Good history teachers incorporate historiography into their class lessons

Good history teaching incorporates historiography by including many different interpretions of historical events written by many different historians. History is not one singular telling of events. Thus, the very act of examining history is controversial because everyone brings their own viewpoint, their own perspective to any examination off historical figures and events. Historians are no different - their education, training and perspective will shape the way they examine history. Anyone training to become a historian must be very familiar with the controversy that every historical topic entails within academic circles. The study of this is known as historiography

Historiography is the study of what historians believe about historical topics. As such, historiography

• provides a way to explore the methods and theories of historians who study various historical topics,
• identifies the gaps in historical scholarship, and
• allows historians to fine-tune their critical thinking skills and their historical insight.

So, just how do you go about conducting a historiography after you pick a topic to critically analyze through the lens of several historians?

1. Pick a book. Go through several titles, look at annotations and/or book reviews, and then pick the book that most peaked your interest - a book that would be a good start to your ongoing analysis.
2. Know the author. You need to know important facts about the author that may have shaped their interpretation of the topic: gender, race, class, ethnicity, political affiliation, when and where they lived. You can normally find this information in the text itself, the library, or online with a search of the author’s name. You should explain how the context in which the author writes shapes their interpretation of past events and you must provide examples to illustrate your explanation.
3. Determine the author’s thesis and identify the supportive arguments. Read the introductory paragraphs closely to identify the author’s main thesis. What are the primary arguments used to support the thesis?
4. Provide evidence to support or refute the author’s thesis and arguments. Look for supporting evidence, critically analyzing it, questioning whether the author logically interprets the evidence, and explaining how the evidence does or does not support the author’s thesis. Look for ways that the author’s perspective or bias may have influenced his or her interpretation of the evidence and overall argument.
5. Determine what the book or article adds to your understanding of the topic. Explain what is relevant and irrelevant, well proven or poorly proven, and well documented or poorly documented. You should express your own opinion with clear support of evidence from the reading.
6. Decide what is missing. Think about what you still need to know, what was not adequately explained, and what evidence is still needed or needs better interpretation.
7. Select the next book. Once you know what is missing from your understanding of the topic, select the next book or article for an academic comparison.
8. Begin comparing. After you have read several books and/or articles on the same topic, you will compare and contrast the various theses, explain which authors provide a more convincing argument based on their evidence, and identify the gaps still existing in the literature.

An example. Let's look at an example of a historiography your professor undertook several years ago - the political career, and especially the presidency, of Ronald Reagan.

Since Ronald Reagan left the White House, over 900 books have been written about Reagan the man, the governor, and the president.  Most have been written by academics, by journalists, and by scholars at conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. 

Clearly, some authors have an agenda:  academics judge Reagan without the benefit of a truly historical timeframe, journalists examine Reagan from both liberal and conservative biases, and think tank scholars promote Reagan as one of the greatest presidents in the nation’s history. From this massive amount of biographical and political literature, I found that the following seven books provide a balanced understanding of Ronald Reagan:

• Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.  NY: Public Affairs, 2000. 
• Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics. NY: Oxford, 2004.
• John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History.  NY:  W.W. Norton, 2007. 
• Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: American in the Reagan Years.  NY: W.W. Norton, 2003. 
• Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination.  NY: Simon and Schuster, 2005. 
  Jules Tygiel, Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism. NY: Pearson, 2005. 
• Peter J. Wallison, Ronald Reagan : The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. 

Three were written by well-known journalists Cannon, Dallek, Reeves), three were written by distinguished historians (Diggins, Johnson, Tygiel), and one was written by a scholar at a conservative think tank (Wallison). Let's take a brief look at each:

• Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime.  NY: Public Affairs, 2000. (Cannon covered Ronald Reagan’s career for more than 25 years, first as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News and later as the Washington Post White House correspondent.)
  • Reagan was a successful leader because he was an actor which enabled him to communicate eternal optimism.  He gave powerful performances as President, most of which were based upon his clear understanding that presidential leadership should be more inspirational rather than pragmatic.  He felt his job was to “restore hope and national pride” to the American people. (p. 85)
  • Reagan was an “American original, both in form and substance.”  (p. 153)  He successfully “took the fragments of his life that mattered most to  him and fashioned them into powerful stories of personal experience.”  (p. 185)  In so doing, he blurred “the distinction between reality and imagination when it suited his convenience” and was proud of his “re-creation” skills.  (p. 187)  He had a “conflict between feelings and facts” and usually gave “greater weight to his feelings.”  (p. 20)
  • While Reagan presided over a “delegative presidency” in which he left work to others whenever he could, he did not depend upon others for his political inspiration.  He may have been “the most highly managed president in the history of the republic,” but his core ideas were the basis for political inspiration.  He was “a strong man, but an extraordinary weak manager.  He restored public confidence in the  presidency without mastering the difficult act of wielding presidential power.”  (p. 296)
  • Reagan did not see any inconsistency in his “tripartite creed” - belief in lower taxes, smaller government, and increased military spending – and his desire to balance the budget.  Throughout his administration, he adhered to his beliefs in reduced taxes, government deregulation (i.e., “Government does not solve problems, it subsidizes them”), and peace through strength – but did not understand that you could not balance the budget by adhering to such policies.
  • Many of Reagan’s achievements were “devoid of revolutionary purposes” and instead, were characteristic of a “cautious evolution.” (p. 203) He got rid of some of President Johnson’s Great Society entitlement programs by reordering budget priorities, but did nothing to dismantle the New Deal; he modestly reduced taxing and spending; and he dramatically increased federal military spending which in turn,  increased the size of the federal government.
  • Reagan’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair at best shows a president who had deliberately been kept out the loop about the diversion of funds by Cabinet members who did not trust him with the information or who wanted to protect; and at worst shows a president who had known about the diversion but had forgotten the extent of his knowledge by the time he had to testify for the Tower Commission.
• Matthew Dallek, The Right Moment: Ronald Reagan’s First Victory and the Decisive Turning Point in American Politics.   NY: Oxford, 2004.  (Dallek is a former speechwriter for Representative Richard A. Gebhardt and a journalist who has worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.)
  • The “Reagan Revolution” actually began in 1966 when he beat Democrat incumbent Pat Brown for the California governorship.  The Revolution “began as a debate about retaking control of a society in chaos.”  (p. x)
  • Reagan’s political success can be attributed larger policy and social events – seeking office after liberal failures to deal with the excesses of civil rights, student protests, urban riots, and the Cold War – and the rise of conservatism that paralleled these events.  Reagan came to the attention of Californians at the right time, just as they were fed up with liberalism and the moral decline it brought to the state.  Californians, and later Americans when he ran for president - were looking for an alternative, optimistic, and historically traditional vision of what government should and should not do.
  • The Reagan revolution has had long-lasting effects on America because he was able to communicate simple formulas that would solve the state and nation’s problems.  Reagan’s adherence to lowering taxes, decreasing the size of the government, and anti-communist foreign policy never wavered, and these all  had long-lasting appeal to many Americans who distrusted the government.
  • Reagan was able to move the conservative movement away from their stereotypical images as radical anti-communists, crackpots, right-wing zealots, and kooks.  Instead, he created a new image of conservatives who were optimistic, proud of traditional American values, and moving toward a bright and positive future.
  • Reagan’s beliefs mirror the liberal-conservative struggle over the state’s proper role in society, a struggle that ensures the Reagan governorship and presidency will have an enduring legacy.  Thus, “he will remain a fascinating and much-debated figure for years to come,” as “his ideas, values, and vision for American became central features of American politics that endure today.”  (p. 252)
• John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and the Making of History.  NY:  W.W. Norton, 2007. (Diggins is a distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York Graduate Center.)
  • Reagan was “one of the three greatest liberators in American history.”  (p. xx)  Lincoln freed the slaves, FDR helped save Western Europe from fascism, and Reagan helped liberate Eastern Europe from the yoke of communism.  He delivered America from “fear and loathing” by standing for freedom, peace, disarmament, self-reliance, earthly happiness, dreams  of the imagination, and happiness of the heart.
  • On many issues, Reagan’s ideas were more liberal rather conservative: he stood up against the neoconservatives in his cabinet and among his advisors by supporting negotiation with the Soviets rather than a policy of arms escalation based on fear; his religion shunned the guilt and shame of Calvinism and celebrated a God who celebrated the exceptional nature of Americans and the traditional  ideal of the City on a Hill; he believed in the essential goodness rather than the evil in Americans; his vision for America as “the land of tomorrow” was a liberal, Emersonian outlook; and he did not want to win the Cold War through military might, he wanted to settle it.
