history essay examples

history essay examples

Analyzing the Role of Historical Essays in Understanding the Past

1. Introduction to Historical Essays

It is in the historical essay that the novice historian must write and develop his ideas, and it is a useful genre by which the professional takes stock of his work, not only summarizing it, but often previewing something that will later develop into a full-fledged book. A model of pithiness, the historical essay is supposed to cover a broad topic in a limited number of words, all the while presenting the writer’s understanding and knowledge of the topic, cues, nuances, and subtleties. The essays that are presented here talk of developments and aspects of American (or United States) history, and for the most part are synthetic pieces that take a broad idea or topic and deal with the subject authoritatively. They are not concerned with a single factor or the development of that factor (except as is necessary to present the essay’s thesis). So a reader will usually not find minutiae here, for discussions of points like a particular personality of a specific battle, residence, or harvest are appropriately put into its descriptive context.

For many people, professional historians probably do not write particularly exciting literature. For them, history consists of dry tomes and a lot of extraneous knowledge. But for most people, the past still fascinates, and the fact that television often brings something from the past into people’s own homes is a reminder of this. While the general public is presented with the latest ‘daring’ ideas about an aspect of the past, however, professional historians present their views in a less dramatic fashion in formal articles and books, as well as in the informal genre of the historical essay to which every student is introduced in high school or college history courses.

2. The Evolution of Historical Essay Writing

The nature of historical essay writing is best appreciated by returning to the most general, observable feature of the genre. The essay is a synthesis and works with the recognized concepts and terms of an existing tradition because historical essays, by definition, confront very specific contemporary audiences, problems, and historical traditions. Precisely because he is committed to these concepts and principles, the historical essayist must have some provision for historical writing, in which it is impossible to attain apodictic certainty. Therefore, before establishing a plausible mode of argument or method, the essayist must point to the web of communication and dialectical process which is involved in elaborating his case. Finally, beyond being logical or persuasive, the essay must interest valid intellectual, moral, or political concerns. For the essayist always operates under the jurisdiction of this tripartite criterion. First, it is the essayist’s commitment to a prior literary or scholarly tradition that both gives his work meaning and sets limits to his essayistic activity. Only occasionally will agreement be so widespread that the essayist can avoid the explicit task of establishing what can be argued without deviation from some prior premise. As criticism, when made explicit, this is a key element of modern essays.

The frequent conservative critique of contemporary American historical writing is that historians have eschewed the traditional narrative and expository essay forms for specialized monographs, which have mainly profited the scholarly, academic community or teach only a limited cluster of theoretical insights and fatiguing factual data. In examining the origins of the contemporary problem a little more closely, it emerges that the nature of the genre has often been misrepresented. It turns out that historical essay writing in America has never been monolithic. What is often erroneously described as a golden age of American historical writing preceding the 1920s actually witnessed an elaborate differentiation of historical essay writing, not a unitary development. Historical essay writing since the 1920s represents a formidable increase in the scale and diversity of an existing tradition, not the creation of a new intellectual form.

3. Key Characteristics of Effective Historical Essays

Over time, any text, no matter how powerful and effectively meaningful, such as our historical classics, can be more easily enjoyed and understood, and thereby used to learn. With such experience, the student engaged in such work tends to progress remarkably fast, to the degree that satisfaction increases, and each accomplishment serves, in turn, to help things make even more sense and begin to become productive, so that the process that led to such an impressive (predictable) result inspires still more significant advances the next time around. Beyond the extensive duration and hard work essential to produce a timeless repository of great value, several other interconnected key characteristics can be identified; collectively, when found in a work, they both guarantee and complete the significant contribution to the understanding of such unique undertakings from the past.

Effective historical essays, articles, and papers – whatever term one prefers, because they are essentially the same – share ten key characteristics that should be examined in turning a work written for one purpose into one that serves another. Before proceeding, though, let me state upfront that seldom is an individual work ascribed all ten characteristics. The renowned classic, at least in history, that is generally considered the closest one can come to such a masterpiece typically is Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, yet even it falls short of the mark in some areas. However, even then, there is no denying the impressive results when scholarship, research, perseverance, and communication blend. Any attempt to do so would only lead us back to the characteristics that need to be studied in researching or writing one’s own masterpiece, and none of us should ever feel we are above learning from the best and striving each time for more preciseness, more clarity, and a better understanding.

4. Impact of Historical Essays on Shaping Historical Narratives

The human connections of historical essays differ from historians in other areas, such as history teaching, although both types of work make for organized small-scale ironic structures. As the essay neither relies solely on the accumulation of knowledge nor considers themselves to represent ordinary narrative, the potential for the essay’s driving concept resides in past non-representation. As essays without a historical motive express personal opinions, feelings, and subjective judgments, many ways to build such reasoning have existed. Introductory paragraphs carry a cognitive characteristic; the use of first-person pronouns engages emotions; and metaphors illustrate word choice. Essays that lead the narration can be persuasive. This type of essay collects enough selected instances to unify a series by subjective synthesis, but neither builds a model of an event, movement, or period nor reaches so far. On the other hand, the evidence of uniquely meaningful factor does not need to await synthesis and so also eludes historicism.

The structural and empathetic features of the historical essay have a profound connection with shaping historical narratives. The historical essay has always involved transformations of historical knowledge; its many cultural contexts define its precise form. The essay’s earliest known practitioners, the ancient Greeks, had no secure formal structure for a written work. A conspectus of the available evidence was written with the help of visual guides—voters, jurors, and military allies relied on an informed voice to make a decision. The description evolved as the need for clarity and structure at a distance arose with increased mobility. Historical essays on the modern model, mixing factual with emotional latitude, require at least the technological level of Hellenistic Antiquity. The damage to ancient historical analysis from an overblown trust in facts beyond the use of scales and chains for larger geodetic measurements is obvious: the availability of facts from ancient and modern sources stimulates choosing particular ways of modeling reality. As both Thucydides and Herodotus showed, a guiding concept helps to assign models, or the admission that the evidence becomes too weak to model.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions in Historical Essay Writing

In other words, the essence of training students in the historical mode is to let them excel at being good analytical historians. The historical mode casts students as being both the prime problem solvers and the composers of descriptions about the nature of peculiar social problems. Hidden beneath the fact that bank failures, hyperinflation, cycles, and recessions are nothing new, and the various arguments which ensue is the students’ mastery of their craft. If the historical mode is successful, then students not only can appreciate and celebrate the Spanish complexity of historical change but they also have a better sense of when and why the past patterns of human economic behavior are likely to be repeated or are they likely to be the ephemeral expression of contingent historical circumstances.

The aim of historical essay writing is to allow both students and professors to appreciate just how singular arguments about historical change can be. The past is both a vexing and conceptually rich issue. If students simply associate the study of history with mastering all dates, arguments, and facts, then some of the wonder contained in empirical historical analysis is hidden from them. The goal of historical essays is to let students write their essays in the seminar room so that they can begin to publicly make understand their novel interpretations. This not only enriches the classroom environment but it also helps in demonstrating the individual talents and commitment of most students.