How Historians Think

There are many introductory books on history and its methodology. If I were to point out a characteristic of this book, it would be that it attempts to explain "what historians do" based on actual examples of their writings.

For example, in a research paper, a historian quotes historical sources and explains the information gleaned from them to the current reader. At this point, what tense does the historian use? If you look closely, historians surprisingly use the present tense. They use phrases like "it is clear that..." or "it can be seen that..." Historians are not always talking about the past in the past tense; they write papers in a mode that says, "Here is this source right now, and this is what we can read from it"—in other words, they proceed by sharing a specific text with the reader.

By the way, although there is no direct connection, I started writing tanka poetry right around the same time I was writing this book. In the creation of tanka, the "utakai" (poetry circle) is considered very important (though not all poets like them). At a poetry circle, multiple people offer comments (critiques) on a single poem for anywhere from a few minutes to several dozen minutes. When I first participated in a poetry circle, I immediately noticed that "this is similar to the way a historian looks at historical sources." Since the language of tanka is the language of poetry, the way it is constructed differs from everyday language usage, but that doesn't mean one can offer a critique that is unrelated to the words written in the poem. In other words, a critique must, in some form, have a basis within that single poem. Even if the language is used differently from everyday speech, the participants of the poetry circle think about how it differs while sharing that single poem.

The reason I am writing this is because I thought the work I attempted in this book might be interesting even to those who are not historians or interested in history. Opportunities to state something while sharing certain words exist everywhere in our lives, and performing that properly likely leads to communicating with one another seriously (or enjoyably).

How Historians Think

Yusaku Matsuzawa

Chikuma Shinsho

288 pages, 1,034 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations and titles are those at the time of publication.