  • Because Reagan abhorred regulation, he failed to use the presidency to respond to many important social issues:  the AIDS crisis; environmental problems; the demise of public education.  He wanted to dismantle what he believed was a welfare system gone amuck.  In so doing, he tried to deregulate some of the governmental activities that Great Society liberals said were the responsibility of government and, in turn, make these activities the job of private interests.
  • Reagan the politician made several grave mistakes: his hostility to environmental protection; his failure to support the 1964 Civil Rights Act because of his belief that voting rights was a state not a federal issue; his aversion to taxes that left America with no way to extinguish its debts;  his inability to understand that the wealthy who cheated Americans out of money (Keating and the savings and loan scandal) were just as despicable as the poor who took advantage of the government through welfare fraud; his failure to understand that people and government were inextrincably linked – that a government that  only tells the people what they want to know rather than what they need to know is a “government that cannot control the governed and cannot control itself” (p. 53); and his refusal to ask Americans to discipline their consumer desires and stay out of debt while also making demands upon the government.
  • When Reagan left office in 1989, he had changed national politics “in ways that made the Democratic Party almost indistinguishable from the Republican Party, so eager were liberals... to rush to the center.”  (p. 152)  Both parties had made similar mistakes in the 1960s – mistakes that sometimes brought their ideas closer together rather than farther apart.  A good example is that both  parties failed to understand that Vietnam was a war about nationalism, not communism and that throughout their history, the Vietnamese had driven the Chinese, Japanese, and the French out of their nation in search of nationalism.
  • While the president defined the Reagan Doctrine as U.S. support of “those fighting for freedom against communism wherever we find them” (p. 221), in reality, Reagan supported “friendly dictators and the leaders of right-wing regimes in Central America” (p. 224).  In fact, Reagan did not support some of the democratic impulses elsewhere in the world, especially the Chinese students in Tiananmen Square and the Solidarity Movement in Poland.
  • Reagan did not end the Cold War with the USSR; it imploded from within.   Democracy on the part of the communist dominated nations overthrew the Cold War.  (p. 225) Indeed, the democratic impulse among the Soviet satellite nations and people had long been challenging communism in Eastern Europe and the Central Asian Republics. 
• Haynes Johnson, Sleepwalking Through History: American in the Reagan Years.  NY: W.W. Norton, 2003. (Johnson has written 13 books on American politics, was a regular on the PBS-TV program Washington Week in Review, and is a professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.)
  • The decade of the Reagan presidency - one in which the American people, their leaders, and their political institutions “appeared to be sleepwalking through history” – greatly influenced America’s future.  (p. 12)  Americans desperately wanted to believe in America after the tumultuous previous two decades, and they were willing to follow anyone who made them feel good again. Reagan showed Americans what they wanted to see, rather than what they should be seeing and understanding.
  • The 1980s was similar to two other periods of American history “that were characterized by a national climate of selfishness.”  (p. 111)  Each period – the late 19th Century Gilded Age and the Roaring Twenties – arose after prolonged periods of national strain and disillusionment and in each “the greed of the times was rationalized by the nation’s leaders as being driven by nobler motives.”  (p. 111)
  • The rise of television and Reagan’s understanding of how to use it affected the viewing public in two important ways: Americans became “spectators instead of participants” in public life and Reagan’s policies changed the way that TV functioned.  Television in the 1980s “offered a new opportunity for diversion and helped breed a new passivity in public life.”  (p. 141)  Reagan’s appointee to the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) changed laws and regulations governing programming by abandoning public licensing of the airways that began in 1934 and FCC regulations that required broadcasters to devote a minimum portion of airtime to public service and news programs.  Consequently, TV became more about entertainment that about news and education.
  • Reagan’s presidency – which was firmly grounded in the belief that government was the problem - greatly expanded executive power at the expense of Congressional power as well as the role of the federal government in terms of military power, and often disregarded the rule of law.  Reagan, his cabinet members, and most of his appointees viewed Congress with distrust and often with contempt, while, at the same time, they expanded the executive branch and the role of the Pentagon. Reagan and his advisors did not try to change a law by “pointing out its inadequacies,” but instead, “chose to either disregard it or find a way to get around it.”  (p. 371)
  • Reagan did little to address or control the growing amount of business fraud and consumer greed of the 1980s.  He even encouraged Americans to buy, consume, take hold of all their could afford.
  • When judged by Reagan’s terms, his presidency was a success; when judged on those of the American people, the effects of his presidency were mixed at best.  Reagan accomplished much of what he hoped to achieve:  lowered taxes, redistributed wealth to advantage the wealthy, poured billions into the Pentagon for national defense, and checked the domestic expansion of the government.  But, “the poor had been left poorer, the rich, richer; the social compact, if not broken had been severely weakened.  In fundamental ways America was more divided into its many racial, ethnic, and regional groups than when he became president.”  (p. 455)
• Richard Reeves, President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination.  NY: Simon and Schuster, 2005.  (Reeves, the author of presidential bestsellers, is a syndicated columnist.)
  • The heart of Reagan’s politics was that “he imagined a past.  He imagined a world.  And he made people believe in the past he imagined, and a future too.”  (p. 473)  Reagan’s optimism, patriotism, and belief in the American Dream gave the American people hope after two decades of failed presidencies and pessimism.
