History in a Grain of Sand: Teaching the Historian's Craft

Abstract

One day in graduate school, my adviser suggested I read Phillip Shaw Paludan's Victims: A True Story of the Civil War as an inspiring example of how to make the most of limited evidence.1 Starting with a poorly documented massacre of twelve men and a boy in western North Carolina in January 1863, Paludan draws on the letters and memoirs of peripheral participants, oral histories of descendants, and modern social science to reveal the larger meaning of the Civil War in Appalachia and the conditions under which people commit atrocities in war. His compelling narrative draws in the reader and vividly shows how ordinary people experience history. As I read Paludan, I began to think about how well books of this genre lend themselves to teaching undergraduates the historian's craft. Because such works deal with past events in an immediate and emotional way, they easily capture students. Their small scale permits readers fully to grasp events and issues. Often based on limited primary evidence, they reveal more clearly than traditional monographs how historians combine primary and secondary sources. Most important, since they address large questions through small, discrete events, they help students understand that the essence of our craft lies in constructing perspective through context. Just as an oyster creates a pearl around a grain of sand by patiently surrounding it with successive layers of nacre, so historians create meaning by embedding their historical grains in a consideration of larger issues and events. While completing my graduate work, I wrote a proposal for an undergraduate course entitled in a Grain of Sand: Narrative History and the Historian's Craft, and my department supported the experiment. My goal was to introduce the students to a new and exciting way of studying and writing about the past and to expand their definitions of history. I organized the course around a close reading of six short, provocative books. Students also wrote papers, based on original research, about an ordinary event or person. In addition to Victims, I assigned Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return ofMartin Guerre; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms; Judith C. Brown, Immodest Acts;