r/Askhistorians

When I started contributing I did because there was a clear lack of quality answers to Japanese history questions at the time. I was not especially interested in Japanese history but general East Asian and European history. But since there were experts for other areas I took to answering the questions on Japan I could, helped by that I know Japanese. That led to me becoming a flair. And the increasing number of stuff I read and research I did to answer questions led me to focus on Japanese history.

My true love in history is Historiography, which encompasses the way history is studied, written, and promulgated to a wider audience. I picked this because, for a while, I found myself becoming utterly enchanted with every historical period I learned about. A mentor of mine in Undergrad helped me see that was where my interests were. History books (and essays, and museum exhibitions, and popular entertainment based on history) can be examined for their historical content. They can also be considered as artifacts in their own right, as they reflect the audience that produced and consumed them.

I've since "calmed down" and focused on antebellum United States history and the social history of the decades before the war, but part of the reason I was attracted to that were the differing narratives about the causes of the war, and how the outbreak of hostilities in Kansas was linked to common concerns like free speech, censorship, and aggressive policing of political beliefs, in addition to moral concerns over human chattel slavery and the power held by those in control of the system. Reading histories that disagreed with each other was what led me there.

It chose me. I grew up in an antebellum town burned in 1864 which made me curious about that time. I studied my local history and found the foundation of my hometown fascinating which led me to volunteer as a guide (docent, actually) at the home where a president's mom was born (which more to the point was built by a founding family of said town). Then my curious nature led me to examine how in the evergreen f#&$ we even got to the point where Americans burned an American town and imprisoned its American citizens as enemy combatants (speaking in broad generalizations here, of course). That coupled with a decade long genealogy mapping project left me looking at the eighteenth century, and then I became hooked. Everything about it I find very interesting, from the way our laws and states developed to the way our foods evolved, from dancing and playhouses to who they thought of as founding fathers. Wierd oddities sit in my mind, like Benjamin Franklin being born closer to Isaac Newton publishing his famous apple facts than he was to the birth of Thomas Jefferson. Or, as I recently touched on in a post, that one English expedition crew actually took an Inuit woman's shoes off to see if she had cloven hooves. Or just imagining what Governor White thought as he watched his daughter and newborn granddaughter shrink out of view, sailing away from Virginia to seek rescue for them. A religious man allowing spectral evidence in a court of law to be able to convict his neighbors of being witches, then going on to lead the first clinical medical trial on the North American continent and subsequently directly saving tens of thousands of lives at minimum. And, in the larger sense, it's also the story of us, whether interesting or not. So I'm drawn like a moth to flame, and now I engage in 18th century public history as a profession. In my case, profession followed passion... it chose me.

I was a contrarian little shit of an 18 year old. No, really that's actually a big part of how I started studying ancient Iran.

My undergrad had this first year honors program where each dorm floor had everyone who was taking one of four related classes living together, and I was in a class on the origins of world religions. Because we all lived and hung out together, I knew what everyone else's term papers were going to be about, and decided I wanted to write about a topic literally nobody else had chosen: Zoroastrianism. I had been really interested in some of the theology when we discussed it in class, but mostly I just wanted to do something weird.

I picked up Mary Boyce's A History of Zoroastrianism vols. 1 and 2 from the library and fell down the rabbit whole immediately. Volume 2 is all about Zoroastrianism developing as an institution under the Achaemenid Persian Empire, and in discussing that Boyce had to tell the history of the empire too. I was always an ancient history nerd, but I was captivated by all these stories that I had never heard. "Why did I only ever hear about them invading Greece, there's so many more interesting events in here."

I went from planning to focus on the Crusades for my major to ancient history overnight. From there it was off to the races, and since neither school I attended for undergrad had any sort of classes about the pre-modern Near East, I just started squeezing Persian history into other assignments whenever possible to give myself an excuse to study more. One graduate school and 130 podcast episodes later and here I am.

For me, I found myself considering questions that I felt to be important. Not just to the discipline, but to the present day, with implications for how I understood the world that I lived in. I suppose I can consider myself one of those darned presentist heathens in the discipline, but oh well.

