Hi, r/AskHistorians,
I have recently taken an interest in world history. I started with history from my country and then my own greater region. I also learn about the history of mankind, the history of wars, economic history, political history.
I wonder as I absorb all of this historical learnings, whether there is a good framework for absorbing history in an objective and analytical way. For example, are there certain structured questions that I should ask myself whilst reading and learning? We are all equipped with a logical mind but it seems to me that the pursuit of learning history is one that requires more than just that; our minds have many cognitive biases, after all. Moreover, I tend to find myself searching through Wikipedia and Youtube. I wonder if these paint a complete picture of historical events.
With this said, do you have any history learning tips for a non-academic history layman like myself? How do you approach learning about a historic topic? Do you adopt any kind of structured or habitual approach? Are there useful tools that you use? Do you write notes in a particular way?
One of the things that I do is to create a log of important events in history and see the relativity of their dates.
Thank you for reading and sharing any tips!
Making a timeline is fantastic, but I bet eventually it will get so big and complicated that it becomes impossible for you to comprehend. Eventually, you'll probably have to break it into lots of smaller timelines that are connected to, or intersecting with your original one. That's good. You'll see how much you've learned and how things are connected and complicated. I bet after a while you won't need to write it out. You'll kind of just have it memorized, even though you never sat down and studied it. The precise dates are rarely that important. Sure, there are some major turning points, but having a sense of what events and people go where will really help you learn more because each time you learn something new you can mentally put it on the timeline somewhere.
As you read more, you'll also start to notice that different authors write about the same topic in very different ways. They try to answer different questions. They put forward different interpretations of the past, despite studying the same moment in history. Looking carefully for these different arguments about the past is how to kick your history reading up to the next level. The more you read, the more arguments/interpretations you'll run in to, and the better you will get at noticing them. You'll also notice that historians use different sources to make different arguments. Pay attention to what the author says about their sources or how they are using their sources (their method).
After I finish reading a book, I write a little paragraph about what the book was trying to do. What was its argument, interpretation, or intervention? I try to articulate what the historian was trying to argue with the book. I might start with a sentence like "This book is a social history of blah blah blah. The author argues that..." Then I write out what I think the author was trying to argue. (Sometimes, they even say exactly what they are arguing in the introduction.) After writing this down in a few sentences, I summarize some of the most important or interesting things from the book's chapters that I learned. Then, I might write a sentence or two about how it connects to other books I read. Is the author debating with another book I've already read? Is this book similar to others? Are they studying the same event but using different sources or methods?
Writing these short paragraphs has helped me because over time, you'll forget the details of a book. I have many books on my shelves that I read, but no longer remember anything about them. If I write a little bit down, I can revisit my notes quickly to remember what the book was about, what the author argued, and what I learned without rereading it.