- [Voiceover] I think one of
the most underrated skills for learning history is learning how to think like a historian. And what do I mean by
"thinking like a historian"? Does that mean that you
have to go out and buy a tweed jacket with some elbow patches and maybe grow a long, white beard and sit around all day
pondering whether the Civil War was caused by slavery or states' rights? No, but you can try that if you want. But I would say thinking like
a historian is a little bit like being a combination
between a storyteller and a scientist . . . you're gonna see me draw a
really, really bad beaker here there we go . . . some little fumes coming off of that. and a lawyer, maybe I'll put a gavel here. It's a gavel, not a
croquet mallet or a hammer. So first let's start with
the storytelling aspect. I think one of the most important
things that we can learn from telling this story of history is that in a good story nothing just happens. Imagine a story where
everything just happened. The story would be: the wind
blows, the earth turns, right? No one is making those things happen and that's why it's kind of a boring story because it doesn't show cause and effect. And that cause and effect is really the backbone of history, right? And you would be surprised how often people can fall into the
trap of telling history, this incredible story
about what people have done in the past that has led to
the society we have today as if it were kind of a
laundry list of events that just followed one
after another without any possibility of things being different. People will say, "and then
World War II happened" or "and then the United
States was born," right? Those statements are in passive
voice because they don't talk about the people who
make these things happen. And really, short of a natural disaster, pretty much everything happens in history because people made it happen. So when you think like a
historian, you kind of think the same way that a novelist might think. OK, what is this character's motive? What are they going to do to
make their wish come true? What are the influences that lead a person to make certain choices? And just like people make choices, nations make choices, right? World War I didn't just happen and just as people make choices, actions have consequences. You wouldn't write a story where a thief stole 100 million dollars and the police didn't even
try to come after her. Neither can you write a
story about history without talking about the effects
that actions have on people. So that's the storytelling aspect of thinking like a historian. Let's talk about the scientific aspect. We often think of history as something that's pretty much done, right? It's a series of events
that happened in the past and now we just have to
memorize what happened so we can learn from it
and maybe have a good idea about what to do in the future. But really there is only so
much we can actually know about what happened in the past. And so historians always have to do a kind of research to
understand what happened and get a better idea of
what people were feeling. So just like scientists have theories, when historians think about the past, they're really thinking
about theories as well. They're saying, "ok, I have a theory about "what caused the evolution
of jazz in the 1920s." Why did jazz become a major popular form of music in the 1920s? Well, I'm gonna theorize
it was because people were reacting to the horror of World War I which made so many people
interested in kind of, staccato notes and discordant sounds. Alright, so that's a theory. Well, how do you go
about proving a theory? And the answer is you do research and you consult evidence, right? And the way that you do that in history is usually by doing a
lot of reading, right? You might say, alright well, let me take the letters of some jazz
musicians from this time period and see what they write about. Maybe they write all about how they experienced battle in World War I and they were trying to
reflect that in their music. Or maybe they write that World War I had nothing to do with
their interest in music. Actually, they wanted to
simulate the sounds of flight because they were so interested in modern forms of transportation. So our understanding of
what happened in the past is always just a theory. I mean we have a pretty good idea of what was going on most of the time, but new information comes to
light all the time, right? I mean people are always cleaning
out their grandma's attic and finding some new documents and as the preponderance of
the evidence shifts and changes so might our understanding of the past. The last aspect of
thinking like a historian I want to talk about is
this kind of lawyerly aspect. And what I mean by this is that historians are always making an argument. Just like a lawyer gets up
in a court room and says, "Here's my idea, now let me support it "with the evidence from
witnesses, from experts, "from objects we might have
found at a crime scene." A historian is saying, "believe my theory. "Believe my evidence." And I think the analogy of
law is really powerful here because you could see the
same pieces of evidence used to support two different arguments. So for example, say there's, maybe . . . a sock that was found
at the scene of a crime right, and here's our sock . . . I'm not a beautiful artist. But, maybe the prosecution tries to argue . . . that the accused must have committed this crime because the sock is his size. Right, the sock shows he did it. Whereas the defense might say, "My client never wears socks, "he always wears sandals." So it's clear that the sock shows that he couldn't possibly have
been the one to do this crime. So that's how we end up with so many different interpretations
of the same event. The task of the historian
is to gather evidence and to present an argument
that they think will best convince the public
of their interpretation. And so these interpretations
do change over time. So in later videos we'll
get into the nuts and bolts of how you tell these stories
and make these arguments. But for now, I just
kind of want you to see that thinking like a historian is not something that only historians can do. It's actually a really useful skill for lots of aspects of your life. We tell stories, search for
evidence, and make arguments in our lives all the time about things that we interact with
every day like our favorite bands, our favorite foods,
our political views, right? We base those on our own experiences, consequences in our lives and evidence that we see around us. And we can do the same thing for the past. It's not such a foreign country. What we have are the remnants of that past and the ability to interpret them.