I suppose the answer to that question varies by individual, but I never think of my reading in terms of retaining detail. If I need to look something up, I can do that in my notes, in the books on my shelf, or online.

What I do think about is reverse engineering. What information from this book is likely to be useful to me in the future, and how can my notes best capture that information to save me from doing this reading again? Am I reading this to speak cleverly about it in class? Am I likely to draw quotes from this for a paper? Do I need to be thinking of this book/article in the context of other work? Or maybe several of those?

For most course reading (and for teaching) I'm most concerned with identifying and understanding the book's argument, the evidence used to defend it, and the author's intervention in the existing literature. That's enough for most purposes. But I'm also always on the lookout for something I can use down the road.

first of all, i'd point out that in my experience, studying/learning history as an undergrad is extremely different from studying it as a professional, or even as a grad student.

as u/vermeershat pointed out, professionals have knowledge of and access to a great many resources, so we don't have to waste our time trying to use our fallible memories to retain hundreds of thousands of historical details. We obviously have, over time, come to know a lot of history facts and trivia, but that is largely because of repetition, greater power of retention due to our various types of personal investment/sacrifice to gain this knowledge, and discovering numerous connections between things. I feel that it is this kind of learning that produces the deepest understanding of history.

that being said, simple memorization of name, dates, maps, and generally-accepted explanations for major events is very important, and not just for passing undergrad courses. By memorizing these things--particularly when you know little about a subject or are having a hard time retaining what you hear--you gain a good intellectual framework on which you can start building deeper knowledge. Even today, whenever I start learning a new subject, I find myself trying to memorize the big points, just like a history newbie. The difference is now I have a relatively huge store of knowledge that begins to connect with this newly-memorized framework, and it makes it easier to see connections, retain the trivia, and understand it all more deeply. But I had to start this whole process from scratch at one point--I didn't just end up here.

Also, memorizing trivia is also a good tool for when you're talking about subjects a little outside of the field you regularly work in (so where your mind isn't as fresh)--it gives you a framework to fall back on to give you time to recall the deeper knowledge.

So, long story short, particularly as an undergrad, I think it is important to memorize the key history data that your professor tells you you need to know. And to do that, just experiment with memorization techniques, just as you have with note taking techniques. Try flash cards, the "house of memory" visualization technique, and other mnemonic devices. My personal favorite is making an easy-to-remember acronym for related things. This is particularly useful when learning geography, and knowing geography is a key thing for gaining that basic framework for historical knowledge.

So, for example, to start learning middle eastern and central asian history, I started with the big seas: Black, Caspian, and Aral--"BCA" (note the letters correspond with the physical relation of the seas, left to right). To remember the countries around the Aral Sea, I always think "TKU" in a clockwise direction (Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan). I have tons of these things for geography (big and small scale) around the world. With that framework, it's easier to visualize history and think of new mnemonic devices for other things.

There are 2 other things I should point out. First is that some professors just drop huge books with thousands of bits of data on students, and the students are so overwhelmed they don't know which pieces of data are most important, and they fear that come test time they will have memorized the wrong facts. There are 2 key ways to combat this: 1) pay attention to your reading and lectures so you can identify what truly is most important, and 2) when it gets close to test time, try to get the professor to review what s/he thinks is most important (many do that anyway). (Also, of course, talk with other students.)

The 2nd thing is that you don't have to limit you undergrad knowledge of history to memorizing facts and rigidly building an intellectual framework. Sometimes people actually have the desire and time to go beyond this and learn a lot more about a subject. You can always do a little internet research, but my favorite way of doing this is taking a book or article I like and trying to read the same sources that the author read, and studying up on the author's own background. As a kid, I imagined history existing as an objective entity that historians simply wrote down--it made me feel very distant from me and made it hard to connect with anything that didn't affect me or my family directly. As I started digging into the author's sources and their own lives, however, I realized that history is much more organic than that, and that it's something I actually could participate in. This kind of research help makes the subject come alive for me by helping me identify with someone who had a similar interest as me and was able to go before me and make sense out of everything.

These are two handouts that explain how to read and write as a historian. They come from this page from a professor of American history: http://web.calstatela.edu/faculty/cendy/histlinks.htm. If you're working on American history, all of the links there may be useful.

So, one thing that was difficult to get the hang of at first was separating out the argument of a book/author separately from the details I didn't know about the time period the book covered.

For example, I read Charles Sellers' The Market Revolution in Jacksonian America in a seminar. He is not the most, err, clear writer and it was my first exposure to the period in any depth. So I had a lot of trouble getting around the argument in the book while still learning the basis about the period. Fortunately my advisor shared a solution that would be much easier today, in the era of Wikipedia: Look up the timeline of the period in an encyclopedia, write myself an outline, and refer to it when I get lost in who did what to whom. That helped me unpick the argument in the book while not feeling like an idiot about the details of the time period.

As /u/VermeersHat suggests, it's even easier today to look up the basic stuff; what I try to do is to retain the idea of the author's argument and compare it to other things I read about the time period.

(As an aside, damn you John Fenno and your Gazette of the United States competing with Philip Freneau and the National Gazette. Trying to unpick Fenno's Gazette and Freneau's Gazette haunted my dreams for months.)

Undergrad fails a bit at this, which is why I liked Grad School better (for me).

Reading history is essentially reading for argument. You should be familiar enough with Clay, Calhoun, and Webster that you have a general idea about how they operated in the 19th century. Then, connect it to the author's argument. Detail can be looked up if you need to go deeper.

In undergrad I had professors who wanted excruciating detail. In trying to memorize this detail, I lost a lot about the argument of history. Now it set me up with a great foundation (maybe thats the point?) of historical eras, which made reading in Grad School much easier.

