but your reader is not a mind reader. When in doubt, err on the side of being overly clear.

Jargon/pretentious theory.

Historians value plain English. Academic jargon and pretentious theory will make your prose turgid, ridiculous, and downright irritating. Your professor will suspect that you are trying to conceal that you have little to say. Of course, historians can’t get along without some theory; even those who profess to have no theory actually do—it’s called naïve realism. And sometimes you need a technical term, be it ontological argument or ecological fallacy. When you use theory or technical terms, make sure that they are intelligible and do real intellectual lifting. Please, no sentences like this: “By means of a neo-Althusserian, post-feminist hermeneutics, this essay will de/construct the logo/phallo/centrism imbricated in the marginalizing post-colonial gendered gaze, thereby proliferating the subjectivities that will re/present the de/stabilization of the essentializing habitus of post-Fordist capitalism.”

Informal language/slang.

You don’t need to be stuffy, but stay with formal English prose of the kind that will still be comprehensible to future generations. Columbus did not “push the envelope in the Atlantic.” Henry VIII was not “looking for his inner child when he broke with the Church.” Prime Minister Cavour of Piedmont was not “trying to play in the major leagues diplomatic wise.” Wilson did not “almost veg out” at the end of his second term. President Hindenburg did not appoint Hitler in a “senior moment.” Prime Minister Chamberlain did not tell the Czechs to “chill out” after the Munich Conference, and Gandhi was not an “awesome dude.”

Try to keep your prose fresh. Avoid cliches. When you proofread, watch out for sentences like these: “Voltaire always gave 110 percent and thought outside the box. His bottom line was that as people went forward into the future, they would, at the end of the day, step up to the plate and realize that the Jesuits were conniving perverts.” Ugh. Rewrite as “Voltaire tried to persuade people that the Jesuits were cony, step up to the plate and realize that the Jesuits were conniving perverts.” Ugh. Rewrite as “Voltaire tried to persuade people that the Jesuits were conniving perverts.”

Intensifier abuse/exaggeration.

Avoid inflating your prose with unsustainable claims of size, importance, uniqueness, certainty, or intensity. Such claims mark you as an inexperienced writer trying to impress the reader. Your statement is probably not certain ; your subject probably not unique , the biggest, the best, or the most important. Also, the adverb very will rarely strengthen your sentence. Strike it. (“President Truman was very determined to stop the spread of communism in Greece.”) Rewrite as “President Truman resolved to stop the spread of communism in Greece.”

Mixed image.

Once you have chosen an image, you must stay with language compatible with that image. In the following example, note that the chain, the boiling, and the igniting are all incompatible with the image of the cold, rolling, enlarging snowball: “A snowballing chain of events boiled over, igniting the powder keg of war in 1914.” Well chosen images can enliven your prose, but if you catch yourself mixing images a lot, you're probably trying to write beyond your ability. Pull back. Be more literal.

Clumsy transition.

If your reader feels a jolt or gets disoriented at the beginning of a new paragraph, your paper probably lacks unity. In a good paper, each paragraph is woven seamlessly into the next. If you find yourself beginning your paragraphs with phrases such as “Another aspect of this problem...,” then you are probably “stacking note cards” rather than developing a thesis.

Unnecessary relative clause.

If you don’t need to restrict the meaning of your sentence’s subject, then don’t. (“Napoleon was a man who tried to conquer Europe.”) Here the relative clause adds nothing. Rewrite as “Napoleon tried to conquer Europe.” Unnecessary relative clauses are a classic form of wordiness.

Distancing or demeaning quotation marks.

If you believe that a frequently used word or phrase distorts historical reality, don’t put it in dismissive, sneering quotation marks to make your point (“the communist ‘threat’ to the ‘free’ world during the Cold War”). Many readers find this practice arrogant, obnoxious, and precious, and they may dismiss your arguments out of hand. If you believe that the communist threat was bogus or exaggerated, or that the free world was not really free, then simply explain what you mean.

Remarks on Grammar and Syntax

Ideally, your professor will help you to improve your writing by specifying exactly what is wrong with a particular passage, but sometimes you may find a simple awk in the margin. This all-purpose negative comment usually suggests that the sentence is clumsy because you have misused words or compounded several errors. Consider this sentence from a book review:

“However, many falsehoods lie in Goldhagen’s claims and these will be explored.”

What is your long-suffering professor to do with this sentence? The however contributes nothing; the phrase falsehoods lie is an unintended pun that distracts the reader; the comma is missing between the independent clauses; the these has no clear antecedent ( falsehoods? claims? ); the second clause is in the passive voice and contributes nothing anyway; the whole sentence is wordy and screams hasty, last-minute composition. In weary frustration, your professor scrawls awk in the margin and moves on. Buried under the twelve-word sentence lies a three-word idea: “Goldhagen often errs.” When you see awk, check for the common errors in this list. If you don’t understand what’s wrong, ask.

Unclear antecedent.

All pronouns must refer clearly to antecedents and must agree with them in number. The reader usually assumes that the antecedent is the immediately preceding noun. Do not confuse the reader by having several possible antecedents. Consider these two sentences:

“Pope Gregory VII forced Emperor Henry IV to wait three days in the snow at Canossa before granting him an audience. It was a symbolic act.”

To what does the it refer? Forcing the Emperor to wait? The waiting itself? The granting of the audience? The audience itself? The whole previous sentence? You are most likely to get into antecedent trouble when you begin a paragraph with this or it , referring vaguely back to the general import of the previous paragraph. When in doubt, take this test: Circle the pronoun and the antecedent and connect the two with a line. Then ask yourself if your reader could instantly make the same diagram without your help. If the line is long, or if the circle around the antecedent is large, encompassing huge gobs of text, then your reader probably will be confused. Rewrite. Repetition is better than ambiguity and confusion.

Faulty parallelism.

You confuse your reader if you change the grammatical construction from one element to the next in a series. Consider this sentence:

“King Frederick the Great sought to expand Prussia, to rationalize agriculture, and that the state support education.”

The reader expects another infinitive, but instead trips over the that . Rewrite the last clause as “and to promote state-supported education.” Sentences using neither/nor frequently present parallelism problems. Note the two parts of this sentence:

“After 1870 the cavalry charge was neither an effective tactic, nor did armies use it frequently.”

The sentence jars because the neither is followed by a noun, the nor by a verb. Keep the parts parallel.

Rewrite as “After 1870 the cavalry charge was neither effective nor frequently used.”

Sentences with not only/but also are another pitfall for many students. (“Mussolini attacked not only liberalism, but he also advocated militarism.”) Here the reader is set up to expect a noun in the second clause, but stumbles over a verb. Make the parts parallel by putting the verb attacked after the not only .

Misplaced modifier/dangling element.

Do not confuse the reader with a phrase or clause that refers illogically or absurdly to other words in the sentence. (“Summarized on the back cover of the American paperback edition, the publishers claim that...”) The publishers are not summarized on the back cover. (“Upon finishing the book, many questions remain.”) Who finished the book? Questions can’t read. Avoid following an introductory participial clause with the expletives it or there . Expletives are by definition filler words; they can’t be agents. (“Having examined the origins of the Meiji Restoration in Japan, it is apparent that...”) Apparent to whom? The expletive it didn’t do the examining. (“After going on the Long March, there was greater support for the Communists in China.”) Who went on the Long March? There didn’t go on the Long March. Always pay attention to who’s doing what in your sentences.

Run-on sentence.

Run-on sentences string together improperly joined independent clauses. Consider these three sentences:

“Galileo recanted his teaching that the earth moved privately he maintained his convictions.” “Galileo recanted his teaching that the earth moved, privately he maintained his convictions.” “Galileo recanted his teaching that the earth moved, however, privately he maintained his convictions.”

The first fuses two independent clauses with neither a comma nor a coordinating conjunction; the second uses a comma but omits the coordinating conjunction; and the third also omits the coordinating conjunction (however is not a coordinating conjunction). To solve the problem, separate the two clauses with a comma and the coordinating conjunction but. You could also divide the clauses with a semicolon or make separate sentences. Remember that there are only seven coordinating conjunctions ( and, but, or, nor, for, so, yet ).

Sentence fragment.

Write in sentences. A sentence has to have a subject and a predicate. If you string together a lot of words, you may lose control of the syntax and end up with a sentence fragment. Note that the following is not a sentence:

“While in Western Europe railroad building proceeded rapidly in the nineteenth century, and in Russia there was less progress.”

Here you have a long compound introductory clause followed by no subject and no verb, and thus you have a fragment. You may have noticed exceptions to the no-fragments rule. Skilful writers do sometimes intentionally use a fragment to achieve a certain effect. Leave the rule-breaking to the experts.

Confusion of restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses.

Consider these two versions of the same sentence:

1. “World War I, which raged from 1914-1918, killed millions of Europeans.” 2. “World War I that raged from 1914-1918 killed millions of Europeans.”

The first sentence has a nonrestrictive relative clause; the dates are included almost as parenthetical information. But something seems amiss with the second sentence. It has a restrictive relative clause that limits the subject (World War I) to the World War I fought between 1914 and 1918, thus implying that there were other wars called World War I, and that we need to distinguish among them. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but the writer of the second sentence appears foolish. Note carefully the distinction between that (for use in restrictive clauses, with no comma) and which (for use in nonrestrictive clauses, with a comma).

Confusion about who’s doing what.

Remember—history is about what people do, so you need to be vigilant about agency. Proofread your sentences carefully, asking yourself, “Have I said exactly who is doing or thinking what, or have I inadvertently attributed an action or belief to the wrong person or group?” Unfortunately, there are many ways to go wrong here, but faulty punctuation is among the most common. Here’s a sentence about Frantz Fanon, the great critic of European imperialism. Focus on the punctuation and its effect on agency: “Instead of a hierarchy based on class, Fanon suggests the imperialists establish a hierarchy based on race.” As punctuated, the sentence says something absurd: that Fanon is advising the imperialists about the proper kind of hierarchy to establish in the colonies. Surely, the writer meant to say that, in his analysis of imperialism, Fanon distinguishes between two kinds of hierarchy. A comma after suggests fixes the immediate problem. Now look at the revised sentence. It still needs work. Better diction and syntax would sharpen it. Fanon does not suggest (with connotations of both hinting and advocating); he states outright. What’s more, the comparison of the two kinds of hierarchy gets blurred by too many intervening words. The key point of the sentence is, in effect, “instead of A, we have B.” Clarity demands that B follow A as closely as possible, and that the two elements be grammatically parallel. But between the elements A and B, the writer inserts Fanon (a proper noun), suggests (a verb), imperialists (a noun), and establish (a verb). Try the sentence this way: “Fanon says that the imperialists establish a hierarchy based on race rather than class.” Now the agency is clear: We know what Fanon does, and we know what the imperialists do. Notice that errors and infelicities have a way of clustering. If you find one problem in a sentence, look for others.

Confusion about the objects of prepositions.

Here’s another one of those common problems that does not receive the attention it merits. Discipline your prepositional phrases; make sure you know where they end. Notice the mess in this sentence: “Hitler accused Jewish people of engaging in incest and stating that Vienna was the ‘personification of incest.’” The reader thinks that both engaging and stating are objects of the preposition of. Yet the writer intends only the first to be the object of the preposition. Hitler is accusing the Jews of engaging , but not of stating ; he is the one doing the stating . Rewrite as “Hitler accused the Jews of incest; he stated that Vienna was the ‘personification of incest.’” Note that the wordiness of the original encouraged the syntactical mess. Simplify. It can’t be said too many times: Always pay attention to who’s doing what in your sentences.

Misuse of the comparative.

There are two common problems here. The first might be called the “floating comparative.” You use the comparative, but you don’t say what you are comparing. (“Lincoln was more upset by the dissolution of the union.”) More upset than by what? More upset than who? The other problem, which is more common and takes many forms, is the unintended (and sometimes comical) comparison of unlike elements. Consider these attempts to compare President Clinton to President George H. W. Bush. Often the trouble starts with a possessive:

“President Clinton’s sexual appetite was more voracious than President Bush.”

You mean to compare appetites, but you've forgotten about your possessive, so you absurdly compare an appetite to a man. Rewrite as “more voracious than President Bush’s.” A variation of this problem is the unintended comparison resulting from the omission of a verb:

“President Clinton liked women more than President Bush.”

Re-write as “more than did President Bush.”

A misplaced modifier may also cause comparison trouble: “Unlike the Bush administration, sexual scandal nearly destroyed the Clinton administration.” Rewrite as “Unlike the Bush administration, the Clinton administration was nearly destroyed by sexual scandal.” Here the passive voice is better than the misplaced modifier, but you could rewrite as “The Bush administration had been free of sexual scandal, which nearly destroyed the Clinton administration.”

Misuse of apostrophe.

Get control of your apostrophes. Use the apostrophe to form singular or plural possessives (Washington’s soldiers; the colonies’ soldiers) or to form contractions (don’t; it’s). Do not use the apostrophe to form plurals. (“The communists [not communists’] defeated the nationalists [not nationalists’] in China.”)

Comma after although.

This is a new error, probably a carryover from the common conversational habit of pausing dramatically after although . ( “Although , coffee consumption rose in eighteenth-century Europe, tea remained far more popular.”) Delete the comma after although . Remember that although is not a synonym for the word however , so you cannot solve the problem in the sentence by putting a period after Europe . A clause beginning with although cannot stand alone as a sentence.

Comma between subject and verb.

This is a strange new error. (“Hitler and Stalin, agreed to a pact in August 1939.”) Delete the comma after Stalin. Finally, two hints: If your word-processing program underlines something and suggests changes, be careful. When it comes to grammar and syntax, your computer is a moron. Not only does it fail to recognize some gross errors, it also falsely identifies some correct passages as errors. Do not cede control of your writing decisions to your computer. Make the suggested changes only if you are positive that they are correct. If you are having trouble with your writing, try simplifying. Write short sentences and read them aloud to test for clarity. Start with the subject and follow it quickly with an active verb. Limit the number of relative clauses, participial phrases, adjectives, adverbs, and prepositional phrases. You will win no prizes for eloquence, but at least you will be clear. Add complexity only when you have learned to handle it.

An historical/an historian.

The consonant “H” is not silent in historical and historian , so the proper form of the indefinite article is “A.”

Avoid the common solecism of using feel as a synonym for think, believe, say, state, assert, contend, argue, conclude, or write. (“Marx felt that the bourgeoisie exploited the proletariat.” “Emmeline Pankhurst felt that British women should be able to vote.”) The use of feel in these sentences demeans the agents by suggesting undisciplined sentiment rather than carefully formulated conviction. Concentrate on what your historical actors said and did; leave their feelings to speculative chapters of their biographies. As for your own feelings, keep them out of your papers. (“I feel that Lincoln should have freed the slaves earlier.”) Your professor will be delighted that the material engages both your head and your heart, but your feelings cannot be graded. If you believe that Lincoln should have acted earlier, then explain, giving cogent historical reasons.

The fact that.

This is a clumsy, unnecessary construction. ( “The fact that Nixon resigned in disgrace damaged the Republican Party.”) Re-word as “Nixon resigned in disgrace, damaging the Republican Party.” Never use the hideous phrase due to the fact that.

In terms of.

This phrase is filler. Get rid of it. (“Bismarck was a success in terms of uniting Germany.) Rewrite as “Bismarck successfully united Germany.”

