As a historian, I love encouraging people to pursue self-study of historical topics they're into. I'm sure, though, that approaching a subject you're not familiar with can be daunting. I feel the same way when trying to delve into stuff I'm not familiar with. Where do you even start?
For that purpose, I decided to put together a step by step guide to what I consider a good path to becoming well-versed on a particular historical topic. A guide to getting your black belt in casual history studies, if you will. Following these steps, you'll be able to have a genuinely strong grasp of your subject of choice. You'll even be able to hold a conversation with experts.
A disclaimer, though: this is about becoming well-versed on a specific topic. Stuff like Reconstruction, the Great Depression, the Napoleonic Wars, the Mexican Revolution, or the Ming Treasure Voyages. If you want to learn about a more general topic- say "colonial Spain" or "feudal Japan" or "20th Century United States"- then you can follow these same steps, but you'll have to increase the number of resources you use at every step of the way. The broader your interest, the more research you should do on it.
Anyway, let's dive in! I'll use the topic of Reconstruction to give examples for each step.
Step One: Familiarity
The first step is to become acquainted with your topic on a basic level. Even if it's something you have a vague notion of, you'll want to refresh yourself on the basics. You may have bits and pieces of a topic you know about, but it's always good to start from the ground up. To keep with the martial arts metaphor, you've got to learn the day-one basics (while also unlearning bullshit) before you can move onto anything else.
In a way, this is the most important step. Like putting on a white belt your first day in a martial arts class, you're entering new territory. Because of that, you want to start with things that are easy: short articles and videos. For articles, History.com is always a solid starting place. For videos, I'd highly recommend the Crash Course series on YouTube if they have a video about your topic of interest.
Whatever sources you end up at, make sure the information can be traced back to a historian or history book!
So, if you were studying Reconstruction, you might look at this article from History.com, then watch this Crash Course video. Then you might check out this Lloyd Sealy Library page of important events and figures in Reconstruction, and watch the Crash Course Black History video about Reconstruction, which overlaps with the other Crash Course video but approaches the topic from a slightly different angle. You'll notice as you go through these different sources that each mentions specific information that others don't. By checking out these various sources, you're getting a well-balanced diet of information!
Step Two: Getting Some Detail
Now that you have a basic familiarity with the topic, it's time to understand it in a little more detail. You want to get a little more specific, including incorporating the very beginnings of thinking like a historian. This is how you get your first belt beyond your white belt.
Starting off, you'll want to read longer articles and watch longer videos, including things like documentaries, interviews with historians, and/or explorations of specific history books. You'll also want to look up easy to digest primary sources. Speeches are a great resource for this, as well as photographs and writings from the time. By looking at the longer articles and videos, you'll be absorbing more information. By looking at primary sources, on the other hand, you'll actually get to hear the voices of the people you're studying. This is an invaluable part of being a historian, because you're getting a picture of the time period directly from the source.
A good thing to start doing here is to also see who are some of the best historians of your topic. A quick Google of "best historians of [your topic]" will often bring good results.
So, for example, you might read this Jacobin article about Reconstruction that goes a little more in depth than the quick write-ups we saw in the last section. Then you might read or listen to this interview with Eric Foner, arguably the greatest living historian on Reconstruction. Afterward, you could watch this American Experience documentary about Reconstruction. Finally, you could check out speeches by Andrew Johnson, the president who tried to oppose Reconstruction; Ulysses Grant, the president after Johnson who supported Reconstruction; Thaddeus Stevens, the Congressional leader who rallied support for Reconstruction; and Frederick Douglass, the formerly enslaved person who became a national orator and strong advocate of Reconstruction.
Step Three: Getting Some Depth
At this point, you're really starting to get to know your topic. You're getting to know it well enough that you're even starting to see where different sources agree and disagree on how to understand it (keep that in mind as you move forward, it'll become important later). You're also starting to get a good grasp of some of the important voices from that time period, giving you an immediate, personal understanding of it that isn't just academic. Even just by making it this far, you could genuinely say you understand your topic.
But now it's time to dig a bit deep.
Watch another documentary and/or listen to a podcast about your topic. With the podcast, like with everything else, make sure like with everything else you can trace it back to a specific history book or historian to make sure you're not listening to bullshit. Then get your hands on a short biography about someone from the time period. You could even use a biography from the "Who Was...?" series of biographies aimed at younger readers. Or, if there's a relatively short biography written for adults, you could check that out. After that, check out primary sources that are a little more challenging than speeches and journal entries. Things like excerpts from laws, political platforms/declarations, newspaper articles, and transcripts of important events.
