This handout has a genealogy. I borrowed it first from Dr. Maureen Miller when we both taught at Hamilton College. I then adapted it to fit my courses and passed along a copy to my colleague at MTSU, Dr. Nancy Rupprecht, who made some additions of her own. The current version incorporates some of her additions, and I have incorporated new material of my own in January 2008. If you wish to borrow it, please acknowledge its source.
Readers may wish to consult the classic book on this subject, Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (New York, 1940). Adler goes far beyond this handout with his advice to readers.
This strategy is specifically designed for those reading monographs, as opposed to textbooks, journal articles, or other types of historical writing. A monograph is the technical term for the books that most historians write: a book with a single author, a narrowly defined topic, and original research. Monographs are usually published by university presses, but some "trade" (commercial) publishers also publish them. Please note that while monographs are often used in history courses, they are not textbooks, which most often have a broad topic ("American history to 1877," "Western civilization since 1715," "Colonial Latin America"), multiple authors, several editions, and lots of illustrations. While monographs can get expensive, depending on the publisher and the binding (cloth or paperback), they are almost always significantly cheaper than textbooks.
All scholarly monographs in history have arguments, which you may also refer to as the thesis or the interpretation. No author writes a book without specific goals and some point to make about the topic of the book. Authors want to convince the reader of something, and that something is the argument or thesis. A scholarly monograph should generally be evaluated on two points:
1. Are the author's goals (the questions he or she is trying to answer) significant and adequately formulated? Does the book add significantly to the state of knowledge on a particular topic, or interpret a topic in a new way, or explore a new topic that is significant?
2. How well does the author achieve his or her goals? Does the author, in fact, prove his or her theses and convince the reader that the author's work is a significant contribution to the field of history in which it fits?
Scholarly books follow certain conventions in organization and format; awareness of and attention to these conventions will help you understand and evaluate the author's argument. A convention is the way of doing things that are embedded in the culture of the historical profession. Part of learning to be a historian is to embed oneself in the culture of history and to be alert to the conventions that appear as you study. If the past is a foreign country, then the beginning historian is like a student studying in the foreign country, learning the language, stumbling over cultural faux pas, and generally trying to "fit in."
The following steps and questions are designed to facilitate your reading and analysis of books. If you are asked in class to complete a reading log for a particular book, these are also the instructions.
A careful reading of any book begins with the cover and title page. What can you learn about the book before you open it? If you have a copy with the dust jacket, or a paperback, then you can examine the cover art, the "blurbs" praising the book, and probably something about the author. You will also know the publisher. Bear in mind that blurbs are advertising, designed to entice you into buying the book. Publishers do not put negative comments about books on the covers, so just because Professor X or Famous Person Y thought the book "smashing" or a "tour de force of historical writing" does not mean that everyone did, or that you will.
Next look at the full title page. The publication data (author, title, place of publication, publisher, and date of publication) may or may not be important in interpreting the book. One might ask, for example, whether a book written by a Briton and published in Britain might have a different perspective on American colonies than a book written by an American and published in America. (There is not necessarily a connection, but there may be one.) At the least, the title page is what you should use when you cite the book in a bibliography or footnote. Do not depend on the cover for this information!
After ruminating about the possible implications of the title page, which may also include an illustration or artwork, turn the page and look at the publication information on the copyright page. Here you will usually find lots of potentially useful tidbits: When was the book first copyrighted? Has it been revised and republished in more than one form? Which edition do you have? These details may also affect the way you cite the book in a footnote or bibliography.
Beginning in the 1970s, books almost always include the Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data. This is chockfull of information, for you see how the book would appear in a card catalog (whether paper or electronic). You can see how the book is categorized by subject, by author, and by title, and you may also find out when the author was born (and died). Might the author's age matter? You will even see the book's call number, both in the Library of Congress system and in the Dewey decimal system. If you would like to find similar books, use the subject headings given here, or go to the shelf in the stacks and browse in the same area as this book.
Now that you have spent a few moments with the cover and title page, you are ready for step two.