Attend carefully to the placement of this limiting word. Note, for example, these three sentences:

“The government only interred Japanese Americans during World War II.” “The government interred only Japanese Americans during World War II.” “The government interred Japanese Americans only during World War II.”

The first limits the action to interring (as opposed to, say, killing); the second limits the group interred (i.e., not Italian Americans); the third limits the time of interring (i.e., not during other wars).

Thus and therefore.

More than likely, you have not earned these words and are implying that you have said more than you actually have. Use them sparingly, only when you are concluding a substantial argument with a significant conclusion.

Misuse of instead.

Instead is an adverb, not a conjunction. Consider this sentence: “Charles Beard argued that the framers of the constitution were not idealists, instead they promoted their economic interests.” Revise as “The framers of the constitution, Charles Beard argued, did not uphold ideals; instead , they promoted their economic interests.” Now the instead appears properly as an adverb. (Note also that the two clauses are now parallel—both contain transitive verbs.)

Essentially and basically.

These are usually either filler words (the written equivalent of “uh” or “um”) or weasel words that merely call attention to your vagueness, lack of conviction, or lazy unwillingness to qualify precisely. (“ Essentially , Churchill believed that Nazi Germany presented a grave danger to Britain.”) Delete essentially and basically unless you are writing about essences or bases.

Both share or both agree.

These are redundant. If two people share or agree , they are both involved by definition. (“Stalin and Mao both agreed that capitalism belonged in the dustbin of history.”) Delete both .

This word means one of a kind. It is an absolute. Something cannot be very unique, more unique, or somewhat unique.

Incredible.

In casual conversation incredible often means extraordinary, astonishing, or impressive (“Yesterday’s storm was incredible.”). To avoid confusion in historical prose, you should stick with the original meaning of incredible : not believable. If you write that “William Jennings Bryan gave incredible speeches,” you’re saying that you don’t believe his speeches, or that his audiences didn’t believe them at the time—in other words, that he appeared to be lying or mistaken. You probably mean that he gave great speeches. If you write that “It’s incredible that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor,” you’re calling into question the very existence of a historical event. You probably mean that the Japanese attack was unwise or reckless. English is rich with adjectives. Finding the best one forces you to think about what you really mean.

As a synonym for subject matter, bone of contention, reservation, or almost anything else vaguely associated with what you are discussing, the word issue has lost its meaning through overuse. (“There were many issues involved with Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb, and some historians have issues with his decision.”) Stop talking about issues and get to the point.

Beware of the word literally . It’s commonly misused, and you almost never need it in historical prose. Literally means actually, factually, exactly, directly, without metaphor. The careful writer would never say, “Roosevelt literally swamped Landon in the election of 1936.” One imagines Roosevelt (in his wheelchair no less!) dumping the hapless Landon off a pier in the Everglades on election night. The swamping was figurative, strictly a figure of speech. The adverb literally may also cause you trouble by falsely generalizing the coverage of your verb. “London was literally destroyed by the blitz.” This suggests that the whole city was destroyed, when, in fact, only parts were destroyed. Rewrite as “The blitz destroyed parts of London.” Now you’ve qualified properly (and gotten rid of the passive).

When you’re tempted to use this word, resist. Like issue , involve tells the reader too little. (“Erasmus was involved in the Renaissance.”) This statement could mean virtually anything. Delete it and discuss specifically what Erasmus said or did.

This is a fine old word with many precise meanings, but as an overused synonym for feature, side, or part, it is usually a sign of insipid prose (“Another aspect of the issues in this area is the fact that...”). Just get directly to the point.

Most good writers frown on the use of this word as a verb.(“Eisenhower’s military background impacted his foreign policy.”) Affected, influenced, or shaped would be better here. Impacted suggests painfully blocked wisdom teeth or feces. Had an impact is better than impacted , but is still awkward because impact implies a collision.

Here is another beloved but vapid word. (“Many factors led to the Reformation.”) Such a sentence usually opens a vague, boring, weaseling paragraph. If you believe (quite reasonably) that the Reformation had many causes, then start evaluating them.

Meaningful.

Overuse has drained the meaning from meaningful . (“Peter the Great took meaningful steps to westernize Russia.”) Just get to the point.

Interesting.

The adjective interesting is vague, overused, and does not earn its keep. (“Burckhardt had an interesting perspective on the Renaissance.”) This sentence is filler. Delete it and explain and analyze his perspective.

The events that transpired.

Your professor will gag on this one. Events take place or happen by definition, so the relative clause is redundant. Furthermore, most good writers do not accept transpire as a synonym for happen. Again, follow the old rule of thumb: Get right to the point, say what happened, and explain its significance. You don’t need any filler about events and transpiring .

The reason is because.

This phrase is awkward and redundant. Replace it with the reason is, or better still, simply delete it and get right to your reason.

For all intensive purposes.

The phrase is for all intents and purposes , and few good writers use it in formal prose anyway.

Take for granite.

This is an illiteracy. The phrase is “ take for granted .”

Should of/could of.

You mean should have or could have .

Center around.

Good writers frown on this phrase because it’s illogical and jarring. Use center on or center in. Attention to a small detail like this indicates that you’re thinking carefully about what you’re saying, so when the big problems confront you, you’ll be disciplined and ready.

Begs the question.

Recently, many people have started to use this phrase to mean raises, invites, or brings up the question. (“Stalin’s purges beg the question of whether he was paranoid.”) Actually, begging the question is the common logical fallacy of assuming your conclusion as part of your argument. (“In the late nineteenth century, many Americans moved to the cities because of urbanization.”) Note that the use of abstractions (e.g., urbanization) encourages begging the question . Understanding this fallacy is central to your education. The formal Latin term, petitio principii, is too fancy to catch on, so you need to preserve the simple English phrase. If something raises a question, just say so.

Historic/historical confusion.

Everything in the past or relating to the past is historical. Resist the media-driven hype that elevates the ordinary to the historic . (“A three-alarm fire last night destroyed the historic site of the first Portuguese-owned dry cleaners in Cleveland.”) Reserve the word historic for the genuinely important events, persons, or objects of the past. The Norman invasion of England in 1066 was indeed historic . Historically , historians have gathered annually for a historical convention; so far, none of the conventions has been historic .

Affect/effect confusion.

The chances are that the verb you want is affect , which means to have an influence on (“The Iranian hostage crisis affected [not effected] the presidential election of 1980”). Effect as a verb means to bring about or cause to exist ( effect change). Effect as a noun means result or consequence (“The effect of the Iranian hostage crisis on the election...”).

While/whereas confusion.

If you’re stressing contrast, the word you want is whereas . While stresses simultaneity. “Hobbes had a dismal view of human nature, whereas [not while] Rousseau believed that man had a natural sense of pity.”

It’s/its confusion.

This is the classic bonehead error. Note that the spell checker won’t help you. And remember— its’ is not a word at all.

Reign/rein confusion.

A queen reigns during her reign. You rein in a horse with reins.

Their/there/they’re confusion.

You do know the difference. Pay attention.

Everyday/every day confusion.

As an adjective, everyday (one word) means routine. If you wish to say that something happened on every successive day, then you need two words, the adjective every and the noun day . Note the difference in these two sentences: “Kant was famous for going on the same constitutional at the same time every day . For Kant, exercise and thinking were everyday activities.”

Refer/allude confusion.

To allude means to refer to indirectly or to hint at. The word you probably want in historical prose is refer , which means to mention or call direct attention to. “In the first sentence of the ‘Gettysburg Address’ Lincoln refers [not alludes ] to the fathers of the nation [he mentions them directly]; he alludes to the ‘Declaration of Independence’ [the document of four score and seven years earlier that comes to the reader’s mind, but that Lincoln doesn’t directly mention].”

Novel/book confusion.

Novel is not a synonym for book. A novel is a long work of fiction in prose. A historical monograph is not a novel —unless the historian is making everything up.

Than/then confusion.

This is an appalling new error. If you are making a comparison, you use the conjunction than . (“President Kennedy’s health was worse than [not then ] the public realized.”)

Lead/led confusion.

The past tense of the verb to lead is led (not lead ). “Sherman led [not lead ] a march to the sea.”

Lose/loose confusion.

The opposite of win is lose , not loose . “Supporters of the Equal Rights Amendment suspected that they would lose [not loose ] the battle to amend the constitution.”

However/but confusion.

However may not substitute for the coordinating conjunction but. (“Mussolini began his career as a socialist, but [not however ] he later abandoned socialism for fascism.”) The word however has many proper uses; however , [note the semicolon and comma] graceful writers use it sparingly.

Cite/site/sight confusion.

You cited a source for your paper; ancient Britons sited Stonehenge on a plain; Columbus’s lookout sighted land.

Conscience/conscious confusion.

When you wake up in the morning you are conscious , though your conscience may bother you if you’ve neglected to write your history paper.

Tenet/tenant confusion.

Your religion, ideology, or worldview all have tenets —propositions you hold or believe in. Tenants rent from landlords.

All are not/not all are confusion.

If you write, “ All the colonists did not want to break with Britain in 1776,” the chances are you really mean, “ Not all the colonists wanted to break with Britain in 1776.” The first sentence is a clumsy way of saying that no colonists wanted to break with Britain (and is clearly false). The second sentence says that some colonists did not want to break with Britain (and is clearly true, though you should go on to be more precise).

Nineteenth-century/nineteenth century confusion.

Historians talk a lot about centuries, so you need to know when to hyphenate them. Follow the standard rule: If you combine two words to form a compound adjective, use a hyphen, unless the first word ends in ly. (“ Nineteenth-century [hyphenated] steamships cut the travel time across the Atlantic.”) Leave out the hyphen if you’re just using the ordinal number to modify the noun century. (“In the nineteenth century [no hyphen] steamships cut the travel time across the Atlantic.”) By the way, while you have centuries in mind, don’t forget that the nineteenth century is the 1800s, not the 1900s. The same rule for hyphenating applies to middle-class and middle class —a group that historians like to talk about.

Bourgeois/bourgeoisie confusion.

Bourgeois is usually an adjective, meaning characteristic of the middle class and its values or habits. Occasionally, bourgeois is a noun, meaning a single member of the middle class. Bourgeoisie is a noun, meaning the middle class collectively. (“Marx believed that the bourgeoisie oppressed the proletariat; he argued that bourgeois values like freedom and individualism were hypocritical.”)

Your professor may ask you to analyze a primary document. Here are some questions you might ask of your document. You will note a common theme—read critically with sensitivity to the context. This list is not a suggested outline for a paper; the wording of the assignment and the nature of the document itself should determine your organization and which of the questions are most relevant. Of course, you can ask these same questions of any document you encounter in your research.

What exactly is the document (e.g., diary, king’s decree, opera score, bureaucratic memorandum, parliamentary minutes, newspaper article, peace treaty)?
Are you dealing with the original or with a copy? If it is a copy, how remote is it from the original (e.g., photocopy of the original, reformatted version in a book, translation)? How might deviations from the original affect your interpretation?
What is the date of the document?
Is there any reason to believe that the document is not genuine or not exactly what it appears to be?
Who is the author, and what stake does the author have in the matters discussed? If the document is unsigned, what can you infer about the author or authors?
What sort of biases or blind spots might the author have? For example, is an educated bureaucrat writing with third-hand knowledge of rural hunger riots?
Where, why, and under what circumstances did the author write the document?
How might the circumstances (e.g., fear of censorship, the desire to curry favor or evade blame) have influenced the content, style, or tone of the document?
Has the document been published? If so, did the author intend it to be published?
If the document was not published, how has it been preserved? In a public archive? In a private collection? Can you learn anything from the way it has been preserved? For example, has it been treated as important or as a minor scrap of paper?
Does the document have a boilerplate format or style, suggesting that it is a routine sample of a standardized genre, or does it appear out of the ordinary, even unique?
Who is the intended audience for the document?
What exactly does the document say? Does it imply something different?
If the document represents more than one viewpoint, have you carefully distinguished between the author’s viewpoint and those viewpoints the author presents only to criticize or refute?
In what ways are you, the historian, reading the document differently than its intended audience would have read it (assuming that future historians were not the intended audience)?
What does the document leave out that you might have expected it to discuss?
What does the document assume that the reader already knows about the subject (e.g., personal conflicts among the Bolsheviks in 1910, the details of tax farming in eighteenth-century Normandy, secret negotiations to end the Vietnam war)?
What additional information might help you better interpret the document?
Do you know (or are you able to infer) the effects or influences, if any, of the document?
What does the document tell you about the period you are studying?
If your document is part of an edited collection, why do you suppose the editor chose it? How might the editing have changed the way you perceive the document? For example, have parts been omitted? Has it been translated? (If so, when, by whom, and in what style?) Has the editor placed the document in a suggestive context among other documents, or in some other way led you to a particular interpretation?

Your professor may ask you to write a book review, probably of a scholarly historical monograph. Here are some questions you might ask of the book. Remember that a good review is critical, but critical does not necessarily mean negative. This list is not meant to be exhaustive, nor is it a suggested outline. Of course, you can ask these same questions of any secondary historical work, even if you’re not writing a review.

Who is the author, and what are his or her qualifications? Has the author written other books on the subject?
When was the book written, and how does it fit into the scholarly debate on the subject? For example, is Smith writing to refute that idiot Jones; to qualify the work of the competent but unimaginative Johnson; or to add humbly to the evidence presented by the redoubtable Brown’s classic study? Be sure not to confuse the author’s argument with those arguments he or she presents only to criticize later.
What is the book’s basic argument? (Getting this right is the foundation of your review.)
What is the author’s method? For example, does the author rely strictly on narrative and anecdotes, or is the book analytical in some way?
What kinds of evidence does the author use? For example, what is the balance of primary and secondary sources? Has the author done archival work? Is the source base substantial, or does it look thin? Is the author up-to-date in the scholarly literature?
How skillfully and imaginatively has the author used the evidence?
Does the author actually use all of the material in the bibliography, or is some of it there for display?
What sorts of explicit or implicit ideological or methodological assumptions does the author bring to the study? For example, does he or she profess bland objectivity? A Whig view of history? Marxism?
How persuasive is the author’s argument?
Is the argument new, or is it old wine in new bottles?
Is the argument important, with wide-ranging implications, or is it narrow and trivial?
Is the book well organized and skillfully written?
What is your overall critical assessment of the book?
What is the general significance, if any, of the book? (Make sure that you are judging the book that the author actually wrote, not complaining that the author should have written a different book.)

