Arriving home after their mysterious and deadly car crash, Barabara and Adam, protagonists of the film Beetlejuice, find a copy of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased lying waiting for them. Keen to find out more, they inspect the cover, the title, and the publisher before beginning to delve into the text.
They might have also taken a look through the table of contents, index, and bibliography. But it's a good start – and it points towards an approach which
experienced readers of History books will follow, whether they know it or not, quite regularly.
In this post, I’d like to argue that we need to think carefully about how we read books in History and, more importantly, how we instruct students to do so, too. Reading books might come so naturally to us, as teachers and experienced readers, that we simply assume students will be able to do the basics. We have to assume, on the contrary, that they can't - and I'm confident that, if we do, we will most likely find that the vast majority can't. Therefore, the key preliminary steps to reading book-length academic texts have to be taught explicitly.
This is not supposed to be any kind of definitive guide, but rather an explanation and illustration of strategies which might be common-sense to people who read a lot of History books, but are likely to be missed by those who don’t.
More broadly, how to read History books is, I think, a conversation which is worth having, both
when we’re thinking about our own teaching practice and when we’re thinking of
how to move students on beyond our classrooms.
Academics in university (from anecdotal experience)
love to complain about how poor undergraduate students are at reading books.
They’re probably justified in doing so (certainly if my own reading skills as
an undergraduate are anything to go by). And it’s therefore probably incumbent
on us, teaching students at a pre-undergraduate level, to think about how we
equip our young people with the skills they’ll need at university (not to
mention any other walk of life where they have to read long texts).
“Gutting
a Book”
Amongst the more colourfully named approaches to approach
reading History books is “gutting a book”.
The premise is simple (and set out in some excellent user-friendly online guides, such as here, here, and here). Using a variety of signposts and tools embedded within the books and their text, it is possible to read selectively and strategically to good effect.
It's worth pointing out, in fact, that academics themselves, when researching a topic, often do not read a book cover-to-cover. And they certainly wouldn't start by simply ploughing into the text and running their way through until the end. Instead, they might dip into the book selectively, deploying a number of strategies to identify key individual elements of the text which help them with their enquiries. These techniques underpin successful (or, as Karin Wulf has put it rather better, "efficient") reading of lengthy and complex texts.
They include (amongst others):
- identifying the argument and thesis of the book;
- identifying (potentially) useful content within the book;
- exploring the book’s source base;
- considering which chapters to read;
- placing the book and its argument within the context of wider scholarship.
Of course, the idea of not reading a whole book might fill literary purists with horror. But it’s an absolutely valid approach for people with an awful lot to read, a specific goal, and limited time. In fact, no serious academic could possibly approach parts of their scholarly reading in any other way. More to the point, even when they do read whole books, they do so with deliberate strategies that allow them to get what they need from them.
David Lavery, in a brilliant essay-polemic from 1989 entitled "How to gut a book", made
the case: “We have so little time now to read, let alone re-read, and yet the
number of books to be read increases relentlessly.” His solution was simple –
don’t just read books, gut them: “Book gutters crack open these capsules in
search in search of the ideas within.”
So if we’re to teach students how to read academically, we
really need to teach them how to gut a book. Here, I’ll present five strategies
which I think are particularly (and in one case potentially) useful in the
classroom.
Absolutely none of what will follow is likely to be ground-breaking to anyone who reads History books themselves. In fact, it dove-tails very neatly with a number of approaches that have been publicised by educationalists such as Alex Quigley (whose Closing the Reading Gap, which proposes a number of practical approaches to reading, has been extremely influential to many schools) and Daniel Willingham (who has recently argued for, and outlined approaches to, deliberate reading strategies for students to follow).
But I hope, in some small way, this post might provide some approaches to helping develop students’ disciplinary literacy and food for thought in building these into teachable lessons.
Strategy
1: Survey the Content
The first thing many of us will do when we grab a book is to
work out what it contains. Obviously, this doesn’t mean diving straight into
the text itself and ploughing through hundreds of pages.
The front cover, including the title and especially the
sub-title, will tell us a lot. The table of contents and the index will tell us
even more.
So if we’re approaching a History book with students, our
first job is probably to show them the cover and ask them what they think it is
all about. Then, we might take them through the table of contents (and even a
section of the index), to work out exactly what it’s trying to tell us.
I’ve done this for the past few years with Year 12 students,
who we instruct to buy an academic text on Russian and Soviet History which
they’ll read alongside their course over the couple of years of A-Level. Before
asking them to buy one of four possible choices, we look together through the
table of contents to demonstrate that not all of the book needs to be read
(although there are benefits to reading chapters which cover the history
outside of our course).
