Historical Thinking

What does it mean to think historically?

Historians, like many other social scientists, approach their investigations with a skill set that is part of their training and helps define their field. This is why developing your “historical literacy” is an important step towards your growth as a historian. It means entering a conversation with texts and other historians. To put it another way, historical literacy is about gaining a deep understanding of historical events and developments through an active dialogue with historical texts.

To help you process the notion of historical thinking, the following sections provide a primer on the very notion of historical thinking, the skills central to thinking like a historian, and the habits of a historian.

Historical Thinking

There are many useful guides to historical thinking. You can easily search “historical thinking” and find dozens of websites dedicated to this subject. One of the more useful guides comes from Teachinghistory.org’s webpage on “What is Historical Thinking?” It outlines five elements of historical thinking that are all integral to understanding how we know what we know about the past:

  • Multiple Accounts & Perspectives (requires):
    • using multiple sources to get as accurate a picture as possible of events in the past
    • working with multiple accounts, and learning to analyze and synthesize them.
    • recognizing that no single account, written from one perspective, captures the complexity of the past
  • Analysis of Primary Sources
    • Primary sources are original documents and objects created at the time under study. They are vital to reconstructing the past.
    • We must learn how to read, question, contextualize, and analyze primary sources.
    • We look for points of agreement and disagreement between the two contrasting accounts.
    • Primary sources need to be questioned and read closely.
  • Sourcing
    • Sourcing is about identifying and asking questions about the origin of the source, the author’s purposes and perspective, when the source was created (and for whom), and about a source’s trustworthiness. 
  • Context
    • Historical context is about locating events and sources in time and space … and asking the necessary questions to do so.
  • Claim-evidence Connection
    • Historical narratives must be supported by evidence. History isn’t fiction. Even if we sometimes make educated guesses to fill in the gaps, our arguments and narratives are based on evidence.
    • Truth claims need to be supported by evidence.
Historical Thinking Skills

Beyond the areas outlined by Teachinghistory.org, there are more elements (causation, significance, change over time, and corroboration, for example) central to the historical profession. In an effort to crystallize the skills inherent to the study of the past, the American Historical Association (AHA) produced a primer for students and educators alike. As the world’s largest professional association for historians, the AHA possesses an out-sized influence in how historians define their work, re-think the nature of the profession, and articulate their contributions to society. Here are the five key skills outlines by the AHA (with hyperlinks to the main AHA webpage) and that any student must develop in a history classroom:

Historical thinking is complex, but it is also vital if we want to promote a society of readers, thinkers, and informed citizens. If you plan on working with students in your career, just remember that historical thinking is NOT separate from the content we want students to learn; instead, it is the skill set that will help students master their understanding of the past.

Habits of Mind: Developing a Historian Mentality

In an article published in 2007 in Perspectives in History, historians Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke lay out the “Five Cs “of historical thinking: change over time (which also implies continuity), causality, context, complexity, and contingency. Most of these are fairly straightforward. However, contingency requires a bit more explanation. According to Andrews and Burke, an understanding of the past considers how any given outcome depends upon a number of prior conditions; each of these prior conditions depends, in turn, upon still other conditions (and so on). “The world is a magnificently interconnected place,” they remind us. And they’re right! Change a single prior condition, and any historical outcome could have turned out differently.

Together, Andrews and Burke’s “5 Cs” are at the heart of the questions historians try to answer, the arguments they present, and the debates that take place within the field.

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