Here are some tips for those long, intimidating term papers or senior theses:

Start early. If you don’t, none of these tips will matter. Big trouble is looming if you don’t have a specific topic by the end of the first week. You should be delving into the sources during the second week.
Keep in mind all of the dos and don’ts in this booklet.
Work closely with your professor to assure that your topic is neither too broad nor too narrow.
Set up a schedule with your professor and check his or her policy about reading rough drafts or parts of rough drafts. Then keep your professor informed about what you’re doing. You don’t want any unpleasant surprises. You certainly don’t want to hear, “I haven’t seen you for weeks, and it sounds like you’re way off base. How can you possibly get this done with only two weeks left in the semester?”
Make an appointment with Kristin Strohmeyer, the history reference librarian in Burke Library. She will help you to find and use the appropriate catalogs and indexes.
Use your imagination in compiling a bibliography. Think of all of the possible key words and subjects that may lead you to material. If you find something really good, check the subjects under which it is cataloged. Comb the notes and bibliographies of books and articles you’ve already found.
Much of what you need will not be in our library, so get to know the friendly folks in the Interlibrary Loan department.
Start early. This can’t be said too often.
Use as many primary sources as you can.
Jot down your ideas as they come to you. You may not remember them later.
Take careful notes on your reading. Label your notes completely and precisely. Distinguish meticulously and systematically between what you are directly quoting and what you are summarizing in your own words. Unintended plagiarism is still plagiarism. Stay clean as a hound’s tooth. Write down not just the page of the quotation or idea, but also the whole run of pages where the matter is discussed. Reread all of your notes periodically to make sure that you still understand them and are compiling what you will need to write your paper. Err on the side of writing down more than you think you will need. Copious, precise notes won’t come back to haunt you; skimpy, vague notes will. Just accept that there is something anal about good note-taking.
If you take notes directly into your computer, they will be easy to index and pull up, but there are a couple of downsides. You will not be able to see all of them simultaneously, as you can note cards laid out on a big table. What you gain in ease of access may come at the price of losing the big picture. Also, if your notes are in your computer, you may be tempted to save time and thought by pasting many of them directly into your paper. Note cards encourage you to rethink and to rework your ideas into a unified whole.
Don’t start to write until you have a good outline.
Make sure that your paper has a thesis. (See the entry State a clear thesis. )
Check and recheck your facts.
Footnote properly. (See the entry Cite sources carefully .)
Save plenty of time to proofread.
Start early.

Top Ten Signs that you may be Writing a Weak History Paper

10. You’re overjoyed to find that you can fill the required pages by widening all margins.

9. You haven’t mentioned any facts or cited any sources for several paragraphs.

8. You find yourself using the phrase “throughout history mankind has...”

7. You just pasted in another 100 words of quotations.

6. You haven’t a clue about the content of your next paragraph.

5. You’re constantly clicking on The Britannica, Webster’s, and Bartlett’s.

4. Your writing tutor sneaks another look at her watch as she reminds you for the third time to clarify your thesis.

3. Your main historical actors are this, it, they, the people, and society, and they are all involved with factors, aspects, impacts, and issues.

2. You just realize that you don’t understand the assignment, but it’s 3:00 A.M, the paper is due at 9:00, and you don’t dare call your professor.

1. You’re relieved that the paper counts for only 20 percent of the course grade.

Final Advice

You guessed it — start early.

Studying History at Hamilton

Students will learn to use interdisciplinary methods from the humanities and social sciences to probe the sources of the past for answers to present questions. They will learn to draw comparisons and connections among diverse societies across a range of historical eras. They will further learn to convey their findings through writing that is clearly structured, precise, and persuasive.

Tutor Appointments

Peer tutor and consultant appointments are managed through TracCloud (login required). Find resources and more information about the ALEX centers using the following links.

Office / Department Name

Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center

Contact Name

Jennifer Ambrose

Writing Center Director

Help us provide an accessible education, offer innovative resources and programs, and foster intellectual exploration.

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19 Standards of Historical Writing

In this chapter, you will learn the basic expectations for writing an undergrad history research paper. At this point in your college career, you’ve likely had a great deal of instruction about writing and you may be wondering why this chapter is here. There are at least three reasons:

For some of you, those lessons about writing came before you were ready to appreciate or implement them. If you know your writing skills are weak, you should not only pay close attention to this chapter, but also submit early drafts of your work to the History Tutoring Center (at UTA) or another writing coach. Only practice and multiple drafts will improve those skills.
Those of you who were paying attention in composition courses know the basics, but may lack a good understanding of the format and approach of scholarly writing in history. Other disciplines permit more generalities and relaxed associations than history, which is oriented toward specific contexts and (often, but not always) linear narratives. Moreover, because historians work in a subject often read by non-academics, they place a greater emphasis on clearing up jargon and avoiding convoluted sentence structure. In other words, the standards of historical writing are high and the guidelines that follow will help you reach them.
Every writer, no matter how confident or experienced, faces writing blocks. Going back to the fundamental structures and explanations may help you get past the blank screen by supplying prompts to help you get started.

As you read the following guide, keep in mind that it represents only our perspective on the basic standards. In all writing, even history research papers, there is room for stylistic variation and elements of a personal style. But one of the standards of historical writing is that only those who fully understand the rules can break them successfully. If you regularly violate the rule against passive voice verb construction or the need for full subject-predicate sentences, you cannot claim the use of sentence fragments or passive voice verbs is “just your style.” Those who normally observe those grammatical rules, in contrast, might on occasion violate them for effect. The best approach is first to demonstrate to your instructor that you can follow rules of grammar and essay structure before you experiment or stray too far from the advice below.

Introductions

Introductions are nearly impossible to get right the first time. Thus, one of the best strategies for writing an introduction to your history essay is to keep it “bare bones” in the first draft, initially working only toward a version that covers the basic requirements. After you’ve written the full paper (and realized what you’re really trying to say, which usually differs from your initial outline), you can come back to the intro and re-draft it accordingly. However, don’t use the likelihood of re-writing your first draft to avoid writing one. Introductions provide templates not only for your readers, but also for you, the writer. A decent “bare bones” introduction can minimize writer’s block as a well-written thesis statement provides a road map for each section of the paper.

So what are the basic requirements? In an introduction, you must:

Pose a worthwhile question or problem that engages your reader
Establish that your sources are appropriate for answering the question, and thus that you are a trustworthy guide without unfair biases
Convince your reader that they will be able to follow your explanation by laying out a clear thesis statement.

Engaging readers in an introduction

When you initiated your research, you asked questions as a part of the process of narrowing your topic (see the “Choosing and Narrowing a Topic” chapter for more info). If all went according to plan, the information you found as you evaluated your primary sources allowed you to narrow your question further, as well as arrive at a plausible answer, or explanation for the problem you posed. (If it didn’t, you’ll need to repeat the process, and either vary your questions or expand your sources. Consult your instructor, who can help identify what contribution your research into a set of primary sources can achieve.) The key task for your introduction is to frame your narrowed research question—or, in the words of some composition instructors, the previously assumed truth that your inquiries have destabilized—in a way that captures the attention of your readers. Common approaches to engaging readers include:

Telling a short story (or vignette) from your research that illustrates the tension between what readers might have assumed before reading your paper and what you have found to be plausible instead.
Stating directly what others believe to be true about your topic—perhaps using a quote from a scholar of the subject—and then pointing immediately to an aspect of your research that puts that earlier explanation into doubt.
Revealing your most unexpected finding, before moving to explain the source that leads you to make the claim, then turning to the ways in which this finding expands our understanding of your topic.

What you do NOT want to do is begin with a far-reaching transhistorical claim about human nature or an open-ended rhetorical question about the nature of history. Grand and thus unprovable claims about “what history tells us” do not inspire confidence in readers. Moreover, such broadly focused beginnings require too much “drilling down” to get to your specific area of inquiry, words that risk losing readers’ interest. Last, beginning with generic ideas is not common to the discipline. Typical essay structures in history do not start broadly and steadily narrow over the course of the essay, like a giant inverted triangle. If thinking in terms of a geometric shape helps you to conceptualize what a good introduction does, think of your introduction as the top tip of a diamond instead. In analytical essays based on research, many history scholars begin with the specific circumstances that need explaining, then broaden out into the larger implications of their findings, before returning to the specifics in their conclusions—following the shape of a diamond.

Clear Thesis Statements

Under the standards of good scholarly writing in the United States—and thus those that should guide your paper—your introduction contains the main argument you will make in your essay. Elsewhere—most commonly in European texts—scholars sometimes build to their argument and reveal it fully only in the conclusion. Do not follow this custom in your essay. Include a well-written thesis statement somewhere in your introduction; it can be the first sentence of your essay, toward the end of the first paragraph, or even a page or so in, should you begin by setting the stage with a vignette. Wherever you place it, make sure your thesis statement meets the following standards:

A good thesis statement :

Could be debated by informed scholars : Your claim should not be so obvious as to be logically impossible to argue against. Avoid the history equivalent of “the sky was blue.”
Can be proven with the evidence at hand : In the allotted number of pages, you will need to introduce and explain at least three ways in which you can support your claim, each built on its own pieces of evidence. Making an argument about the role of weather on the outcome of the Civil War might be intriguing, given that such a claim questions conventional explanations for the Union’s victory. But a great deal of weather occurred in four years and Civil War scholars have established many other arguments you would need to counter, making such an argument impossible to establish in the length of even a long research paper. But narrowing the claim—to a specific battle or from a single viewpoint—could make such an argument tenable. Often in student history papers, the thesis incorporates the main primary source into the argument. For example, “As his journal and published correspondence between 1861 and 1864 reveal, Colonel Mustard believed that a few timely shifts in Tennessee’s weather could have altered the outcome of the war.”
Is specific without being insignificant : Along with avoiding the obvious, stay away from the arcane. “Between 1861 and 1864, January proved to be the worst month for weather in Central Tennessee.” Though this statement about the past is debatable and possible to support with evidence about horrible weather in January and milder-by-comparison weather in other months, it lacks import because it’s not connected to knowledge that concerns historians. Thesis statements should either explicitly or implicitly speak to current historical knowledge—which they can do by refining, reinforcing, nuancing, or expanding what (an)other scholar(s) wrote about a critical event or person.
P rovide s a “roadmap” to readers : Rather than just state your main argument, considering outlining the key aspects of it, each of which will form a main section of the body of the paper. When you echo these points in transitions between sections, readers will realize they’ve completed one aspect of your argument and are beginning a new part of it. To demonstrate this practice by continuing the fictional Colonel Mustard example above: “As his journal and published correspondence between 1861 and 1864 reveals, Colonel Mustard believed that Tennessee’s weather was critical to the outcome of the Civil War. He linked both winter storms and spring floods in Tennessee to the outcome of key battles and highlighted the weather’s role in tardy supply transport in the critical year of 1863.” Such a thesis cues the reader that evidence and explanations about 1) winter storms; 2) spring floods; and 3) weather-slowed supply transport that will form the main elements of the essay.

Thesis Statement Practice

More Thesis Statement Practice

The Body of the Paper

What makes a good paragraph.

While an engaging introduction and solid conclusion are important, the key to drafting a good essay is to write good paragraphs. That probably seems obvious, but too many students treat paragraphs as just a collection of a few sentences without considering the logic and rules that make a good paragraph. In essence, in a research paper such as the type required in a history course, for each paragraph you should follow the same rules as the paper itself. That is, a good paragraph has a topic sentence, evidence that builds to make a point, and a conclusion that ties the point to the larger argument of the paper. On one hand, given that it has so much work to do, paragraphs are three sentences , at a minimum . On the other hand, because paragraphs should be focused to making a single point, they are seldom more than six to seven sentences . Though rules about number of sentences are not hard and fast, keeping the guidelines in mind can help you construct tightly focused paragraphs in which your evidence is fully explained.

Topic sentences

The first sentence of every paragraph in a research paper (or very occasionally the second) should state a claim that you will defend in the paragraph . Every sentence in the paragraph should contribute to that topic. If you read back over your paragraph and find that you have included several different ideas, the paragraph lacks focus. Go back, figure out the job that this paragraph needs to do—showing why an individual is important, establishing that many accept an argument that you plan on countering, explaining why a particular primary source can help answer your research question, etc. Then rework your topic sentence until it correctly frames the point you need to make. Next, cut out (and likely move) the sentences that don’t contribute to that outcome. The sentences you removed may well help you construct the next paragraph, as they could be important ideas, just not ones that fit with the topic of the current paragraph. Every sentence needs to be located in a paragraph with a topic sentence that alerts the reader about what’s to come.

Transitions/Bridges/Conclusion sentences in paragraphs

All good writers help their readers by including transition sentences or phrases in their paragraphs, often either at the paragraph’s end or as an initial phrase in the topic sentence. A transition sentence can either connect two sections of the paper or provide a bridge from one paragraph to the next. These sentences clarify how the evidence discussed in the paragraph ties into the thesis of the paper and help readers follow the argument. Such a sentence is characterized by a clause that summarizes the info above, and points toward the agenda of the next paragraph. For example, if the current section of your paper focused on the negative aspects of your subject’s early career, but your thesis maintains he was a late-developing military genius, a transition between part one (on the negative early career) and part two (discussing your first piece of evidence revealing genius) might note that “These initial disastrous strategies were not a good predictor of General Smith’s mature years, however, as his 1841 experience reveals.” Such a sentence underscores for the reader what has just been argued (General Smith had a rough start) and sets up what’s to come (1841 was a critical turning point).

Explaining Evidence

Just as transitional sentences re-state points already made for clarity’s sake, “stitching” phrases or sentences that set-up and/or follow quotations from sources provide a certain amount of repetition. Re-stating significant points of analysis using different terms is one way you explain your evidence. Another way is by never allowing a quote from a source to stand on its own, as though its meaning was self-evident. It isn’t and indeed, what you, the writer, believes to be obvious seldom is. When in doubt, explain more.

For more about when to use a quotation and how to set it up see “How to quote” in the next section on Notes and Quotation.”

Conclusio ns

There exists one basic rule for conclusions: Summarize the paper you have written . Do not introduce new ideas, launch briefly into a second essay based on a different thesis, or claim a larger implication based on research not yet completed. This final paragraph is NOT a chance to comment on “what history tells us” or other lessons for humankind. Your conclusion should rest, more or less, on your thesis, albeit using different language from the introduction and evolved, or enriched, by examples discussed throughout the paper. Keep your conclusion relevant and short, and you’ll be fine.

For a checklist of things you need before you write or a rubric to evaluate your writing click here

How History is Made: A Student’s Guide to Reading, Writing, and Thinking in the Discipline Copyright © 2022 by Stephanie Cole; Kimberly Breuer; Scott W. Palmer; and Brandon Blakeslee is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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The Oxford Handbook of Women and the Economy

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26 Gender: A Historical Perspective

Paola Giuliano, University of California, Los Angeles

Published: 06 September 2017
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Social attitudes toward women vary significantly across societies. This chapter reviews recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies, and how these differences are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. We also discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly.

Social attitudes toward women and their role in society show remarkable differences across countries, including those with similar institutions or economic development. Standard economic variables such as the level of development, women’s education, fertility and marriage/divorce prospects, and the expansion of the service sector have been widely studied (see Goldin 1990 for a review). Some scholars have emphasized the role played by market prices, such as the decline in child care costs ( Attanasio, Low, and Sanchez-Marcos 2008 ), and by technological factors, such as the invention of baby formula ( Albanesi and Olivetti 2016 ). A recent literature has emphasized how this large variation could be the result of differences in cultural beliefs about the appropriate role of women in society ( Fernandez 2007 ; Fernandez and Fogli 2010 ; Bertrand, Kamenica, and Pan 2015 ). Several new contributions have started to study the deep historical roots of these cultural differences (see Nunn 2009 for a review).