  • Reagan - an ideologue who had a few ideas that he held with “stubborn certainty” – was successful because he used his communication skills to turn his ideas into values and emotions.  Not only could Reagan imagine a better world, he was able to communicate to the American people that such a world would be based on traditional American values.
  • Reagan was a courageous leader.  He was a “gambler, a bold determined guy” who “knew how to be president.”  (p. xvi)
  • Reagan did not win the Cold War or bring down communism, “but he knew that it was going to happen.”  (p. xv)  He was the only president since FDR who firmly believed that the Soviet Union would fail within his lifetime.
  • Reagan changed history by understanding and trusting his greatest adversary – Gorbachev, the leaders of the Soviet Union.  He held firm to this trust, even as his advisors and conservative commentators thought he had been foolishly tricked by the “evil empire.”
  • Many Americans paid a high price for President Reagan’s certainty.  During his presidency, many opportunity costs were lost – costs that cannot be measured: money feeding the wealthy in terms  of tax breaks, increased defense spending, less money for social programs that could help the poor and educate Americans.  “The rich got richer and Reagan told them they deserved it.  The poor got poorer and he told them it was their own fault.”  (p. xvii)
• Jules Tygiel, Ronald Reagan and the Triumph of American Conservatism. NY: Pearson, 2005.  (Tygiel, a long-time historian at San Francisco State University, died in 2008.)
  • By invoking the “Reagan Revolution,” Reagan re-defined the American experience and the American Dream around conservative ideals.  His revolution was based upon Reaganomics – major tax cuts, supply-side economics, massive defense spending – and aggressive anti-communism. Further, the revolution shifted political discourse to the right; encouraged distrust of large government and bureaucracy; celebrated decreasing taxes and increasing governmental deregulation; moved the Supreme Court closer to a conservative majority and brought a conservative agenda to the nation’s federal courts; and it encouraged a new role for the religious right politics. These ideals became the basis of conservatism through the end of the 20th Century and into the 21st Century.
  • At the beginning of the 21st century, both the United States and the world were more closely aligned with Reagan’s vision than during his adult lifetime.  The Soviet Union had dissolved, but America had many new “evil empire” in the Middle East; U.S. foreign policy operated unilaterally; ideology shaped reality rather than reality shaping ideology; the extremes between rich and poor, as well as rich and the middle class had grown; and the New Deal and Great Society social contracts with America “had been rewritten to reflect a less compassionate brand of unrestrained economic acquisition and individualism.”  (p. 206)
  • A recurrent pattern existed within the Reagan administration of “ignoring or conveniently misinterpreting laws that did not adhere to the Administrations desires and agenda.”  (p. 157).  This was especially evident in the Iran-Contra affair and in covert interventions in Latin American nations.
  • The Reagan administration lived by a “rather narrow definition of freedom.”  It ignored the Four Freedoms of FDR and Rockwell in favor of a definition of freedom that “meant only a release from communism.” (p. 142)  This definition was defended by Jeane Kirkpatrick’s academic treatise in which she theorizes that totalitarian nations can never change and become democracies.  Therefore, she argued, the U.S. was obliged to stop communism from spreading.
  • Reagan confidently believed that he “instinctively expressed the will of the American people.”  (p. 120)  Rather than take the tactic of earlier presidents who asked what Americans could do for their country, he asked people not to sacrifice but “to simply believe in the power of the American ideal.”  (p. 120)
• Peter J. Wallison, Ronald Reagan : The Power of Conviction and the Success of His Presidency.  Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004. (Wallison was Counsel to President Reagan from 1986-1987 is currently a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.)
  • Reagan governed “through his ideas and convictions.  He believed and acted on his beliefs; he stayed the course.”  He had an “extraordinary sense of mission and faith in the American people.”  (p. 281)  It was the power of these convictions that made him a great president.
  • Reagan not only changed the United States and the world, he also shaped the future through his vision of U.S. foreign policy.  His vision was based upon “three principle elements: that U.S. foreign policy must be based on American ideals; that these ideals – primarily democracy and self government – are desired by all peoples; and that the U.S has a special mission to promote the success and spread of democratic governments around the world.”  (p. 283).  Such a foreign policy would, in turn, provide security for the United States.
  • Reagan was motivated by strong ideas and a consistent philosophy that ultimately “reformulated Republicanism so that it tapped into traditional American values.”  (p. 14)  These were ideas and philosophies that he had always held and that he never abandoned.  He believed he would be a successful president if he put his ideas into practice – and he left office convinced that he had.
  • Reagan was a “truly unique” president because he was able to infuse his major ideas and philosophies into policies that were actually implemented.  This quality made Reagan possibly the best president in the history of the United States. Because Reagan took enormous political risks to support political causes that he believed were right, his commitment to the people and the office was greater than any other president, with the “possible exception of Lincoln.”  (p. xi)
  • President George W. Bush’s foreign policies were deeply embedded in those of Ronald Reagan.  Reagan’s views on foreign policy “lay dormant” until after September 11, 2001 when “Bush adopted the Reagan view that peace and security for America and the rest of the civilized world could be achieved only through the introduction of democracy in the Arab countries of the Middle East.”  (p. 287) 