Carefully read the preface (if there is one) and the introduction. Sometimes the introduction will, in fact, be labeled as the first chapter. In these two places the author should tell you the following things:
1. Why he or she wrote the book--how the author became interested in the topic. Did it begin as a doctoral dissertation?
2. What questions the author hopes to answer, what issues he or she will address. Usually these questions or issues are suggested by what other historians have or have not said on the subject. The author will sometimes survey a historical literature (what previous historians have written about renaissance art, for example), point out its defects (questions unanswered, areas not covered), and then state how the book at hand will try to answer some of these defects.
3. The author should then tell you how he or she will answer the questions or address the issues to which the book is devoted. The author should also give some indication, even if only general, of the results of their inquiry. Good authors will state clearly exactly what they are going to argue (what their answers are to the questions raised). If you are lucky, the author will state, "The argument of this book is . . ." or "I conclude that . . ." in the introduction.
You must determine the author's position on each of these issues before proceeding. For some students, this is the most challenging aspect of learning to read a book. If the reader proceeds without knowing the argument of the book, then the following steps will not make sense, and the reader will be tangled in a bramble for the remainder of the book. If you are not sure of the book's argument (thesis), ask for help!
After you know why the author is writing the book, what questions he or she hopes to answer, and how they will answer them, then look at the table of contents. The table of contents will tell you something about how the author is organizing his or her argument (his or her answer to the questions raised). Are the chapters organized chronologically, topically (thematically), or some combination of the two? If chronologically, into what periods does the author divide the subject? If thematically, into what topics does the author organize the material? Each chapter should be a building block in the author's argument--how does the organization of chapters relate to what the author tells you about his or her argument in the introduction? Are the chapters subdivided into sections? What do these subdivisions indicate about the author's approach and the elements of his or her argument? (Oftentimes the author will briefly sketch the structure of the book in the introduction, after revealing the thesis of the book. These sections are easy to spot, for the author will say, "In chapter one . . ." and "Next in chapter two . . .," or "In part one I explore. . . ." You get the picture. But if you do not see this information in the preface or introduction, then you must rely on the table of contents.)
After you have analyzed the table of contents, consider the title of the book. Does the title accurately convey what the author is treating in the book? Does it give you any additional clues about the author's approach or argument? A recent trend in book titles is, roughly, the following format: catchy or evocative phrase: what this book is really about, dates. For example, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800. Both the sections before and after the colon can give you subtle (or not so subtle) information about the author's intent and point of view. In the example just given, the phrase "revolutionary experience" seems significant: what is "revolutionary"? Is it purely a chronological description (i.e., during the American Revolution) or was the experience in fact revolutionary? If the latter, how? Sometimes the phrase before the colon is more revealing. Forrest McDonald's title Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution should give you pause. Why does he choose to characterize the subject with this relatively obscure Latin phrase? Even if you know that novus ordo seclorum means something like "a new order for the ages," does that help you understand what McDonald is arguing about the intellectual origins of the Constitution? And what are intellectual origins, anyway? Is this a positive or negative statement on McDonald's part?
Finally, before moving beyond the introductory matter, you should pause to consider what the introduction, table of contents, and title tell you about the author's point of view. No book is entirely objective and value-free. Every author has a particular point of view or "bias." So, the question is not whether a book is "biased" (all books are). The question is whether, or to what degree, the author's "bias" or point of view distorts his or her evaluation of the subject matter. Has the author's point of view seriously limited his or her research? Has it blinded the author to equally plausible interpretations of the material which conflict with his or her own conclusions? Sometimes, you may disagree with the author's conclusions because of his or her point of view but still find much useful material in a book (the research it is based upon may be solid and stimulating).
In trying to determine the author's point of view, ask yourself the following questions. First, which historical forces does the historian stress? Usually historians characterize themselves as "political," "social," "economic," "intellectual," or some combination of these. This can give you a clue as to which historical forces the author gives the most causal weight. For example, Mary Beth Norton, who wrote the book mentioned above on the "revolutionary experience" of women, considers herself a "social historian." Will this influence her treatment of the subject in ways that are different from someone who considers herself a "political" or "economic" historian? Second, can you detect any personal views about the way the world and people are (or should be) in the author's work? Does Forrest McDonald's stress on intellectual origins indicate he is doing "great white male" history (an assumption that the male thinkers are usually the intellectuals and politicians and therefore the most important force in history)? Finally, are there any indicators that the author espouses a particular theory or creed which will influence his or her work? For example, Marxist theory has been popular among some historians. The use of Marxian terms like "bourgeoisie," "class struggle," or "hegemony" would be clues that the author has been influenced by Marxist theory and may share its assumptions.
