APU Careers & Learning

Learning When to Trust Your Historians

history-narrow-focus-educationA few months ago, we considered the curious case of Stephanie Harvey (part 1 and part 2), a fictitious independent scholar who duped professional historians into believing that she found proof of a meeting between literary giants Dickens and Dostoyevsky.

There were plenty of lessons to take away from that experience, but one thing stuck out–a modest article using an obscure citation to back a revolutionary discovery that has the potential to gain traction. As a historian inevitably scours journal after journal for new insights and an understanding of the historiography of his or her subject, the danger of running into a Stephanie Harvey is high. Yes, most academic journals are peer-reviewed, but even these reviews can only go so far.

Consider the words of Joyce Seltzer, senior executive editor of history at Harvard University Press. In response to abuses of citations, she stated,

“I have neither the time nor the resources to verify an author’s sources. I can query a source when it seems inadequate, inconsistent, or inappropriate, but I cannot establish its provenance. Nor can I necessarily know whether evidence was taken out of context or otherwise distorted to fit the author’s argument. This is the historian’s professional responsibility.”

Seltzer’s point is easy to understand, as it would be impossible for an editor to verify so many citations for a 30-page journal article.  I have seen some articles with 150-plus citations. Given that many of these are to obscure books, manuscripts, microfilm, and other archival documents, it is just impossible to verify them all.

This is where we must learn to trust our historians, but remember trust must be earned. Essentially, you must go through an exercise of verifying another historian’s sources if you are to cite him or her. Like Seltzer, it would be impossible to do this every time, but you can determine for yourself once a historian has earned your trust.

When has a historian gained your trust? That is for you to decide. In essence, your ability to determine the necessary level of scrutiny to apply to each historian you encounter is part of how others will judge your work in the future.

By Scott Manning
Online Learning Tips, Student Contributor

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