This approach doesn’t in fact have to involve looking books
written by historians. One of the best approaches I saw was in a KS3 lesson on
witchcraft, which began with looking at the cover, title, and table of contents
of King James I’s Daemonologie, asking what it reveals to us about his
preoccupation with the occult.
Strategy
2: Locate the Thesis
Books are typically built around a central argument or
thesis. But unless we know where to find this, it can remain hidden in plain
sight.
The usual place to find the thesis of a book is likely to be
in the introduction or conclusion, especially in the opening and closing paragraphs of each, so one
thing we can ask students to do is extract these and skim them to look for key contentions.
But we don’t even have to look that far all the time. A
detailed blurb or summary can give a good sense of what a book is arguing,
especially when considered alongside title, index, or the chapters flagged up
in a table of contents.
One colleague suggested an approach for a Year 7 scheme on
Medieval life for “judging a book by its cover” – considering what story Ann Baer’s Medieval
Woman really wanted to tell by looking at its front and back covers, and an online bookshop summary of the book. A neat activity that fitted
brilliantly into a standalone lesson on the experiences of women in a Medieval
village!
Strategy
3: Scope Out the Scholarship
Comparing a range of texts within a particular field of
scholarship allows students to begin to appreciate what historians in the
plural have been exploring in their work.
This approach was one I took when thinking about the
question of popular resistance to Stalin’s Soviet regime (something sadly
neglected in exam-board materials, but widely discussed by historians since the
1990s). I presented students with a number of texts, asking them to look
closely first at the titles and front covers, then at the table of contents,
then at a short summary of the book which they had to match using a bit of
common sense to the correct front cover and table of contents.
By the end of a brisk march through the scholarship,
students have been able to survey how and where scholars locate examples of
popular resistance (or at least disobedience) to ostensibly totalitarian
control, whilst also highlighting some broader trends in the historiography.
Strategy 4:
Explore the Debate
Considering different books side-by-side, in comparison with
one another, can also give a little taste of the debates and disagreements
between historians.
This approach could be done in a number of ways, but one of
the most simple is to show students the chapter headings of two books on the
same topic with markedly different interpretations.
Take, for example, the explanations of Sheila Fitzpatrick (Soviet social historian extraordinaire) and Richard Pipes (Cold-War historian and former Reagan advisor) as to the causes of the Bolsheviks coming to power in October 1917. A brief peruse of the chapter headings reveal remarkably different preoccupations – one on social collapse, regime failure, and popular revolution; the other on a well-organised coup led by a dictatorially-inclined revolutionary elite.
Strategy
5: Sifting the Sources
How often do students really consider what the source base
of a text is? In all probability, rather little.
This is a missed opportunity: identifying which sources a
book uses can tell us a huge amount about not just the possible interpretations
it might offer, but also how we could categorise it as a piece of scholarship.
A few years ago, myself and colleagues knocked around some
ideas as to how we might do this with KS3 when considering the British Empire.
It never fully got off the ground – but I’m still intrigued by the idea.
Taking two contrasting accounts of the British Empire –
Niall Ferguson’s Empire and Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire –
we took a look at the first page of the bibliography for each. Each one told a
very different story, hinting at different approaches to the past,
interpretations, and scholarly research.
Ferguson’s Empire, a highly sympathetic and general
history of the empire, referenced as its foundational sources other general
histories from Anglophone scholars attacking similar research questions (how
did the empire rise and fall, who were its leading figures and heroes, how did
it transform Britain’s role and power in the world).
 |
| Ferguson, Empire |
Gopal’s Insurgent Empire, a highly critical history
of the empire focused on its detractors, was far more focused on the primary
accounts of radical commentators from the time and archival collections,
including those of anti-colonial groups and organisations.
 |
| Gopal, Insurgent Empire |
What students might have made of this we never found out – that angle was sadly a step too far for our Year 8s when we planned the scheme. But it’s one I’d love to come back to...
Selected Further Reading
David Lavery, "How to Gut a Book", The Georgia Review 43:4 (1989), pp. 731-744
Alex Quigley, Closing the Reading Gap, Routledge (2020)
Daniel T. Willingham, "How to Read Difficult Books: A Guide for High School School and College Students", American Educator (Summer 2023): https://www.aft.org/ae/summer2023/willingham
Karin Wulf, "Efficient Reading", blog post (ND): https://karinwulf.com/trove/efficient-reading/