Your reading and analysis of the introductory matter of the book should give you a clear sense of what the author will try to accomplish in the body of the book. You should read the body of the book with the aim of determining how well the author actually achieves these goals.
Read each chapter as a distinct unit. Do not forget the footnotes or endnotes. (Some books only have a "suggested reading" or bibliographic essay at the end.) They are a critical part of scholarly books and contain much useful information. Stop after each chapter and determine 1) what the author argued in that chapter and 2) what sources did the author use to support the argument. I suggest not taking any notes until you have finished a chapter; then go back and briefly summarize the author's argument and use of sources. Proceeding in this fashion, when you complete the chapters your notes will record the essential building blocks of the author's overall argument. If you are completing a reading log, your notes for each chapter should focus on 1 and 2 above. State the argument of the chapter and explain how the chapter fits structurally into the rest of the book. This attention to the structure of the argument is crucial and is the most often overlooked aspect of reading a book. State the types of evidence the author uses in the chapter to make their case. By this we do not mean listing each source. Rather, take note of the types of sources, beginning with the distinction between primary and secondary sources. Is the author using predominantly secondary sources (works written by other historians) or primary sources (original sources from the time), or some mixture? Categorize the types of primary sources (monographs, journal articles, reference works, web sites) and secondary sources (including, but not limited to, newspapers, tax records, court records, public documents, letters and diaries, church records, photographs, material culture, prints and maps, and oral history interviews). Finally, state how well the author uses their sources. Have they chosen the right ones to persuade you? Could the argument be stronger with the use of other sources? You may not always be able to answer these questions, but you should at least think about them.
Read the conclusion. After you have read the conclusion, go over your notes and consider the following questions:
1. Are the author's final conclusions supported by all the material he or she has presented in the chapters? Do any of the author's conclusions go beyond the material in the book (i.e., does the author draw any conclusions which are not warranted by his or her preceding arguments and evidence)?
2. Is the argument, as built and elaborated in the chapters, logically consistent? Are there things the author should have considered which he or she did not consider? Is there material in the chapters that seems superfluous or is not adequately linked to the author's overall argument?
3. Evaluate the author's evidence for his or her assertions. Take what you have noted in each chapter about the sources and reach an overall conclusion for the author's use of sources in the entire book. What sources does the author use? Are these sources adequate (should the author have used more, or a greater variety, of sources)? Did the author interpret his or her sources correctly? Perhaps most important, can the sources tell us what the author claims they do?
Now it is time to think about the book as a whole. Review your notes and make sure you have a clear grasp of the book as a single unit. Return to sections that remain unclear. Then review your assignment. This may be only to discuss the book in class, in which case you should come to class with notes as described above, ready to discuss. It may be to complete a reading log, in which case the notes you have taken will be turned in for a grade and judged by how well you follow and complete each step described above. The assignment may also be a book review, in which case you will need to take additional steps to finish the assignment. Or the assignment may be to write an evaluative essay about the book, in which case you should be ready to formulate your ideas into a thesis, organize your material in a clear, logical way that reinforces your thesis, and write a strongly argued, well written essay, using examples and evidence from the book to illustrate your arguments. (Refer to the handout on A, B, C, D, and F papers for more information about the distinguishing characteristics of essays.)
This approach may strike you as overkill, but it describes what professional historians (and other serious readers) essentially do when they read a book. Of course, you need not follow this approach for every book you read. Even professors read books for fun, but we expect you to take seriously the books we assign for classes. It is then that you should be systematic and thorough in your reading. Following this approach carefully and faithfully will mean that you absorb fully a book and come to critical conclusions about it with relative ease. Give it a try.
Copyright 2008 by James H. Williams