This chapter will review the literature on the long-term historical origins of the differences in gender roles and gender gaps across societies and how they are transmitted from parents to children and therefore persist until today. We will review work on the historical origin of differences in female labor force participation, fertility, education, marriage arrangements, competitive attitudes, domestic violence, and other forms of difference in gender norms (such as the presence of the dowry vs. the bride price and differences in inheritance rules favoring women). 1

We will also discuss how relatively short-term historical shocks can help in understanding differences in gender roles across societies. Finally, we will discuss the conditions under which gender norms either tend to be stable or change more quickly.

Historical Origin of Gender Roles

In this section, we will look at seven important long-term historical determinants of gender roles: agricultural technology, language, geography, preindustrial societal characteristics, family structures, religion, and historical shocks.

Agriculture and Agricultural Technology

A recent literature has emphasized how differences in agricultural technology or, more simply, a long history of agriculture can have long-lasting effects on the evolution of gender role attitudes. Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) study the historical persistence of differences in female labor force participation. The hypothesis for their empirical analysis comes from the seminal work of Ester Boserup (1970) , in which she argued that differences in the role of women in societies originate in the different types of agricultural technology, particularly the differences between shifting and plough agriculture. Shifting agriculture, which uses hand-held tools like the hoe and the digging stick, is labor intensive, with women actively participating in farm work, while using a plough to prepare the soil is more capital intensive. Unlike the hoe or digging stick, the plough requires significant upper-body strength, grip strength, and bursts of power to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it. Farming with the plough is also less compatible with child care, which is almost always the responsibility of women. As a result, men in societies characterized by plough agriculture tended to specialize in agricultural work outside the home, while women specialized in activities within the home. In turn, this division of labor generated a norm that the natural place for women is in the home. This belief tends to persist even if the economy moves out of agriculture, affecting the participation of women in activities performed outside the home, including market employment, entrepreneurship, and politics.

The authors document a very strong negative correlation between traditional use of the plough and female participation in agriculture in preindustrial societies, using the Ethnographic Atlas , a dataset assembled by George Peter Murdock in 1967 and containing ethnographic information for 1,265 ethnic groups covering the whole world. To investigate whether plough-based agriculture correlates with lower female participation in all agricultural tasks or only in a few (such as soil preparation), the authors report results on specific activities carried out in the field or outside the home: land clearance, soil preparation, planting, crop tending, harvesting, caring for small and large animals, milking, cooking, fuel gathering, water fetching, burden carrying, handicraft production, and trading. Their empirical analysis carefully controls for other variables that could be correlated with plough use and gender roles: the presence of large domesticated animals, a measure of economic development, the fraction of land on which the ethnic group lives defined as tropical or subtropical, and the fraction of land that is defined as suitable for agriculture. Overall, the authors find that plough use is associated with less female participation in all agricultural tasks, with the largest declines in soil preparation, planting, crop tending, and burden carrying. But they find that plough use tends not to be significantly correlated with female participation in other activities. This interpretation of the correlations is fully consistent with Boserup’s hypothesis.

After looking at the correlation between agricultural technology and female participation in agriculture in preindustrial societies, Alesina et al. (2013) study whether differences in agriculture technology still have an impact on female labor force participation today. A correlation between female labor force participation in agriculture and agricultural technology in the past does not necessarily imply that differences in historical agriculture technology affect female labor force participation today. Goldin and Sokoloff (1984) , for example, document that within the northeastern United States, the low relative productivity of women and children in agriculture (and their low participation in this sector) allowed them to participate in the manufacturing sector. In this setting, initial female labor force participation in agriculture is inversely related to subsequent participation in manufacturing, resulting in a lack of continuity of female labor force participation over time as industrialization occurred. An interpretation based on social norms could, however, help explain long-term persistence.

At the country level, 2 the authors look at differences in female labor force participation but also at two other measures that could reflect cultural attitudes and beliefs about the role of women in society: a measure of entrepreneurship (the share of firms with a woman among the principal owners) and a measure of the presence of women in national politics (the proportion of parliamentary seats held by women). In countries with a tradition of plough use, women are less likely to participate in the labor market, own firms, and participate in national politics. 3

To further limit endogeneity concerns, the authors also provide instrumental variable estimates. To construct their instrument, they exploit the variation in historic plough use that arose from differences in societies’ geo-climatic conditions, which affected whether crops that potentially benefited from the plough were cultivated. As Pryor (1985) explains, because of differences in the length of the cropping season, the amount of land required for cultivation, and the characteristics of the soil (slope, depth, rockiness, etc.), crops differ significantly in the extent to which the use of the plough improves productivity. In his study, Pryor identifies crops as being either plough positive (cultivation greatly benefits from the plough) or plough negative (cultivation benefits less from the plough). 4 The identification strategy relies on the assumption that, holding constant overall crop productivity (which they control for), the distinction between plough-positive and plough-negative geo-climatic environments only impacts gender roles through the plough. The primary concern with this strategy is that the difference between plough-positive and plough-negative environments may be correlated with geographic features that affect gender attitudes today through channels other than the plough. The authors check the robustness of their results to this concern by controlling for geographic characteristics that are potentially correlated with the suitability of the environment for plough-positive and plough-negative crops (terrain slope, soil depth, average temperature, and average precipitation of locations inhabited by each country’s ancestors). The IV estimates confirm the ordinary least squares results.

In addition to determining labor force participation, differences in agricultural technology can influence social norms more broadly. Boserup (1970) indeed hints at the possibility that plough societies developed different social norms and marital arrangements compatible with a different value of women in society. Her idea was not new, as anthropologists have long posited that the origins of household formation rules relate to both technology and productivity. According to Aberle (1961 , 725), “the origins of matrilineal systems are probably to be sought in technology, division of labour, types of subsistence activities and the ecological niches in which these activities occur.” Goody (1976) has linked the demand for wives to the productivity of women in agriculture: in female farming communities, a man with more than one wife can cultivate more land than a man with only one wife. Therefore, polygamy is expected to be more common in societies with shifting cultivation. Finally, in societies in which women do most of the agricultural work, it is the bridegroom who must pay bride-wealth, while in societies in which women are less engaged in agriculture, marriage payments usually come from the bride’s family.

To explore this hypothesis, Giuliano (2015) looks at the correlation between historical plough use and whether the dowry is the most prevalent mode of marriage, whether the inheritance rule in a society is matrilineal, and if polygamy is prevalent. 5 She finds that in societies that used the plough, (1) inheritance rules appear to be less favorable to women—as indicated by the fact that matrilineality is less common, (2) there is less polygamy, and (3) a dowry is paid by the bride’s family. After establishing a correlation for the past, the author shows that differences in agricultural technology have a persistent effect on social norms, lasting until today. Using data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Gender, Institutions, and Development Database, she finds that societies that historically used the plough are characterized by higher parental authority granted to the father, by inheritance rules that favor male heirs, and by less freedom for women to move outside the house. She also finds that, in these societies, women are more likely to wear a veil in public and polygamy is less accepted or illegal. 6

Various reasons could explain the persistent effect of differences in agricultural technology on gender outcomes today. For example, underlying cultural traits may be reinforced by policies, laws, and institutions that affect the benefits of beliefs about gender inequality. A society with traditional beliefs about gender inequality may perpetuate these beliefs by institutionalizing unequal property rights, voting rights, and so on. Beliefs about gender inequality may also cause a society to specialize in capital-intensive industries, which in turn decreases the relative cost of gender inequality norms, thereby perpetuating them. A third explanation is that cultural beliefs are inherently sticky. Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn ( 2011 , 2013 ) present evidence consistent with this last interpretation. Looking at children of immigrants in the United States and Europe, they test for a relationship between traditional plough agriculture and cultural beliefs while holding constant the external environment. They do find a high degree of persistence in cultural traits.

Additional evidence on how variation in agriculture could affect labor productivity and, subsequently, gender differences comes from Qian (2008) . She studies economic reforms in China in the late 1970s that made growing cash crops more lucrative. During the Maoist era, centrally planned production targets focused on staple crops. In the early reform era (1978–1980), reforms increased the return to cash crops, which included tea and orchards. Men and women specialize in the production of different crops: women have a comparative advantage in picking tea leaves, which are delicate and grow on short bushes, whereas men, due to their height and strength, specialize in picking fruit from trees. Qian (2008) compares the impact of the economic reforms in tea-growing regions, where female labor productivity, especially, should have risen, and in regions specializing in fruit orchards, where male labor productivity should have risen most. In tea-growing regions, the reforms led to fewer so-called missing girls, consistent with families having fewer sex-selective abortions of female fetuses or engaging in less neglect and infanticide of girls. The mechanism Qian puts forward is that when women’s share of household income increases, their gender preferences have a higher weight in household decision making.

Rather than looking at differences in type of agriculture, Hansen, Jensen, and Skovsgaard (2015) make a more general point about the relevance of agriculture, hypothesizing that societies with long histories of agriculture have less gender equality as a consequence of more patriarchal values and beliefs regarding the proper role of women in society. Their research is motivated by the idea that patriarchy originated in the Neolithic Revolution—the prehistoric transition from a hunter-gatherer to an agricultural society—and that patriarchal values and beliefs have persisted and become more ingrained in countries with long histories of agriculture. Agricultural societies were more gender biased than hunter-gatherer societies. Population growth and land scarcity made cultivation of food more labor intensive, which created “a premium on male brawn in plowing and other heavy farm work” ( Iversen and Rosenbluth 2010 , 32). This led to a division of labor within the family, in which the man used his physical strength in food production and the woman took care of childrearing, cooking, and other family-related duties. This increased the male’s bargaining power within the family, which, over generations, translated into norms and behavior that shaped cultural beliefs about gender roles.

An alternative mechanism builds on the work by Iversen and Rosenbluth (2010) , who emphasize the task division within the household. They note that evidence suggests that hunter-gatherer societies were characterized by more independent women as compared to agricultural societies. First, some evidence from present-day hunter-gatherers indicates that the gathering activity of women provides more than half of the daily caloric intake of their communities. Second, meat, as provided by male hunting activity, may not have been strictly necessary for survival; gathered food served as an independent and more secure source of calories.

Using a world sample, a European regional sample, and a sample of children of immigrants living in the United States, the authors find a negative association between the number of years that a country had been an agrarian society in 1500 ce and contemporary measures of gender equality, including female labor force participation, number of years since women gained suffrage, and percentage of seats in parliament held by women.

Another interesting aspect of the long-term persistence of gender roles is the relation between grammatical gender marking and female participation in the labor market, the credit market, land ownership, and politics ( Gay, Santacreu-Vasut, and Shoham 2013 ). The grammatical features of a language are inherited from the distant past and the gender system is one of the most stable linguistic features, surviving for thousands of years. Gay et al. (2013) broadly follow Whorf (1956 , 55):

[One is] inclined to think of language simply as a technique of expression, and not to realize that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily expressible by the type of symbolic means that language employs.

In linguistics, a grammatical gender system is defined as a set of rules for agreement that depends on nouns of different types. 7 Gay et al. (2013) rely on the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures , the most comprehensive data source of grammatical structures, and use four very stable grammatical variables related to gender: the number of genders in the language, whether the gender system is sex based, rules for gender assignment, and gender distinctions in pronouns. The authors construct the gender intensity index by summing these features for the most commonly spoken language in a country.

Using cross-country and individual-level data, they find that women speaking languages that more pervasively mark gender distinctions are less likely to participate in economic and political activities and more likely to encounter barriers in their access to land and credit. The authors also investigate a sample of immigrants living in the United States—that is, all facing the same institutional and labor market environment—and find consistent results.

Galor, Ozak, and Sarid (2016) also study the emergence of sex-based gender systems in languages and their effects on behavior. They advance the hypothesis and establish empirically that variation in caloric suitability for plough-positive/negative crops affects the emergence of grammatical gender in a language. 8 They also explore the relationship between linguistic and cultural traits and test whether their coevolution contributed to the stability and persistence of cultural characteristics and their lasting effect on gender differences. Their hypothesis is that preindustrial characteristics that were conducive to the emergence and progression of complementary cultural traits triggered an evolutionary process in language structures that has fostered the transmission of these cultural traits. In a society characterized by distinct gender roles and by gender biases, grammatical gender that fortified the existing social structure and cultural norms may have emerged and persisted over time. Moreover, agricultural characteristics that were complementary to the use of the plough and therefore to distinct gender roles in society may have fostered the emergence and prevalence of grammatical gender. Galor et al. (2016) test this hypothesis in two stages. In the initial stage, the empirical analysis explores the origins of language structures, focusing on the geographical roots of sex-based grammatical gender systems. In the second stage, the empirical analysis examines the effects of language structures on contemporary economic outcomes. The authors show that second-generation female immigrants who speak a language that has grammatical gender have a lower probability of attending college. Although the authors look at immigrants to show that there is cultural persistence over time, their identification strategy is an improvement over previous papers. Since they identify immigrants using the language spoken at home, they can control not only for country-of-destination fixed effects but also for country-of-origin fixed effects, allowing a better identification of the importance of historical characteristics (as represented by language) to female outcomes today.

A long-term determinant of differences in gender roles can be found in geography. In a fascinating paper, Carranza (2014) , having pointed out that soil texture, which varies exogenously, determines the workability of the soil and the technology used in land preparation, uses this as a lens to look at differences in female labor force participation in India. She distinguishes between loamy and clayey soil textures. 9 Deep tillage, possible in loamy but not in clayey soil textures, reduces the need for transplanting, fertilizing, and weeding, activities typically performed by women ( Basant 1987 ). 10 In areas where deep tillage is required, the lower demand for female labor relative to the demand for male labor is expected to have a negative impact on the perceived relative value of girls to a household ( Boserup 1970 ).

Carranza (2014) finds that soil texture explains a large part of the variation in women’s relative participation in agriculture. The author goes further and examines the impact of geography on the infant sex ratio, perhaps the most extreme indicator of gender-based discrimination. Because relatively smaller female labor contributions in loamy areas make girls relatively more costly, the ratio of girls to boys will be negatively related to the difference between the fractions of loamy and clayey soils. Sex ratios and female labor force participation in India today show a large geographical heterogeneity, even within the same state and cultural region. These differences within the same state are not driven by alternative mechanisms, including cultural, social, economic, or policy variables ( Dyson and Moore 1983 ; Agnihotri 1996 ).

Carranza (2014) estimates that soil texture explains 62 percent of the within-state variation in female agricultural labor force participation and 70 percent of the variation in the sex ratio for 0- to 6-year-olds. A 10-percentage-point greater fraction of loamy relative to clayey soils is associated with a 5.1 percent lower share of female agricultural laborers and a 2.7 percent lower ratio of female to male children. The relationship between soil texture, relative female labor force participation, and the ratio of female to male children did not change significantly between 1961 and 2001.

Preindustrial Societal Characteristics

Preindustrial social characteristics can have a persistent effect on gender roles. Among the most studied are the practice of matrilineality, modes of residence after marriage, and the dowry versus the bride price.

Matrilineality

Matrilineality refers to the fact that lineage and inheritance are traced through female members. This can affect the residential patterns of married couples (in matrilineal societies, it is more common for the married couple to reside in the wife’s natal home with her mother) and the inheritance of property (with property handed down from women to their daughters and granddaughters and from men to their sisters’ sons).

