Historical Methods

Theoretical Questions

One way for social scientists to pose questions about contemporary issues is to compare aspects of contemporary society with those of past societies. As C. Wright Mills put it, to understand social life today, one must ask such questions as, “In what kind of society do I live?” and “Where does this society stand in the grand march of human history?” These questions necessarily imply a theory, a set of related propositions that orients the researcher as to where to search for answers. Indeed, to generalize, any historical question implies a theory, for without a theory, the social scientist is haphazardly collecting a conglomeration of shapeless facts.

I stress the centrality of an explicit theory to historical method to highlight a key distinction between [Page 463]historical methods used by historians and those used by social scientists. Although historians use theories, their theoretical assumptions are not always explicitly developed. Rather, their theoretical emphases are often contained in the professional classification in which they are placed—say, “military historian,” “diplomatic historian,” or “social historian”—because these classifications implicitly claim that the activities of a specific group (and hence a particular kind of power or lack of power) is central to the analysis of epochs. Within this profession, as within all academic professions, the centrality of any one category has varied over time. In the late 20th century, the advent of social history (including such specialties as women's history and African American history) was an announcement that understanding people who had been historically powerless, even invisible, is vital to grasping the nature of our own time.

Appropriate Data

Such shifts in categorical emphasis also imply new forms of data. Thus, news reports have less utility to understand the lives of peasants, factory workers, slaves, or maids than they do to write the biography of, say, a military officer—although news stories may tell us how factory workers or slaves were seen by those who had more power than they. Similarly, one can hope to understand the differential reaction of European Americans and African Americans to urban riots by comparing mass media and African American media. But unless such reports are placed in a theoretical and comparative context, the researcher can only have hope.

Unfortunately, many social scientists embarking on historical inquiries have not been trained in history. In part, this deficiency means that when reading historical accounts, the social scientist may not know either the specific questions those accounts are debating or even the implicit theories that historians are addressing. Without a context, it is difficult to know what to remember, or even what to write on one's ubiquitous note cards or computer files. Similarly, without some appreciation of the lives of people in a specific group living in a specific time and place, one cannot know the meaning or significance of a specific piece of data.

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