So, what do these authors have in common:

1. While all authors agree that Reagan’s presidency has had a long-lasting impact on the U.S. in terms of his social, economic, and foreign policy agenda, they disagree about the nature of such impact - has it been essential beneficial or detrimental to the future social, economic, and foreign policies of the U.S.
2. All authors agree that his presidency had an enormous influence on the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st. 
   • Reagan was a “truly consequential president” (Johnson), a president who remained “his own man” and focused on “his own personal convictions.”
   • This made him “one of the two or three truly great presidents in American history” (Diggins), a president who, like FDR, recognized that the “decisive aspect of presidential leadership was inspirational rather than pragmatic” (Cannon), a president who left the U.S. as a “far more politically conservative, individualistic, and militarily dominant nation” than it was when he entered office (Tygiel).
3. All authors agree that Reagan’s eternal optimism made Americans in the 1980s feel good again.He changed the country’s mood from pessimism to optimism, from failure to success, from cynicism to belief in patriotic myths and fables, and from ignoring their own personal opportunities and confronting national problems to celebrating their opportunities while ignoring their worries about national problems.
4. All authors agree that at the end of Reagan’s presidency, the federal government had more control and power over the lives of Americans than it had at the beginning of Reagan’s presidency.  While Reagan’s policies contributed somewhat to the deregulation of the domestic responsibilities of government, they also increased the budget, power, and size of military defense. 
5. All authors agree that in some form or another, Reagan was a 20th Century proponent of the 19th Century belief in Manifest Destiny.  Reagan never wavered from his belief in American exceptionalism and Americans were obligated to spread our democratic ideals to peoples around the world who longed to be free.