So, with Reconstruction, you could watch this Nashville Public Television documentary about Reconstruction. Then you can watch this National Museum of African American History & Culture conversation about the book "Black Reconstruction" by WEB Du Bois, one of the great original works about the topic, featuring Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates Jr (arguably the other best living Reconstruction historian next to Foner). After that you'd move onto, perhaps, the "Who Was...?" biography about president Ulysses Grant. Finally, you could look up the text of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the US Constitution (which are less difficult and boring than they sound).
(Note: you may be tempted, if you're studying Reconstruction, to look up "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" as part of your research here. While that's a fantastic read and I'd highly recommend it generally, that memoir only goes up to a little after his escape from slavery. It doesn't go up to the time period of Reconstruction, so it won't help you too much for this specific topic)
Step Four: Getting Some Genuine Understanding
If you've made it this far, you're truly passionate about your topic, which I applaud. You're already at the point where you know more about the topic than the great majority of people. You're already thinking like a historian in that you're absorbing information, comparing notes on each source of information, and studying substantial primary sources from the time period.
But if you want to keep going, keep on reading.
The next step is to review some of the bigger secondary sources you've gone through and ask: where do they agree and disagree? What kind of information does each source include or not include? Who gets the spotlight in each source? How do they frame the topic and events within?
After that, you're going to take a pretty big step. You're going to read an actual history book about your topic. Once again, like with the historians you've looked up, you'll want to research what the best books are for your topic and choose from htere. As you read the, ask yourselves the same questions I posted up above for your other sources. You want to not only read the book to learn what it has to teach you, but also see where it does and doesn't overlap with what else ou've read. This is the sort of things historians in training do in graduate school.
When it comes to Reconstruction, this is an easy one. The two best books are the aforementioned "Black Reconstruction" by WEB Du Bois and "Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution" by Eric Foner. Though if you want reads that are shorter, you can read "A Short History of Reconstruction" by Eric Foner and "Stony the Road" by Henry Louis Gates Jr. Both of those are pretty concise while still being substantive.
Step Five: Expertise
Everything you've done up to this point has put you past 99% of people who have ever lived when it comes to understanding your topic. Seriously. As far as laypeople go, you are an expert. I mean, it's one thing to put effort into history as a historian, but to go out of your way this much when it's not even something you're trained to do? That is super cool. You have a lot to be proud of.
But let's say you want to get your black belt as a hobby historian. How would you go about doing that?
Choose two more history books to read, and ask the same questions of them you have asked about the first book and every other source you've read. On top of that, read another book about a specific aspect of your topic. It could be a biography, or it could be another history book that just covers a sub-topic of your greater topic.
So, finishing up our Reconstruction example, let's say you decided to read "A Short History of Reconstruction" by Eric Foner before. You would now read "Black Reconstruction" by Du Bois and "Stony the Road" by Henry Louis Gates Jr. After that, you could maybe check out "The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass", which is his autobiography written in his old age that encompasses all of his life, rather than just his escape from slavery and early activism that is covered in his earlier, more famous memoir, "The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass." Or you could read "Capital Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen" by Philip Dray, which has a pretty self-explanatory title. Or you could read "The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the American Constitution" by Eric Foner, another self-explanatory title.
Closing Thoughts
I am only a blue belt in the martial art I train in, but one thing I've heard black belts say is that once you get your black belt, it's almost like a new beginning. Your black belt doesn't mean you know everything. Rather, depending on how you look at it, you could see it as meaning you no longer need to even think about rankings at all. You've cleared the final hurdle. Now you can just keep exploring because of your love of learning.
As a historian, I can relate to that. Granted, depending on who you ask, a PhD may be considered your actual black belt. But as someone with an MA in history who teaches it, constantly reads it, co-hosts a podcast about it, and is in the process of writing a book about it, I feel content with my relationship to history as it is. I continue to explore and learn and write about it not because I'm thinking about clearing another hurdle or getting any sort of official credential, but because I love it as a discipline.
If you've made it this far, I think it's safe to say you do, too. As someone who wishes society taught us to be more historically minded, I want to thank you for your interest in the topic. We're in turbulent times, and I think historical perspective is an incredibly important tool for as many as people as possible to have. So whatever role you play in becoming historically informed, it is my belief you're doing a great service to yourself and others, including me in an indirect way. Every decision we make has ripple effects, even if they're invisible to us. You choosing to learn from those who came before us and grow from it helps everyone.
Thanks for reading!