Matrilineality can improve women’s outcomes for a variety of reasons. Women in matrilineal societies have greater access to land and other assets, either through direct inheritance and ownership or through greater access to the possessions of the large matriclan. This makes them less reliant on their husbands and less vulnerable in the case of a husband’s death. Women in matrilineal systems have continued kin support, either by living with or near their own family after marriage or through ongoing connections maintained by matrilineal kinship. They are also likely to have greater intrahousehold bargaining power vis-à-vis their husbands and have greater exit options than patrilineal women. These differences are amplified when a couple resides matrilocally and a woman is surrounded by her family.

The difference between matrilineal and patrilineal kinship systems have wide implications for gender roles, including differences in competition ( Gneezy, Leonard, and List 2009 ), spatial ability ( Hoffman, Gneezy, and List, 2011 ), risk aversion and contribution in dictator games ( Gong and Yan, 2012 ; Gong, Yan, and Yang , 2015 ), political participation ( Gottlieb and Robinson 2016 ), and social interactions between family members ( Lowes 2016 ). 11

Gneezy et al. (2009) study how competitiveness among women varies between a patriarchal society (the Maasai in Tanzania) and a matrilineal and matrilocal society (the Khasi in northeast India). Among the Maasai, the most important distinctions between men are age based and almost all wealth is in cattle. The age structure prevents men from marrying until they are roughly 30, and polygamy is the most common form of marriage. Therefore, the average Maasai woman is married to a much older man who has multiple wives.

For the Khasi, inheritance and clan membership always follow the female lineage. Family life is organized around the mother’s house, which is headed by the grandmother, who lives with her unmarried daughters, her youngest daughter, her youngest daughter’s children, and any unmarried, divorced, or widowed brothers and sons. The youngest daughter never leaves and eventually becomes the head of the household; older daughters usually form separate households adjacent to their mother’s household. Furthermore, a woman never joins the household of her husband’s family and a man usually leaves his mother’s household to join his wife’s household. Sometimes a man practices duolocal marriage, living in both his mother’s and his wife’s households, but even when residing with his wife’s family, he spends much of his time in his mother’s or sisters’ households.

These two societies’ differences in societal structure are reflected in substantial differences in gender competition in an experimental setting. Maasai and Khasi subjects were given a choice to either partake in a ball-throwing game without competition or to compete with an anonymous person from the same village playing the same game, with the winner receiving all the benefits. 12 Among the Maasai, 50 percent of men chose to compete versus only 26 percent of women, a result similar to that in Western cultures, where patrilineal systems were historically more common. The result is reversed in the matrilineal society, where women were more competitive than men: 54 percent of Khasi women chose to compete versus only 39 percent of Khasi men.

These results shed light on the debate on whether the underlying sources of the observed gender differences in competition are attributable to nature or nurture or some combination of both. One possibility is that differences in competition are primarily attributable to the genetic differences between the sexes. An alternative hypothesis is that gender differences are culture specific—determined by the different social and economic functions of men and women in a society. The fact that women in different environments show different propensities to compete rules out the possibility that women are naturally less competitive. Gneezy et al. (2009) consider their results broadly in line with the importance of nurture. This explanation is consistent with Boyd and Richerson (2005) , who argued that social learning is the most important channel of cultural transmission compared to explicit training or socialization; individuals choose to copy successful individuals as much, if not more, than common individuals. This type of learning is called prestige-based learning. Khasi women would therefore decide to imitate older women in their household or successful women in their village. The Khasi institutions of matrilocal residence and matrilineal inheritance, in other words, could carry out the role of prestige-based learning in generating cultural transmission of differences in gender roles.

Hoffman et al. (2011) use a research approach similar to Gneezy et al. (2009) to study how differences in societal structure can influence a gender gap in spatial reasoning (measured by the time needed to solve a puzzle), a skill that has been shown to correlate with success in engineering courses, as well as the decision to major in physical sciences ( Humphreys, Lubinski, and Yao 1993 ). Spatial reasoning is measured by the time needed to solve a puzzle. Hoffman et al. (2011) show that women’s disadvantage disappears when they move from a patrilineal society (the Karbi) to a matrilineal society (the Khasi). Men take 36.4 percent less time than women in the patrilineal society but are no faster than women in the matrilineal society.

Gong et al. ( 2012 , 2015 ) study the importance of belonging to a matrilineal society in contributions in a dictator game and in risk aversion. The authors collect evidence on behavior for the matrilineal Mosuo and the patrilineal Yi societies. 13 The authors find that among the Mosuo, men contribute more in dictator games than women do—a pattern opposite that observed in Western societies—whereas there are no gender differences in the Yi society. Men are less risk averse in both the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, with the gender gap being smaller among the Mosuo, and the Mosuo are less risk averse than the Yi in general. These differences, according to the authors, could be the result of different family structures. The Mosuo have bigger families with more adult members; in case of disability, a Mosuo woman has her sisters, brothers, mother, and mother’s siblings all living in the same household to take care of her children. A Yi woman, on the other hand, does not have such security; in case of invalidity, the next female caretakers in line for one’s children will be her sisters-in-law, who are biologically unrelated to her children and live in a separate household. Such differences in family structure can be important in explaining the ethnic difference in gender differences. The ranking of education exactly mimics the ranking in risk aversion. Yi women have the least education and the gender difference in education is bigger for the Yi than for the Mosuo. Mosuo men take the least economic responsibility for the household and also are the least risk averse.

Gottlieb and Robinson (2016) compare the civic and political behavior of men and women in matrilineal groups to those in patrilineal groups. They match data on political opinions from the Afrobarometer to information about the historical social structure of each ethnicity from the Ethnographic Atlas . Their cross-country analysis finds that the gender gap in political engagement, political participation, and civic participation is significantly smaller in matrilineal groups than in patrilineal ones.

To understand the mechanisms driving the results, the authors use data on Malawi, a country with both patrilineal (Mpezeni Ngoni and Tumbuka) and matrilineal ethnicities (Chewa, Lomwe, Mapeza Ngoni, and Yao) and which presents variation in access to land and matrilocal residence, allowing the authors to investigate whether it is the short-term access to resources or the long-term expectation of resource entitlements that mostly determines female empowerment. 14

After documenting differences in matrilocality and land inheritance, the authors study the effects of these factors on women’s outcomes. They use three indicators for women’s empowerment: marriage exit options, social independence, and financial autonomy. Marriage exit options are measured by the probability that a woman can say that she can leave her husband for a variety of reasons. Social independence is measured using two questions asking whether it is acceptable for a woman to go to the market or to the clinic without her husband’s permission. Financial autonomy is measured by a question asking whether the respondent had money of her own that she could spend without her husband’s knowledge. Matrilineal women were more likely to support women leaving their husbands and having financial autonomy, but they were less likely to support women’s social independence.

The authors examined two aspects of matrilineality: land inheritance and matrilocal residence. Both are associated with more support for women leaving their husbands and greater financial autonomy for women, but less support for women’s social independence. Between the two, however, land inheritance appears to be the main determinant of women’s empowerment. In addition, the negative results on social independence disappear when the authors control for wealth and education, variables that vary substantially between the two groups.

As a final step, the authors investigate whether it is short-term access to resources or longer-term expectation of resource entitlements that most affects female empowerment. The authors find that long-term expectation of land entitlement and security has a stronger effect than simply owning land. Therefore, a history of less gender disparity in access to resources over generations may affect present outcomes, having reduced gender differences over time.

While the study constitutes a systematic, cross-national study on the importance of matrilineal kinship on the status of women, its nature remains descriptive. The identification relies on the assumption that matrilineality kinships are exogenous to the outcomes of interest. However, it may be that more gender-equitable ethnic groups were more likely to adopt or retain matrilineality.

Lowes (2016) compares how matrilineal and patrilineal kinship systems affect intrahousehold cooperation. In matrilineal societies, the wife maintains close relations with her own lineage, rather than being incorporated into her husband’s lineage. This can translate into less altruism as a result of conflicting allegiances within the household. In addition, in matrilineal societies, women maintain greater control over their children since they belong to her lineage, not to her husband’s lineage. Having the children as part of a woman’s lineage may increase the value of her outside option, increase her relative bargaining power, and reduce spousal cooperation. To test these hypotheses, Lowes (2016) collects data from 320 matrilineal and patrilineal couples in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, approximately 40 percent of whom were from a matrilineal ethnic group. She finds that matrilineal individuals (both men and women) cooperate less with their spouses in a household public goods game and that these results are driven by opportunities to hide income. She also finds that when matrilineal individuals are paired with their spouses, they experience greater stress responses than patrilineal individuals do, as measured by an increase in skin conductance. In addition, she also finds that matrilineal women are better able to enact their preferences. Children of matrilineal women are healthier and better educated than children of patrilineal women. Finally, matrilineal individuals give less money to their spouses than patrilineal individuals do in a dictator game. Whereas patrilineal individuals are more generous with their spouses than they are with strangers, matrilineal individuals treat their spouses much as they treat strangers. Overall, matrilineal individuals are less altruistic toward their spouses because they maintain strong allegiances to their own lineage.

Matrilocality

Whereas most studies look at matrilineal systems in terms of inheritance along with residence choices after marriage, others investigate patrilocality in isolation, showing that alone it can give rise to differences in gender roles. In northern India, where the social structure is more patrilocal than in the south, gender inequality is more pronounced ( Jayachandran 2015 ). The mechanism behind it is that when a woman gets married, she ceases to be a member of her birth family and joins her husband’s family. Under this system, parents gain more returns to investment in a son’s health and education because he will remain a part of their family, whereas a daughter will physically and financially leave the household upon marriage.

Levine and Kevane (2003) study how investment in daughters varies based on residence after marriage. When parents know that their daughters will leave to live in other villages, their private return to investment in their daughters’ health or education might be expected to be lower than their private return to investment in their sons. Levine and Kevane (2003) study the virilocality hypothesis using data from Indonesia, a country where there is considerable variation in postmarriage residence. Indonesian groups can practice virilocality, ambilocality (residence with either set of parents), uxorilocality (residence with bride’s family), and neolocality (residence with neither set of parents). The authors did not find a strong correlation between virilocality and differential investment in daughters. They attribute that lack of results to the fact that residential norms are not very tight in Indonesia. The other interpretation is that it is a combination of norms—of which virilocality is only one—that reduces investment in daughters.

Bau (2016) studies the interaction of residential practices with policies and how this can affect gender differences. She shows that the complementarity between the transmission of culture and the education of one’s child means that the introduction and expansion of pension plans will crowd out both educating children targeted by the norm and transmitting the norm to the next generation. She finds that the establishment of pension plans in Ghana and Indonesia and the expansion of a plan in Indonesia confirm this hypothesis. In Indonesia, matrilocal daughters who are exposed to the pension plan for longer receive less education and are less likely to live with their parents after marriage. In Ghana, patrilocal sons show the same pattern.

The Dowry versus the Bride Price

Another factor that can vary substantially across cultures and have important effects on gender differences in social preferences is the presence of the dowry versus the bride price. Dowry is a payment that a bride’s parents make to the couple at the time of marriage. A bride price is a transfer at the time of marriage from the groom and/or his family to the bride’s family. According to Boserup (1970) , these social norms emerged in societies based on their type of agriculture: where women played a lesser role in agriculture, the dowry prevailed. Evidence on the impacts of the dowry system on women’s welfare is mostly anecdotal and points to a pro-male bias. In India, the prospect of paying dowry is often cited as a key factor in parents’ desire to have sons rather than daughters ( Das Gupta et al. 2003 ). 15 The presence of dowry also reduces investment in human capital and results in newly married women sometimes being the victims of violence or, worse, dowry deaths as punishment for the dowry being deemed inadequate by the groom ( Bloch and Rao 2002 ).

Ashraf et al. (2016) study how the cultural practice of bride price influences the efficacy of policies aimed at increasing education. Using the Sekolah Dasar Inpres school building program in Indonesia, where 61,807 primary schools were constructed between 1974 and 1980, the authors study its impact on girls’ schooling. They first confirm (similarly to Breierova and Duflo 2004 ) that the program had no overall effect on education. However, they uncover an important heterogeneity: a positive impact of the program on female education among girls from ethnic groups that traditionally engaged in bride price payments. The authors find similar effects when studying a similar school expansion program in Zambia. The bride price provides an additional reward to parental investment in a daughter’s education, a reward that is absent for cultures lacking the bride price. A higher bride price is therefore a moral obligation on the part of the groom’s family to compensate the bride’s family for their greater educational investment in their daughters.

Other Preindustrial Societal Characteristics

Many of the studies on the relevance of historical societal characteristics are based on experimental evidence, therefore raising the question of external validity. To what extent can results from games played with small groups be used to derive general conclusions about these important gender issues? A different approach is then to look at survey evidence and control for other determinants of women’s outcomes. Alesina, Brioschi, and La Ferrara (2016) follow this second approach and use comprehensive evidence from Africa to study the role of preindustrial societal characteristics on violence against women. To study the long-term determinants of domestic violence, they link individual-level data from contemporary Africa to historical preindustrial characteristics obtained by Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas . More specifically, the authors look at productive activities prior to industrialization (agriculture, gathering, hunting, fishing, and animal husbandry); alternative types of settlement (sedentary, nomadic, compact, and isolated); modes of marriage (the dowry vs. the bride price) and living arrangements after marriage (such as virilocality); the presence of endogamy (the custom of marrying exclusively within a specific ethnic or social group); the prevalence of the stem family (an arrangement in which two generations cohabit); polygyny (a form of plural marriage in which a man is allowed to have more than one wife); and differences in land inheritance (societies in which gender equality in land inheritance was more prevalent vs. matrilineal descent systems, in which a person’s descent was traced through the mother and her maternal ancestors and a man’s property was inherited by his sister’s sons rather than by his own children and primogeniture).

The authors find that ancestral characteristics that led to different economic roles for women determine cultural attitudes that persist even today, when the initial conditions that generated them have evolved or disappeared. In societies in which women were actively involved in subsistence activities (e.g., gathering), women’s role is more highly regarded and violence against women is lower today. On the contrary, plough-based societies, or societies whose form of subsistence was fishing or hunting, have a higher level of violence against women today; in these societies women have less bargaining power because they do not contribute to the family income. Regarding the role of different types of settlement, the authors find that women whose ancestors lived in nomadic and isolated settlements are exposed to a higher probability of violence today and are more prone to justify it. Men whose ancestors lived in compact settlements are less likely to justify abuses against their wives. One interpretation of these findings is that nomadic and isolated settlements were less economically developed communities; another is that societal protection of women is more difficult within these types of living arrangements.

Past societal norms also are related to domestic violence today: women in societies formerly characterized by bride price have a lower probability and lower intensity of violence today. Alesina et al.’s (2016) interpretation is that when men had to pay to marry their wives, they attributed a greater value and cared more about them, which is reflected in less domestic violence. They also find that endogamous societies (in which members marry within the same ethnic group) have more domestic violence, perhaps because beating a wife from a different ethnic group may bring about retaliation across ethnicities. They also find that when the stem family was prevalent, both men and women tend to be less favorable to violence. They do not find any effect of polygynous marriage on violence. On the one hand, to the extent that having more than one wife indicates a lower consideration of women’s status, one would expect to see polygyny associated with more violence. On the other hand, some of the motives that typically instigate violence against one’s wife may be alleviated by the presence of other wives. For example, if the inability of the first wife to deliver a son is compensated for by a second wife who delivers one, the husband may be less likely to beat the first wife. Virilocal residence does not have any effect on domestic violence.

