In the midst of reading some very thought-provoking essays published in the novel digital humanities work Hacking the Academy, I found one of the most practical and useful pieces I’ve read in graduate school. Larry Cebula’s “How to Read a Book in One Hour” should be recommended reading for every student entering graduate school in the humanities, not because Cebula encourages laziness or inattentiveness in advising students to skim academic monographs methodically, but because his pragmatic method insidiously reinforces the pedagogical goals of a graduate education in history.
When I started my graduate history program at George Mason, I found it hard to communicate to family and friends exactly what this course of study was going to teach me. I think that the general public believes that a post-secondary education in history involves intense memorization of facts and figures, a training to be able to recall famous names, dates, places, and speeches and to speak to the obvious greatness of the same. Few outside of the profession know that in fact historians view their job as interrogating evidence and formulating arguments to make amongst themselves.
Several brilliant professors I’ve had the opportunity to lean from at Mason have stressed the importance of understanding historiography, and I’m much the better for it professionally. I realize now that it’s nearly impossible to make a worthwhile argument about a scholarly monograph without understanding where the author is coming from – who s/he’s read, is responding to, agreeing with, or challenging. In an age when historians had faith that their treatment of a subject could be the complete, objective telling of a story, a reading of previous authors’ works might only serve to confirm facts or one’s own mastery of the subject to others’ detriment. Post-modern historians, however, recognize that theirs is but the latest in a revolving and sometimes cyclical series of arguments, that their role is to explore new facets and neglected sources with novel methodologies to reinterpret and come to a greater understanding of a topic or concept. This work is necessarily predicated on an understanding of historical work in context.
All this is to say that I’ve changed the way that I read given what I look for now in a scholarly work, and Cebula’s article was a justification of my evolving methodology and philosophy on the subject. As he wrote, “plodding through a book one page at a time is not the best way to understand a book in graduate school.” Instead, he advises, students should spend their time reading the introduction, conclusion, and table of contents, and then skimming the body of the text for useful arguments and interesting methods and sources. Most importantly, he suggests taking good notes and reading two scholarly reviews of any work, essentially creating an annotated bibliographic entry and comparing one’s thoughts to those of important scholars in the field. These steps make the entire exercise useful beyond the single class period for which the harried student might be cramming; the useful notes and check on one’s analysis make this an exercise in flexing the academic muscles and preparing for comprehensive exams and future papers.
As much as I agree with this method and its simple effectiveness, I’ve found that my persistent problem in employing it is my inherent interest in the material. More often than not, I take Cebula’s advice to read the introduction thoroughly, then forget to take the next step of skipping to the conclusion, getting bogged down in compelling anecdotes and details while forgetting to keep my eye on the bigger picture of the author’s thesis and methods. Well, as this is my last regular response post for Clio Wired, I’m going to consider this a New Semester’s Resolution. I’m going to follow Cebula’s method, take good notes, and then let myself get lost in the details as soon as I know what I want to talk about in class!