Now, your note taking system. For me, by the time I started grad school and was reading 4-5 books per week +articles, my note taking became extremely streamlined. I essentially wrote one sentence explaining the argument from the end of each chapter/section whatever. If I needed to fill in during discussion, I would go back into the chapter during class. I didn't have to memorize every facet of the argument, as long as I could contribute to discussion and then back up my assertions by going back into the detail. However, it is tough to contribute to the discussion if you don't understand the argument.

YMMV though in school. I turned out to be a historic preservationist, and though I was required to do academic history, I never excelled at it. But again, I have a working knowledge of it. I don't know every detail, but I know the ideas and arguments. ( I have to because our built environment tells us so much about our past.)

I hope this helps. If it is rambling I apologize. I have to proofread things multiple times usually and I am just on break at work.

What are the specific books that you're reading?

I read books to get a gist of their thesis and approach to the material. If someone were to ask me what the book was about, would I be able to give them a quick answer and maybe a good example from the text? What would this book be good for in the future? I will do a closer read if the book is on something I am currently researching.

As for retaining details, that comes with time and writing. No one is going to know every single detail about their topic or even everything they have in their notes. Most won't even be able to give you every detail in their own books.

A lot of people in academia use software like Zotero and Evernote/OneNote to keep track of the materials they have read and the notes they take. Zotero is a browser add-on that allows you to build a bibliography using a library website or JSTOR. You can arrange your materials and assign keywords so you know what each piece is good for. It also has a Word extension to automatically add footnotes and create a works cited page.

Evernote and OneNote are note-taking programs and both have great search functions. I usually keep my notes based on book/article but under a general heading. I put links to the articles on my computer, links to other notes I cross-referenced, copies of article pdfs, images the authors describe. I use OneNote since I already had it with my copy of Office, but Evernote does have a free version you might want to check out.

Edit: People retain information better when writing by hand instead of typing. You might consider handwriting your notes at first then copying them.

Keeping your notes and materials straight is the answer to your question. If you have a question about Clay, you know where to get the answer even if you can't answer it right away.

It might be fun do read Max Weber's scientific methods, Droysen's Grundriss der Historik, and ESPECIALLY Wilhelm Dilthey's Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, 1910 as well as Karl-Otto Apel's Die Erklären-Verstehen-Kontroverse in transzendental-pragmatischer Sicht, and then to evaluate what you are reading from the point of view of its methods, rigor, and consistency. This might lead to another dimension of appreciation, and hence, a better memory of what impresses you.

I feel that the most rewarding phase of learning is academic research. While difficult and a bit lonesome, it's having not only the knowledge, but also the know-how and the epistemological purview that permits to discern between intuitions and pursue the most worthwhile ones. Stepping on new problems, or providing a re-interpretation of old frameworks are a great way to keep on writing.

This is something I struggled with a lot. I think there are two answers. First, everyone's different--some people can remember things really well and only write down specific quotes or references they'll need later, others will re-write an entire book in a single point-by-point outline. Finding the write way to take notes is something you have to learn through experimentation--if you're struggling to access the information you need, your notes aren't extensive enough. If you're spending so much time taking notes that you're not keeping up with the work, or if you're dedicating too much thought to note-taking and not enough to the reading, then you know things need to change.

Second, it depends on your knowledge of the subject. As you first begin to learn about something, you need to retain everything you come across--all the names, all the dates, all the events. If you're reading something academic, you have the author's argument to contend with as well. VermeersHat's comment (currently the top comment) is absolutely correct--understanding an argument, it's most important to find what's useful to you or what applies to your field or what can be tied in with your existing research. But this only really applies to someone who's familiar with a given area of study. You mention you took world history courses, which I'm assuming covered a lot of ground you were previously unfamiliar with. In that context, if you ask the question "what information will be useful later?", the answer is a clear "all of it".

The bad news is you'll never retain all of it. The good news is that historians don't need to retain everything because history is a sort of open-book academia. Right now it might seem like you're forgetting stuff you just read, but if you go on to read another, more detailed monograph or article regarding a subject you think you've forgotten, you'll be amazed at how quickly it comes back to you. Existing knowledge is reinforced as you study. If it's important, it'll come up in the other literature. This isn't just true of history, but also historiography. Similarly, if you're confused about the historical context of an event or you don't understand some reference made by the author, you can go look up the footnote. You don't need everything to be in your notes because historians tell you exactly where to find things in books.

So to answer your final question, "is it simply repetition?", the answer is mostly yes. However, that repetition doesn't come from sitting down with flash cards, it's just a natural part of the process of research. You should definitely study in this way for your exams, but in the scheme of things, that's not how historians work. It sounds to me like you're worried about not retaining everything you read, and that will definitely be an issue when you're taking survey courses or the like, but as time goes on, you'll know most of what you're reading (in terms of the history itself). That's when looking for the argument, useful information relating to your own research, connections with other works, etc becomes the purpose of note-taking. Now only is it much easier, but it's so much more fun.

I'm not sure how the American system works, but my first few years at University, I had to learn a ton of facts. Yet towards the end of my education it was a lot more important to fully grasp the thread of the story and to understand where the author was going to. My professors always told their students that iff you can look up a fact with minutes, then why would you need a course on it? So if you ask me how I studied, that greatly depends on the professor and the year I was in.

If it was a course where we were meant to study a lot of facts, I would make summaries and spend a lot of time learning the index of my summaries and the books in question. It's a lot harder to remember facts if you can't place them within context. Hence why I spent a lot of my time getting to know the context. If I had to read a lot of articles for a course, I'd mark the important parts or keywords so I could read them over and over at a rapid pace.

I'd argue that study method is a very individual thing, but I think that it's always a good idea to adapt your study method to your subject, resources and your professor.