Differences in Historical Family Structures

Among the historical societal characteristics, family structure has been very important in determining gender roles. Alesina and Giuliano (2014) show the historical persistence of family structures from medieval times until today and the impact of differences in family structure on various economic outcomes, including differences in gender roles.

In societies with strong family ties ( Castles 1995 ; Ferrera 1996 ; Esping-Andersen 1999 ; Korpi 2000 ), family solidarity is based on an unequal division of family work between men and women—what has been called the “male-breadwinner hypothesis,” with men working full time and women dedicating themselves to housework. Weak family ties, in contrast, will foster egalitarian gender roles, with men and women participating equally in employment and housework.

Alesina and Giuliano (2010) measure the strength of family ties by combining three questions from the World Values Survey, capturing beliefs on the importance of the family in a person’s life, the duties and responsibilities of parents and children, and the importance of love and respect for one’s parents. This combined measure is used to study the effect of the strength of family ties on a variety of outcomes, including female labor force participation and household production. They find that societies with strong family ties have greater home production, mostly done by women, and lower female labor force participation. They are also more traditional in terms of gender roles.

Similarly, Algan and Cahuc (2007) show that differences in family culture can explain lower female employment, and Giavazzi, Schiantarelli, and Serafinelli (2013) find that culture matters for women’s employment rates and for hours worked. Alesina and Ichino (2009) provide an in-depth analysis of the relevance of family ties on economic outcomes with respect to Italy. Bertocchi and Bozzano (2015) investigate the determinants of the educational gender gap in Italy with a primary focus on the potential influence of family structures. They use data from the 1861–1901 period immediately following the country’s unification. Their main dependent variable is the ratio of female to male enrollment rate in upper primary schools. They measure two aspects of family structure: residential habits (nuclear vs. complex families) and inheritance rules (equal division vs. primogeniture). They find that the most robust driver of the education gender gap was family structure, with a higher female-to-male enrollment ratio being associated with nuclear residential habits and equal division of inheritance.

Tur-Prats (2016) looks at the relationship between traditional family patterns (stem vs. nuclear) and intimate-partner violence. Stem families are those in which one child stays in the parental household with spouse and children so that at least two generations live together. In these families, one son inherits all the land and remains in the parental home with his wife to continue the family line. In nuclear families, all children receive an equal share of the inheritance when leaving the parental home to start their own independent households.

Territories where the stem family was prevalent currently exhibit lower rates of domestic violence and of gender equality. The relationship between family structure and domestic violence or gender roles could be explained by the fact that the coresidence of the wife with other women reduced the burden of household work, freeing up her time for nondomestic work. This allowed a more productive role and a larger contribution to family subsistence.

To measure intimate-partner violence, the author uses data from three cross-sectional surveys of violence against women in Spain, conducted in 1999, 2002, and 2006. Women were asked whether they had encountered any of twenty-six situations that are related to domestic violence. To further explore the cultural transmission channel, Tur-Prats (2016) uses data from the World Values Survey for Spain, finding that territories that had a stem-family tradition in the past currently exhibit more gender-equal attitudes than those with a nuclear-family tradition.

Data on intimate-partner violence are linked to historical measures of family type, given by the average number of married and widowed women per household at the province level in 1860. A unique source of exogenous variation based on the Christian conquest of the Iberian Peninsula is used as an instrument for family types. The so-called Reconquista was an almost eight-century-long period (722–1492) during which several Christian kingdoms took control of significant parts of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic rulers and repopulated them. Because the stronger and more centralized monarchies in the west of Spain had an interest in restricting the development of powerful landholding families, they introduced compulsory sharing of inheritance among all children, which led to nuclear families. The eastern kingdoms, on the other hand, had a more powerful feudal nobility, which wanted to maintain its landholdings intact through indivisible inheritance, which led to stem families. The instrumental variable results are consistent with the original findings.

Since Max Weber, there has been debate on the impact of religion on people’s economic attitudes. Religion has, in particular, a profound impact on attitudes toward gender roles. Guiso, Sapienza, and Zingales (2003) study the relevance of religion using individual-level data from the World Values Survey. As measures of attitudes toward women, they use responses to a variety of questions ranging from who should get a job first—a man or a woman—when jobs are scarce, whether men should have priority in obtaining university education, and whether both men and women should contribute to household income. Religious people and active churchgoers are less sympathetic to women’s rights, and the effect is twice as strong for Muslims as for any other religion.

The influence of religion on gender roles has also been explored by Algan and Cahuc (2006) , who show that Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Muslims are more prone to embrace the traditional male breadwinner conception than Protestants and atheists. Esping-Andersen (1990) also associates a conservative view of women and the family with Catholic countries, while Bertocchi (2011) shows that Catholicism was negatively associated with the introduction of woman suffrage in Italy from 1870 to 1930.

Two interesting papers take a historical perspective in looking at the effect of religion on gender differences: one in the context of the Protestant Reformation ( Becker and Woessmann 2008 ) and one in the context of missionary activity in Africa ( Nunn 2014 ).

Becker and Woessmann (2008) provide evidence that Protestantism was a distinctive driving force in the advancement of female education in Prussia. Martin Luther explicitly urged, solely for religious reasons, that both girls and boys be able to read the Gospel. The authors use data on school enrollment from the Prussian Population Census in 1816 at the level of counties and towns to show that a larger share of Protestants in a county or town was indeed associated with a larger share of girls in the total school population. Instrumental variable estimates, in which each county’s and town’s share of Protestants is instrumented by its distance to Wittenberg, also suggest that the effect of Protestantism can be causally interpreted. The finding that Protestantism was one factor that helped to reduce the educational gender gap in Prussia is confirmed when using county-level data on the gender gap in adult literacy in 1871. The effect of Protestantism is still visible as recently as 1970: a higher share of Protestants in the population is associated with a higher gender parity index in years of education in 1970.

Nunn (2014) uses information on the location of Catholic and Protestant missions during Africa’s colonial period to investigate whether Protestant and Catholic missionaries differentially promoted the education of males and females. He uses data on seven countries from the Afrobarometer and links the reported information about the ethnicity of each respondent to test whether having ancestors living closer to missions during the colonial period increased that ethnicity’s educational level.

While he finds that both Catholicism and Protestantism had a long-run impact on educational attainment, the impact by gender was very different. Protestant missions had a large positive long-run impact on the education of females and a very small impact on the long-run education of males. In contrast, Catholic missions had no long-run impact on the education of females but a large positive impact on the education of males. These findings are consistent with the Protestant belief that both men and women had to read the Bible to go to heaven. The evidence is also consistent with the arguments of Woodberry and Shah (2004) and Woodberry (2009) that because Protestant missionary activity was open to educating minorities and women, it had a particularly positive effect for these groups.

Natural Experiments in History

Historical shocks can alter the relative position of women in a society (e.g., by increasing their relative income due to the appearance of a specific economic activity or by altering the sex ratio in the population). These shocks can therefore alter the prevailing views about the natural role of women in society. If new beliefs about the role of women persist and are transmitted across generations, a temporary shock can affect gender outcomes in the long run.

Teso (forthcoming) exploits the demographic shock generated by the transatlantic slave trade in Africa between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Male slaves outnumbered females, as they were preferred by plantation owners in the New World for their strength. This led to abnormal sex ratios in the areas from which slaves were taken: in those most affected, historical estimates suggest the presence of as few as forty to fifty men per one hundred women ( Thorton 1980 ). This demographic shock had an impact on the role of women, who had to take up traditionally male work ( Manning 1990 ). Although sex ratios reverted back to the natural level shortly after the end of the slave trade, the impact of this historical event on the role of women was long-lasting because cultural beliefs and societal norms had been affected by it. To test this theory, Teso (2016) matches Demographic and Health Surveys data on twenty-one Sub-Saharan countries with ethnicity-level data from Nunn and Wantchekon (2011) on the number of slaves taken during the slave trade. Exploiting variation in the degree to which different ethnic groups were affected by the trade, he shows that women whose ancestors were more exposed to the slave trade are today significantly more likely to be in the labor force and to be employed in a higher-ranked occupation. 16 The author also finds that women belonging to ethnic groups that were more severely hit by the slave trade are today more likely to participate in household decisions and to have lower fertility. 17

The slave trade also affected other types of social norms. Dalton and Leung (2014) and Edlund and Ku (2013) examine the hypothesis that the severe imbalance in sex ratio caused by the transatlantic slave trade altered beliefs about the acceptability of polygyny. Examining variation across ethnicities (Dalton and Leung 2011) and countries ( Edlund and Ku 2013 ), these studies show that a history of the transatlantic slave trade is associated with a greater prevalence of polygyny today.

Wars are another shock that could permanently change gender roles in societies. Historians have suggested that, during World War II, the high mobilization of men in the United States had a strong impact on gender roles ( Chafe 1972 ). Goldin and Olivetti (2013) ; Acemoglu, Autor, and Lyle (2004) ; and Fernandez, Fogli, and Olivetti (2004) use exogenous variation in mobilization rates across states and find a persistent effect of the war on female labor force participation. Fernandez et al. (2004) find that this effect operates through the marriage market.

Campa and Serafinelli (2016) document how more equal gender role attitudes emerged in state-socialist regimes. They exploit the postwar imposition across Central and Eastern Europe of state-socialist regimes that promoted women’s economic inclusion. The authors use two sets of evidence. In the first part of the paper, they use data from Germany 18 and compare attitudes toward work in the sample of women who, before German reunification, had lived in East Germany with those of women who had lived in West Germany. 19 In 1990, the likelihood of reporting that career success is important was approximately 11 percentage points higher for women in the East than for women in the West. The authors do not find a significant difference in men’s attitudes toward work between the East and the West. The results are very similar when attitudes are measured in 2004. The positive attitudes toward work in the East show that increased female access to higher education and full-time employment can act as mediating channels.

The authors then extend the analysis using a difference-in-differences strategy that compares gender role attitudes formed in Central and Eastern Europe to those formed in Western Europe before and after the imposition of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. To obtain time variation, they use measures of attitudes of immigrants who arrived in the United States at different times. The authors show that gender role attitudes have become much less traditional in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western Europe.

Grosjean and Khattar (2016) study the long-run effect of the male-biased sex ratio that emerged in Australia by the late eighteenth century as a consequence of the British policy of sending convicts to Australia. Male convicts outnumbered female convicts by a ratio of six to one. The sex ratio among immigrants continued to be very biased into the twentieth century, as they were mostly men seeking out Australia’s economic opportunities in mining and pastoralism. The authors use spatial and time variation in the sex ratio and study the short- and long-term effects of a male-biased sex ratio on female outcomes at home and in the workplace. Since their identification relies on within-state variation, the results cannot be driven by institutional differences.

They find that gender imbalance was associated historically with women being more likely to get married, participating less in the labor force, and being less likely to work in high-ranking occupations. They then study the long-term implications. In areas that were more biased historically, people today have more conservative attitudes toward women working, women are less likely to have high-ranking occupations, and they work less and earn less. A one-unit increase in the historical sex ratio moves the average Australian today toward conservative attitudes by 8 percentage points at the mean. It is also associated with a 1-percentage-point decrease in the share of women employed as professionals (5 percent of the population mean and 12 percent of its standard deviation). There does not seem to be a welfare effect as measured by self-reported marital and overall life satisfaction. The authors explain this persistence as a result of cultural transmission.

Xue (2016) studies the impact of China’s cotton revolution—the adoption of spinning and weaving technologies from 1300 until 1840—on gender roles. This revolution allowed women to produce cotton textiles at home and sell clothing. Women living in regions suitable for the production of cotton textiles experienced a huge increase in their economic earning power, which became similar to or greater than that of their husbands. To identify the causal effect of the cotton revolution on modern outcomes, Xue collects information about premodern cotton textiles from county and prefecture gazetteers. Data on 1,489 counties are then linked to the contemporary sex ratio at birth. She finds a strong and negative relationship between premodern cotton textile production and sex ratio at birth. The reduction is substantial: one quarter of the standard deviation of the sex ratio variable.

The effect of the cotton revolution on gender roles is also observed in other historical periods in China: immediately after the shock but also during the period of state socialism. The author finds that cotton textile production prevented suicides of widows in the Ming dynasty: widows in areas suitable to cotton textile production generally maintained a decent standard of living and had relatively high social status. Xue also finds that female labor force participation in presocialist China and the probability of a wife’s heading the household under state socialism were both higher in regions suitable to cotton production.

Heterogeneity in Historical Persistence

In this chapter, we reviewed evidence of historical persistence in gender roles. It is, however, important to note that while there is a high degree of persistence, gender norms have also sometimes changed quickly over time. 20 When do gender role differences persist and when do they not? What factors affect their persistence? What determines the speed of their evolution when they change?

Giuliano and Nunn (2017) examine these questions by testing an insight that has been developed in the evolutionary anthropology literature (Boyd and Richerson 1985 , 2005 ; Rogers 1988 ). The idea is very simple: First consider a population living in a stable environment. In such a setting, the actions of one’s ancestors are particularly informative about which of many possible actions are optimal. The fact that these actions have evolved in this environment is important information. Thus, there are important benefits to a cultural belief in the importance of tradition. We would therefore expect societies that live in a stable environment to strongly value tradition and to be reluctant to deviate from it. Next, consider a population living in a very unstable environment. The setting of each generation changes sufficiently that the optimal actions of the previous generation may no longer be optimal. In such an environment, the traditions of one’s ancestors are less informative and cultural traits that strongly value tradition are thus less beneficial. We would therefore expect these societies to be less strongly tied to tradition and more likely to adopt new cultural practices and beliefs. The authors take this hypothesis to the data and test whether societies that historically lived in environments with more climate variability value tradition less, are more likely to adopt new cultural values, and exhibit less cultural persistence. They test this mechanism for gender differences by looking at female participation in agriculture in preindustrial societies and female labor force participation today. They also look at the relationship between the traditional practice of polygamy and the practice of polygamy today.

To measure a location’s historical environmental stability, they use paleo-climatic data from Mann et al. (2009) that measures the average annual temperature of 0.5-degree-by-0.5-degree grid cells globally, beginning in 500 ad . Data on preindustrial societies are taken from the Ethnographic Atlas . The authors first document a strong relationship between traditional participation of women in agriculture and female labor force participation rates today and a strong relationship between traditional practice of polygamy and the practice of polygamy today. (Although average female labor force participation has been increasing and the practice of polygamy decreasing for decades or centuries, we still see a high degree of persistence of both practices today.) They then show that the persistence is weaker in countries with more historical variability in the environment. The paper is the first attempt in trying to provide a better understanding of when culture persists and when it changes. The findings also consist of a test of a prediction that is common in a class of models from evolutionary anthropology. The core assumption of the models is that culture evolves systematically based on relative costs and benefits of the different cultural traits. Testing these models is important since the current models of cultural evolution within economics share many of the same assumptions and features as the model from evolutionary anthropology. 21 More research needs to be done on how much other sources of instability (such as international trade, migration, or economic and political instability) could also contribute to the evolution of gender norms or cultural values more generally.

History matters in explaining the differences in gender roles observed today. What aspects of history should we look at? In this chapter, we reviewed recent empirical research on various historical determinants of contemporary differences in gender roles. Most of the research illustrates that differences in cultural norms regarding gender roles emerge in response to specific historical situations but tend to persist even after the historical conditions have changed. Thus, even the distant past affects gender norms today. Research also finds that persistence tends to be stronger when the environment is very stable and therefore experimenting with new norms is less necessary.