Initially, I began considering questions about US foreign policy in Asia at a time when everyone (it seemed) was interested in the Middle East. Even in Asia, the focus seemed to be on China, or China's adversarial behavior, while I was interested in questions about the nature of the US power structure in the region. I could have become more of a political scientist about this (which was one of my majors) but I specifically started asking questions about the early Cold War, and the design of the power structures that still persist in the present. I had a great undergrad mentor and wrote a thesis on this that was kind of a diplomatic history piece. All during this time, I had a family member in the military who went to Afghanistan and then South Korea. So I had someone close to me who was an active participant in this exercise of American power abroad, and I had a personal stake in understanding their place and relationship to the world as well.

It was really the process of researching my first major works, the thesis as well as another big paper required by the undergrad history department, that helped me refine my interests. Coming into contact with other scholars, seeing what has been said and hasn't said, etc. The process of research and writing was quite transformative for me. This process only continued when I went to grad school, and I'll eventually landed on what my dissertation is about: the relationship of the US military to East Asia during the Eisenhower years.

I grew up in a working-class household in a close-in Chicago suburb. Let's just say that unions and union membership were closely-held values. I can't recall exactly, but my memory is that at least half of our neighborhood was both Catholic and union.

I think you'll find that the vast majority of people who are willing to spend ~a decade of their life studying something have a very personal connection to the subject. I can't imagine that I would have much interest in studying, for example, the vacation habits of the elite.

On this subject, have a look at the venerable That Noble Dream by the late Peter Novick. He addresses this subject and uses it to argue (quite successfully, IMO) that the search for objectivity, the elimination of bias, is neither possible nor desirable. The mere choice of subject matter is nearly always indicative of some sort of bias. And without that personal connection to study and research, the research done would not be as deep.

Would not call myself an historian but the researches i do started with a taste for sea travel/mediterranean area. Then there was this archives "nobody ever opened before" in south West of France. And one funny thing when you open archives is that they create more questions than they answer, so you have to open more archives to get answers.

That's how i ended up working on family life/material culture/work in this area in the XVIIIth century.

Lord of the Rings, or more specifically the appendices at the end of The Return of the King where Tolkien summarised some of his historical and linguistic background. I'd never encountered history done in an academic way before (I was about 8 at the time, so that's not a shock) and was fascinated by this alternative to telling stories. I somehow ended up reading a translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, presumably because Tolkien was himself a scholar of that period, and just became hooked on this weird period with big holes in our understanding which was so different from the social-focused history curriculum we had at school with its complete (and somewhat modernist, not that I knew what that was) narratives. So when I went to university I automatically gravitated to early medieval subjects to the point that my classmates had a joke that I could only count to 999. My teachers did however broaden my interests geographically if not chronologicaly to cover much more than just England, a debt I can never repay.

I started out as a Russian history major but I took a class on the World Wars and started reading about the Holocaust through my assignments in that class, which sparked my interest in researching the Holocaust (and other adjacent topics like the Holodomor, which is actually what I wrote my undergrad thesis on). When I decided to go to grad school, which you should not do, I decided to focus on Romania because it was an area with a lot of unturned stones, so to speak, versus more heavily researched countries like Germany and Poland (and the language is much easier than like Polish or Russian). I guess that sounds opportunistic but a lot of people here will tell you the same thing: they ended up on their dissertation topic after coming up with three or four other ideas and then finding out someone already did them.

My main area of original research interest within that field was on the economic aspects of the Holocaust (property expropriation, forced labor, etc.) and how much a state could push an ideological project before it became constrained by economic realities, particularly in the case of less-developed economies like Romania's. I'll say that my actual historical interests are wider than my relatively narrow subfield and I've become interested in other under-researched issues within Holocaust studies (like the fate of Soviet POWs) through my work at my day job (researcher at a museum) and I probably devote at least as much time to reading about those issues as I do the work in my actual subfield. I have like three or four different projects bouncing around in my head that I want to work on but haven't made great progress on any of them in the last couple of years. C'est la vie.