Acknowledgments

I thank Susan Averett and Saul Hoffman for comments that substantially improved the chapter.

Anukriti and Dasgupta (this volume) provide a review of research on marriage payments, that is, dowry and bride price.

To show long-term persistence, Alesina, Giuliano, and Nunn (2013) look at differences in female labor force participation, but also at beliefs about the role of women in society in 2000. To analyze contemporary female labor force participation, they match ethnographic data to current populations using the global distribution of 7,612 language groups from the fifteenth edition of the Ethnologue and the global distribution of population densities from the 2000 Landscan database, generating a measure of the fraction of a country’s ancestors who traditionally engaged in plough agriculture.

In a companion paper ( Alesina et al. 2013 ), the authors examine the impact of agricultural technology on fertility. They find that societies with historic plough use had a lower level of fertility. The finding is consistent with the explanation that plough agriculture reduced the benefit of having children, since they were less useful in the field.

Plough-positive crops, which typically require extensive land preparation over a large surface area and in a very short period of time, include wet rice, barley, wheat, rye, and teff. Plough-negative crops, which include crops that require little land to produce a sufficient amount of food, crops that can be grown in rocky or sloped land, and crops with seeds that easily take root (even in shallow soils), include three root crops: maize, millet, and sorghum ( Pryor 1985 ).

Boserup (1970) explains the lack of polygamy in plough-farming societies in terms of access to land, saying that polygamy occurs in long-fallow agricultural societies with communal land tenure and land available for expansion, where “an additional wife is an additional economic asset which helps the family to expand its production” (p. 38).

Giuliano also looks at differences in gender attitudes using the Global Gender Gap Index, a comprehensive indicator introduced by the World Economic Forum . The index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education, and health criteria and is designed to measure gender-based gaps in access to resources and opportunities in individual countries rather than the actual level of the available resources and opportunities in those countries. Differences in historical agricultural practices are strongly correlated with a global measure of gender gap, as summarized by this index.

These are normally based on biological sex, but can also be based on social constructs such as age or social status.

Historical caloric suitability measures the potential daily calories from cultivating the crop with maximal caloric yield during the pre-1500 ce era in that specific location.

According to the proportion in which small, medium, and large particles are combined in the soil, soil texture can range from very fine clay to medium loam to very coarse sand. Finer soils have higher particle density and lower pore space than coarser soils. For that reason, they are heavier, tighter, and more difficult to work.

It is interesting to note that the depth of tillage does not determine the gender-based division of labor. The strength required in land preparation is a function of the depth of tillage and the resistance offered by the soil, which are inversely related. Deep and shallow tillage have similar strength requirements. Men always prepare the land.

Shurchkov and Eckel (this volume) discuss the effect of differences in competition on labor market outcomes for women more broadly.

In the game without competition, subjects had ten attempts and received $1 for each basket scored. In the game with competition, subjects received $3 for each basket in a win, but no money at all in a loss.

In the Mosuo society, agriculture is the main form of subsistence, the head of the household is traditionally female, and women are in charge of economic decision making in the household, while men engage more in activities beyond agriculture and the household. The Mosuo have the unique feature of “walking marriage,” in which the man and the woman in a relationship stay at their mothers’ households aside from night visits at the woman’s, without any economic obligation to each other. Children are raised collectively by the woman’s household without the father. The Yi people were traditionally slash-and-burn farmers and their society is structured by a patrilineal exogamous lineage called jiazhi . Men start their own households once married, except for the youngest son. Women have no right to inherit any property, but they are the primary workforce and thus share the everyday decision-making responsibility with men in the household. Men are in charge of the most important household decisions.

The survey did not ask respondents whether they observed matrilineal or patrilineal descent, but collected information about where they lived after marriage (in the wife’s home village, the husband’s home village, or another village) and whether a respondent personally owned land and, if so, how he or she had received it (inherited from own kin, inherited from spouse’s kin, purchased, or received from a chief). In terms of land ownership, men report owning land at significantly higher rates than women among both the Tumbuka and the Mpenezi Ngoni. Women in matrilineal and patrilineal ethnic groups were equally likely to receive land from the chief or to have bought land, but in matrilineal groups, women were more likely to receive land from their own kin than from their husband’s kin. The pattern was reversed for women in patrilineal groups. In terms of residence after marriage, a majority of the matrilineal Yao and Lomwe practice matrilocal residence, but only 41 percent of the Mapezo Ngoni and 25 percent of the Chewa do. Of the patrilineal Tumbuka and Mpezeni Ngoni, only a small fraction (around 10 percent) practice matrilocal residence.

Portner (this volume) discusses the role of son preference and fertility in developing countries, while Rose (this volume) discusses child gender and the family more broadly.

Pan and Cortes (this volume) present a broader discussion of occupational choices of women.

To show that the effect of the slave trade on gender roles was the result of the biased sex ratio, the author looks at the effect of the Indian Ocean slave trade (which was not biased toward men) and finds no effect. To rule out another possibility—that places that were more affected by the transatlantic slave trade developed markets and local institutions that led to higher female labor force participation—the author compares individuals of different ethnicity who currently live in the same village or in the same city neighborhood, finding that ancestral exposure to the slave trade still has an effect, although smaller.

Before 1945, the politicoeconomic system was the same in East and West Germany. After 1945, the country was split in two, with women in the East and West exposed to very different institutions and policies. East Germany focused on policies that favored female full-time employment, while West Germany encouraged a system in which women either stayed home after they had children or were funneled into part-time employment after an extended break.

Attitudes toward work are measured using a question about the importance of carreer success for the respondent.

Among the factors responsible for the change are the increase in marital bargaining power due to the reduction in time spent on household chores ( Greenwood, Seshadri, and Yorukoglu, 2005 ), a changing social atmosphere ( Fernandez et al., 2004 ), the introduction of the pill ( Goldin and Katz 2002 ), and the diffusion of knowledge about the effects of female labor force participation ( Fogli and Veldkamp 2011 ; Fernandez 2013 ).

See, for example, Bisin and Verdier ( 2000 , 2001 ), Hauk and Saez-Marti (2002) , and Tabellini (2008) .

Aberle, David F. “Matrilineal Descent in Cross Cultural Perspective.” In Matrilineal Kinship , edited by David M. Schneider and Kathleen Gough , 655–727. Berkeley: University of California, 1961 .

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How to Write a Perspective Essay?

Understanding the Importance of Perspective Essays

A perspective essay is a powerful tool that allows individuals to express their thoughts and opinions on a particular topic from their unique standpoint. Unlike other types of essays, a perspective essay requires a deep understanding of the subject matter and the ability to convey personal experiences, observations, and beliefs effectively. By sharing different perspectives, individuals contribute to a diverse and inclusive society where ideas are valued and respected.

Choosing a Compelling Topic

When selecting a topic for your perspective essay, it's important to choose something that you are passionate about and have a strong opinion on. Whether it's a social issue, political ideology, or personal experience, your topic should resonate with your audience and make them eager to read your insights. Research the chosen topic thoroughly to ensure you have a solid foundation of knowledge to build upon.

Gathering Evidence and Conducting Research

Before diving into writing your perspective essay, it's crucial to gather relevant evidence to support your claims and arguments. Conduct thorough research using credible sources such as books, scholarly articles, and reputable websites. Take notes, highlight important information, and carefully analyze different viewpoints to strengthen your own perspective.

Structuring Your Perspective Essay

The structure of a perspective essay is similar to other types of essays. It consists of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. The introduction should grab the reader's attention and provide a brief overview of the topic and your stance. The body paragraphs, which are the core of your essay, should present your arguments, supporting evidence, and counterarguments. Finally, the conclusion should summarize your main points and leave the reader with a thought-provoking closing statement.

Writing with Clarity and Coherence

When writing your perspective essay, aim for clarity and coherence. Use clear, concise, and precise language to articulate your ideas. Structure your paragraphs logically, ensuring a smooth flow of thoughts. Support your arguments with relevant examples, anecdotes, or statistics to engage your audience and strengthen your position. Remember to acknowledge and address opposing viewpoints respectfully, demonstrating open-mindedness and critical thinking.

Formatting and Stylistic Considerations

While the content of your perspective essay is crucial, don't overlook the importance of formatting and style. Use appropriate heading tags, such as H2 or H3, for each section and subsection to improve readability and assist search engines in understanding the structure of your content. Enhance the visual appeal of your essay by using bullet points or numbered lists to break down complex information into digestible chunks. Incorporate relevant keywords naturally throughout the text to optimize your chances of ranking higher in search engine results.

Editing and Proofreading

Once you've completed your perspective essay, take the time to review, edit, and proofread it carefully. Pay attention to grammar, spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure. Ensure your ideas flow smoothly and coherently. Remove any unnecessary repetition or tangential information. Consider seeking feedback from peers, teachers, or online communities to gain valuable insights and improve the overall quality of your essay.

Example Perspective Essay: The Power of Empathy

The following is an example of a perspective essay on the power of empathy:

Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is a remarkable human trait that holds immense power. In a world filled with turmoil and division, empathy acts as a bridge, fostering understanding, compassion, and connection. It enables us to step into someone else's shoes, see the world through their eyes, and recognize their struggles and challenges.

When we embrace empathy, we break down barriers and cultivate a sense of unity. It allows us to transcend our personal biases and preconceptions, opening our minds to a multitude of perspectives. Empathy promotes inclusivity and acceptance, nurturing a society where diversity is celebrated and everyone feels valued.

One powerful aspect of empathy is its ability to spark positive change. By understanding the experiences of others, we become motivated to take action and address social injustices. Through empathy, we recognize the need for equality, justice, and human rights. It fuels our determination to create a better world for ourselves and future generations.

In conclusion, writing a perspective essay is an opportunity to express your thoughts, opinions, and experiences in a unique and compelling way. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can confidently tackle the task of writing a perspective essay. Remember to choose a captivating topic, conduct thorough research, structure your essay effectively, and write with clarity and coherence. By sharing your perspectives, you contribute to the rich tapestry of ideas that shape our society.

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Essay by NDSU professor published in academic journal

Tom Isern, NDSU professor of history and University Distinguished Professor.

Tom Isern has published his essay detailing the origin and history of "The Farmer Is the Man" in the Great Plains Quarterly, the journal of the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.

A traditional ballad sung by thousands of young farm people in North Dakota now has a history, thanks to the research of Tom Isern, NDSU professor of history and University Distinguished Professor.

The song is "The Farmer Is the Man," an anthem of farm fundamentalism that declares, "The farmer is the man who feeds them all." Generations of attendees at summer camps of the North Dakota Farmers Union have sung the song, and still do, because it appears in their official camp songbook. Now they can do so knowing it originated in 1874 as a Granger song, extolling farming as a way of life and the virtues of an early farm organization, the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry.

The story of the discovery of "The Farmer Is the Man" goes back to the spring of 2020, when COVID descended on the land and, like others at risk, Isern went into isolation. As a way to keep in touch with the public, he launched a Friday-night livestream devoted to historic balladry on the Great Plains.

"I'm both a farmer and, going back to the 1970s, a folkie who once made rent with a Martin D28," Isern explains. "This seemed like the time to return to the music. As I did, I discovered that balladry is a promising research field opened up by the availability of digitized source material."

"This modest enterprise took hold, such that on Friday evening 17 May 2024, in partnership with my producer and spouse, Suzzanne Kelley (Editor-in-Chief of North Dakota State University Press), we streamed Willow Creek Folk School Session No. 171 live from what we call the Salon on Willow Creek. That's the spacious back room of our home, with windows facing on the seasonal stream, Willow Creek," Isern said.

The research underpinning the folk school takes print form as scholarly journal articles fashioning a new canon of regional balladry.

"I call this the Genesis Series, because the essays document the origins of classic folksongs of the Great Plains that we used to say were unattributable. Well, that's no longer true," Isern said.

In fact, it turns out "The Farmer Is the Man" had a specific author, known at the time but now long forgotten: the evangelical hymn writer, Rev. Knowles Shaw, best known as the composer of "Bringing in the Sheaves." Living and preaching in Kansas at the time, Rev. Shaw sent his "Granger song," as he himself labeled it, to the editor of the Osage Mission Journal, on January 14, 1874. Over the next few years it was sung at Granger picnics and rallies. Over the decades since, farm associations have continued to revive and sing the song, and popular folksingers like Pete Seeger have embraced it.

Isern has published his essay detailing the origin and history of "The Farmer Is the Man" in the Great Plains Quarterly, the journal of the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska. Isern is an associate fellow of the center.

Photo by Suzzanne Kelley

May 1, 2024 NDSU assistant professor wins prestigious award Faculty , Awards
April 22, 2024 NDSU bands director to retire Faculty

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Guest Essay

The Deep, Tangled Roots of American Illiberalism

An illustration of a scene of mayhem with men in Colonial-era clothing fighting in a small room.

By Steven Hahn

Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “Illiberal America: a History.”

In a recent interview with Time, Donald Trump promised a second term of authoritarian power grabs, administrative cronyism, mass deportations of the undocumented, harassment of women over abortion, trade wars and vengeance brought upon his rivals and enemies, including President Biden. “If they said that a president doesn’t get immunity,” Mr. Trump told Time, “then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

Further evidence, it seems, of Mr. Trump’s efforts to construct a political world like no other in American history. But how unprecedented is it, really? That Mr. Trump continues to lead in polls should make plain that he and his MAGA movement are more than noxious weeds in otherwise liberal democratic soil.

Many of us have not wanted to see it that way. “This is not who we are as a nation,” one journalist exclaimed in what was a common response to the violence on Jan. 6, “and we must not let ourselves or others believe otherwise.” Mr. Biden has said much the same thing.

While it’s true that Mr. Trump was the first president to lose an election and attempt to stay in power, observers have come to recognize the need for a lengthier view of Trumpism. Even so, they are prone to imagining that there was a time not all that long ago when political “normalcy” prevailed. What they have failed to grasp is that American illiberalism is deeply rooted in our past and fed by practices, relationships and sensibilities that have been close to the surface, even when they haven’t exploded into view.

Illiberalism is generally seen as a backlash against modern liberal and progressive ideas and policies, especially those meant to protect the rights and advance the aspirations of groups long pushed to the margins of American political life. But in the United States, illiberalism is better understood as coherent sets of ideas that are related but also change over time.

This illiberalism celebrates hierarchies of gender, race and nationality; cultural homogeneity; Christian religious faith; the marking of internal as well as external enemies; patriarchal families; heterosexuality; the will of the community over the rule of law; and the use of political violence to achieve or maintain power. This illiberalism sank roots from the time of European settlement and spread out from villages and towns to the highest levels of government. In one form or another, it has shaped much of our history. Illiberalism has frequently been a stalking horse, if not in the winner’s circle. Hardly ever has it been roundly defeated.

A few examples may be illustrative. Although European colonization of North America has often been imagined as a sharp break from the ways of home countries, neo-feudal dreams inspired the making of Euro-American societies from the Carolinas up through the Hudson Valley, based as they were on landed estates and coerced labor, while the Puritan towns of New England, with their own hierarchies, demanded submission to the faith and harshly policed their members and potential intruders alike. The backcountry began to fill up with land-hungry settlers who generally formed ethnicity-based enclaves, eyed outsiders with suspicion and, with rare exceptions, hoped to rid their territory of Native peoples. Most of those who arrived in North America between the early 17th century and the time of the American Revolution were either enslaved or in servitude, and master-servant jurisprudence shaped labor relations well after slavery was abolished, a phenomenon that has been described as “belated feudalism.”

The anti-colonialism of the American Revolution was accompanied not only by warfare against Native peoples and rewards for enslavers, but also by a deeply ingrained anti-Catholicism, and hostility to Catholics remained a potent political force well into the 20th century. Monarchist solutions were bruited about during the writing of the Constitution and the first decade of the American Republic: John Adams thought that the country would move in such a direction and other leaders at the time, including Washington, Madison and Hamilton, wondered privately if a king would be necessary in the event a “republican remedy” failed.

The 1830s, commonly seen as the height of Jacksonian democracy, were racked by violent expulsions of Catholics , Mormons and abolitionists of both races, along with thousands of Native peoples dispossessed of their homelands and sent to “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi.

The new democratic politics of the time was often marked by Election Day violence after campaigns suffused with military cadences, while elected officials usually required the support of elite patrons to guarantee the bonds they had to post. Even in state legislatures and Congress, weapons could be brandished and duels arranged; “bullies” enforced the wills of their allies.

When enslavers in the Southern states resorted to secession rather than risk their system under a Lincoln administration, they made clear that their Confederacy was built on the cornerstone of slavery and white supremacy. And although their crushing defeat brought abolition, the establishment of birthright citizenship (except for Native peoples), the political exclusion of Confederates, and the extension of voting rights to Black men — the results of one of the world’s great revolutions — it was not long before the revolution went into reverse.

The federal government soon allowed former Confederates and their white supporters to return to power, destroy Black political activism and, accompanied by lynchings (expressing the “will” of white communities), build the edifice of Jim Crow: segregation, political disfranchisement and a harsh labor regime. Already previewed in the pre-Civil War North, Jim Crow received the imprimatur of the Supreme Court and the administration of Woodrow Wilson .

Few Progressives of the early 20th century had much trouble with this. Segregation seemed a modern way to choreograph “race relations,” and disfranchisement resonated with their disenchantment with popular politics, whether it was powered by Black voters in the South or European immigrants in the North. Many Progressives were devotees of eugenics and other forms of social engineering, and they generally favored overseas imperialism; some began to envision the scaffolding of a corporate state — all anticipating the dark turns in Europe over the next decades.

The 1920s, in fact, saw fascist pulses coming from a number of directions in the United States and, as in Europe, targeting political radicals. Benito Mussolini won accolades in many American quarters. The lab where Josef Mengele worked received support from the Rockefeller Foundation. White Protestant fundamentalism reigned in towns and the countryside. And the Immigration Act of 1924 set limits on the number of newcomers, especially those from Southern and Eastern Europe, who were thought to be politically and culturally unassimilable.

Most worrisome, the Ku Klux Klan, energized by anti-Catholicism and antisemitism as well as anti-Black racism, marched brazenly in cities great and small. The Klan became a mass movement and wielded significant political power; it was crucial, for example , to the enforcement of Prohibition. Once the organization unraveled in the late 1920s, many Klansmen and women found their way to new fascist groups and the radical right more generally.

Sidelined by the Great Depression and New Deal, the illiberal right regained traction in the late 1930s, and during the 1950s won grass-roots support through vehement anti-Communism and opposition to the civil rights movement. As early as 1964, in a run for the Democratic presidential nomination, Gov. George Wallace of Alabama began to hone a rhetoric of white grievance and racial hostility that had appeal in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic, and Barry Goldwater’s campaign that year, despite its failure, put winds in the sails of the John Birch Society and Young Americans for Freedom.

Four years later, Wallace mobilized enough support as a third-party candidate to win five states. And in 1972, once again as a Democrat, Wallace racked up primary wins in both the North and the South before an assassination attempt forced him out of the race. Growing backlashes against school desegregation and feminism added further fuel to the fire on the right, paving the way for the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s.

By the early 1990s, the neo-Nazi and Klansman David Duke had won a seat in the Louisiana Legislature and nearly three-fifths of the white vote in campaigns for governor and senator. Pat Buchanan, seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, called for “America First,” the fortification of the border (a “Buchanan fence”), and a culture war for the “soul” of America, while the National Rifle Association became a powerful force on the right and in the Republican Party.

When Mr. Trump questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president, a project that quickly became known as “birtherism,” he made use of a Reconstruction-era racist trope that rejected the legitimacy of Black political rights and power. In so doing, Mr. Trump began to cement a coalition of aggrieved white voters. They were ready to push back against the nation’s growing cultural diversity — embodied by Mr. Obama — and the challenges they saw to traditional hierarchies of family, gender and race. They had much on which to build.

Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville, in “Democracy in America,” glimpsed the illiberal currents that already entangled the country’s politics. While he marveled at the “equality of conditions,” the fluidity of social life and the strength of republican institutions, he also worried about the “omnipotence of the majority.”

“What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there,” Tocqueville wrote, “but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.” He pointed to communities “taking justice into their own hands,” and warned that “associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies.” Lamenting their intellectual conformity, Tocqueville believed that if Americans ever gave up republican government, “they will pass rapidly on to despotism,” restricting “the sphere of political rights, taking some of them away in order to entrust them to a single man.”

The slide toward despotism that Tocqueville feared may be well underway, whatever the election’s outcome. Even if they try to fool themselves into thinking that Mr. Trump won’t follow through, millions of voters seem ready to entrust their rights to “a single man” who has announced his intent to use autocratic powers for retribution, repression, expulsion and misogyny.

Only by recognizing what we’re up against can we mount an effective campaign to protect our democracy, leaning on the important political struggles — abolitionism, antimonopoly, social democracy, human rights, civil rights, feminism — that have challenged illiberalism in the past and offer the vision and political pathways to guide us in the future.

Our biggest mistake would be to believe that we’re watching an exceptional departure in the country’s history. Because from the first, Mr. Trump has tapped into deep and ever-expanding illiberal roots. Illiberalism’s history is America’s history.

Steven Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of “ Illiberal America: a History .”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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Title: toon3d: seeing cartoons from a new perspective.

Abstract: In this work, we recover the underlying 3D structure of non-geometrically consistent scenes. We focus our analysis on hand-drawn images from cartoons and anime. Many cartoons are created by artists without a 3D rendering engine, which means that any new image of a scene is hand-drawn. The hand-drawn images are usually faithful representations of the world, but only in a qualitative sense, since it is difficult for humans to draw multiple perspectives of an object or scene 3D consistently. Nevertheless, people can easily perceive 3D scenes from inconsistent inputs! In this work, we correct for 2D drawing inconsistencies to recover a plausible 3D structure such that the newly warped drawings are consistent with each other. Our pipeline consists of a user-friendly annotation tool, camera pose estimation, and image deformation to recover a dense structure. Our method warps images to obey a perspective camera model, enabling our aligned results to be plugged into novel-view synthesis reconstruction methods to experience cartoons from viewpoints never drawn before. Our project page is https://toon3d.studio .

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What is Historical Perspective?
To understand historical perspective, it is important to consider an obvious, but still often overlooked fact about the study of history that distinguishes it from other academic disciplines. Historians are most concerned with uncovering how things change over time. They choose a variety of subjects to explore: politics, diplomacy, economics ...
Understanding Historical Perspective
Historical Perspective All historians bring to their works their own historical perspective. That perspective might be determined by his or her political bent or by the use of social theories in the analysis. Every historian's ideas are somewhere on the political spectrum. Historians may be described as conservative, liberal, or anywhere in between. Rarely do […]
How to determine a source's perspective
Perspective is the 'point of view' from which the creator of a source described historical events. Every person sees and understands events differently depending on their age, gender, social position, beliefs, and values. Even modern historians have their own perspectives which can influence how they interpret the past. For example:
PDF A Brief Guide to Writing the History Paper
papers are concerned with history (not just what happened, of course, but why and how it happened), and some are interested in historiography (i.e., how other historians have written history, speciﬁcally the peculiarities of different works, scholars, or schools of thought). Some papers emphasize social or cultural history, others political ...
Historical Perspective: Using the Past to Study the Present
This perspective differs from history be- cause its object is to sharpen one's vision of the present, not the past. When historical perspective is overlooked in social research, researchers may draw misleading conclusions. Historical perspective expands research horizons. by encouraging study of the relative stability of phenomena, providing ...
What Does It Mean to Think Historically?
To argue that history is contingent is to claim that every historical outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; that each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions; and so on. The core insight of contingency is that the world is a magnificently interconnected place. Change a single prior condition, and any ...
3. Historical Analysis and Interpretation
HISTORICAL THINKING STANDARD 3. The student engages in historical analysis and interpretation: Therefore, the student is able to: Compare and contrast differing sets of ideas, values, personalities, behaviors, and institutions by identifying likenesses and differences. Consider multiple perspectives of various peoples in the past by ...
PDF Historiographic Essay Manual
interpretation around historical questions that you want to explore. Mary Lynn Rampolla, whose Pocket Guide to Writing in History has been published in several editions, wrote the goal of a historiographic essay is "to identify, compare, and evaluate the viewpoints of two or more historians writing on the same subject." 1
Historical Perspective: Using the Past to Study the Present
Abstract. Historical perspective refers to understanding a subject in light of its earliest phases and subsequent evolution. This perspective differs from history because its object is to sharpen ...
Writing Historical Essays
Historical essay writing is based upon the thesis. A thesis is a statement, an argument which will be presented by the writer. The thesis is in effect, your position, your particular interpretation, your way of seeing a problem. Resist the temptation, which many students have, to think of a thesis as simply "restating" an instructor's question.
How to write source-based history essays
If you understand how each part works and fits into the overall essay, you are well on the way to creating a great assessment piece. Most essays will require you to write: 1 Introduction Paragraph. 3 Body Paragraphs. 1 Concluding Paragraph.
PDF A Guide to Writing in History & Literature
History & Literature is an interdisciplinary program in which the "how" of what a text says or shows is as important as the "what." The specific words a text uses or the formal structure of a film, a photograph, a novel, or a poem offer a means for understanding the historical and cultural implications of textual and extratextual
Historiographical Essays
Companion to Historiography This volume presents an analysis of the moods and trends in historical writing throughout its phases of development, and explores the assumptions and procedures that have formed the creation of historical perspectives. Contributed by a panel of academics, each essay aims to convey an international, wide-angled view of the ideas, traditions and institutions that lie ...
What is Historical Analysis?
The principal goal of students in history classes and historians in practice is to master the process of Historical Analysis. History is more than a narrative of the past; the discipline cares less for the who, what, where, and when of an event, instead focusing on how and why certain events unfolded the way they did and what it all means. History is about argument, interpretation, and ...
The Literature Review as an Exercise in Historical Thinking
Abstract. Approaching a body of literature from a historical perspective is widely acknowledged as essential to conducting a literature review. Methodological guidance for approaching a body of literature from a historical perspective depends on familiarity with works historians have written about the practice of historical research.
Writing Resources
Paragraph goes nowhere/has no point or unity. Paragraphs are the building blocks of your paper. If your paragraphs are weak, your paper cannot be strong. Try underlining the topic sentence of every paragraph. If your topic sentences are vague, strength and precision—the hallmarks of good writing—are unlikely to follow.
Standards of Historical Writing
As you read the following guide, keep in mind that it represents only our perspective on the basic standards. In all writing, even history research papers, there is room for stylistic variation and elements of a personal style. But one of the standards of historical writing is that only those who fully understand the rules can break them ...
What is history?
History describes our attempts to research, study and explain the past. This is a subtle difference but an important one. What happened in the past is fixed in time and cannot be changed. In contrast, history changes regularly. The past is concrete and unchangeable but history is an ongoing conversation about the past and its meaning.
What is historical context?
What is 'historical context'? Historical context is the awareness that the people who created sources were living at a time which may have held opinions and beliefs that are very different to what we consider 'normal'. Identifying historical context allows us to demonstrate historical empathy: to understand the different attitudes from the ...
Is History History?
Historical questions often emanate out of present concerns, but the past interrupts, challenges, and contradicts the present in unpredictable ways. History is not a heuristic tool for the articulation of an ideal imagined future. Rather, it is a way to study the messy, uneven process of change over time.
26 Gender: A Historical Perspective
The authors explain this persistence as a result of cultural transmission. Xue (2016) studies the impact of China's cotton revolution—the adoption of spinning and weaving technologies from 1300 until 1840—on gender roles. This revolution allowed women to produce cotton textiles at home and sell clothing.
How to Write a Perspective Essay? Example & Guide to Writing
When writing your perspective essay, aim for clarity and coherence. Use clear, concise, and precise language to articulate your ideas. Structure your paragraphs logically, ensuring a smooth flow of thoughts. Support your arguments with relevant examples, anecdotes, or statistics to engage your audience and strengthen your position.
2024 AHA Research Grant Winners
Attribution must provide author name, article title, Perspectives on History, date of publication, and a link to this page. This license applies only to the article, not to text or images used here by permission. The American Historical Association welcomes comments in the discussion area below, at AHA Communities, and in letters to the editor.
Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences
The integration of scientific and humanistic disciplines in academic research and teaching ("consilience") is grounded in the concept of the unity of knowledge. Opponents of consilience argue that there is a difference between factual or propositional knowledge (i.e., "objective" knowledge) produced by science and philosophy through theory, empirical data, or logic-based argumentation ...
Essay by NDSU professor published in academic journal
Tom Isern has published his essay detailing the origin and history of "The Farmer Is the Man" in the Great Plains Quarterly, the journal of the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska. A traditional ballad sung by thousands of young farm people in North Dakota now has a history, thanks to the research of Tom Isern, NDSU ...
It's Not Just Putin. Russia Needs China, Too.
In 2023, Russia's trade with China hit a record $240.1 billion, up by more than 60 percent from prewar levels, as China accounted for 30 percent of Russia's exports and nearly 40 percent of ...
[2405.11304] Quantum-Train: Rethinking Hybrid Quantum-Classical Machine
We introduces the Quantum-Train(QT) framework, a novel approach that integrates quantum computing with classical machine learning algorithms to address significant challenges in data encoding, model compression, and inference hardware requirements. Even with a slight decrease in accuracy, QT achieves remarkable results by employing a quantum neural network alongside a classical mapping model ...
How to analyse historical sources
In order to demonstrate a knowledge of the six analysis skills, you need to do two things: Carefully read the source to find information that is explicit and implicit. Conduct background research about the creator of the source. After completing these two steps, you can begin to show your understanding about the six features of historical ...
Opinion
Dr. Hahn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at New York University and the author, most recently, of "Illiberal America: a History.". In a recent interview with Time, Donald Trump promised ...
[2405.10320] Toon3D: Seeing Cartoons from a New Perspective
Toon3D: Seeing Cartoons from a New Perspective. In this work, we recover the underlying 3D structure of non-geometrically consistent scenes. We focus our analysis on hand-drawn images from cartoons and anime. Many cartoons are created by artists without a 3D rendering engine, which means that any new image of a scene is hand-drawn.