For a literature and history buff like me, teaching political studies has been an eye opening experience. For one thing, I’ve slowly come to realize that students trained in political studies and philosophy approach what people my age used to call “books” and what my younger colleagues call “texts” in different ways.
Back in the stone age when I was an undergraduate major in English lit at Pundit U, we read two kinds of texts. There were poems, which we read quite slowly and deliberately, and there were novels and plays that we read in great gulps. In history, back in those halcyon days of yore, we also read whole books in big gulps.
The big gulp approach was one reason I liked the subjects I did. Foxes tend to like long and rambling books, and hedgehogs like denser, more compact texts as a general rule. That’s a matter of personal preference and learning style; for vulpine readers like me, sitting down with a nice long history that will open up new vistas or give you a rich, detailed new perspective on old ones is among life’s great pleasures. I would far rather read a book of history than a dense and compact philosophical treatise. For that matter, I spend more time reading novels than poems, and I like opera better than art songs, narratives better than lyrics.
But apart from this matter of personal learning style, what I’ve found is that many of my students don’t know what to do when confronted by a whole book. Some try to study it as intensively as they would try to study a chapter in a work of philosophy or political theory. They spend hours and hours on their reading, and often end up angry and unfulfilled. They’ve spent an inordinate amount of time preparing, but they rarely feel they have mastered the text. And when the discussion in class focuses on other aspects of the book in question, their frustration grows.
Others read through an assigned book the way they get through their casual reading. They read at forty to sixty pages an hour, take no notes, and give little thought to the content beyond the impressions of the moment. If they are diligent, their eyes have indeed scanned every word in the whole three hundred-page book, but anything that sticks in the student’s memory got there by chance and two days later he or she won’t be able to say anything coherent about the book’s content or point of view.
The easy thing to do for a grumpy old professor when faced with these reactions is to throw up his hands in the traditional gesture of professorial despair, and launch into one of those eloquent and ever-popular rants, ancient already in the days of Socrates, about how young people today have no attention span, don’t know anything and don’t know hard work.
It is all true, and has been true since Socrates was a sprout, but repeating traditional laments doesn’t help either students or professors wrestling with big fat books in political studies seminars. As I’ve reflected on this problem, I’m increasingly aware that reading serious books – not textbooks and not tracts of theory or philosophy – is a skill that not everybody learns. I’ve been reading dozens and even hundreds of books a year for so long that these reading skills are second nature to me; I don’t think about how to read serious books that aren’t textbooks anymore than I think about how to ride a bicycle.
As I teach, though, I see that not everybody learns how to do this in high school. Through no fault of their own, many students are raised on textbooks and treatises rather than novels and history. You aren’t born knowing how to ride a bicycle and you aren’t born knowing how to read big books effectively for seminars. On the other hand, the basic skills required, either for bike riding or book reading, aren’t all that hard to learn — and once learned, they stick.
A history book is different from a book of political theory or logical argument, and it needs to be approached in a different way. When approaching a history book, the first thing to do is to ask the Winston Churchill question. At a dinner, Churchill once criticized the dessert: “This pudding has no theme.” Most puddings and books have a theme. In the case of a book, this is a big idea or subject. Your first job as an analytical reader is to figure out what that is: you must answer the Pudding Question.
What does the author think is the big story the book is trying to tell – and what does the author think is the point of that story?
For some readers, this is hard. History books present a torrent of information: Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, for instance, is a book I’ve recently taught. This remarkable and effective book tells readers about everything from the type of boats used on the Delaware River in 1776 to the recruiting practices of Hessian mercenary regiments in 18th century Germany.
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by this flow of information. Many readers end up reading history books fairly passively, letting the narrative carry them along through a chronological story, hoping at most to remember a few facts about who did what to whom.
However, historians generally do not write books at random. Every history book you will ever read is the product of an intense process of selection and of winnowing out extraneous material. A great many things happened in the past. Even a subject as “narrow” as the American revolution, a relatively small war involving limited casualties in 13 colonies with a combined population of less than 4 million people, was much more complicated than any single narrative account can account for.
One of the gospel writers throws up his hands at the difficulty of getting everything written down: “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written. Amen.”
Amen to that. What is true of the life of one man is true of even the simplest historical events.
Historians select; they choose which subjects out of an almost infinite number of alternatives to write about. They choose what kind of evidence to use and what to ignore; they decide that some details are important and others are not. Those choices are not made at random; they reflect the historian’s beliefs about what matters.
Every history book is more than a collection of names, dates and details. It is a philosophical and political statement about how the author thinks the world really works.
In a work of political theory or philosophy the author comes right out and tells you what he or she thinks about how the world works. People are selfish, people are generous, chance rules, people are masters of their fate: whatever.
When historians write, these considerations aren’t usually up front. Historians rarely come out, so to speak, on stage and lecture the audience. They do something subtler. They construct a picture of the past based on their assumptions about how the world works and what motivates people, and invite you to accept their presuppositions because you find their narratives effective and convincing.
Your job as an analytical reader of history is to figure out the assumptions and the ideas behind the picture the historian is painting. In one sense, you are fighting the historian. Instead of sitting there passively drinking it in, you are challenging and questioning. But by reading the book in this way, you are engaging much more fully with the author than the passive reader. You are thinking seriously and deeply about exactly the questions that the historian thinks are most important.
Getting an answer to the Pudding Question involves unpacking the argument that shapes and informs the historical narrative. It is a bit like solving a crime: the historian rarely gives you the answer up front, and even when the historian speaks directly about his theme he doesn’t always tell the whole truth. You have to follow clues. Often, it is the “dog that doesn’t bark” that provides the most interesting hints – what the historian chooses to omit from the story can be even more telling than what is on the page.
Of course, the more you know about a particular historical era or person the easier it is to think about what the historian omits or highlights and compare one historian’s account of the Battle of Trenton, for example, to another story. But even when you are reading your first book about a particular episode or era, you can interrogate the book in ways that provide some revealing answers. (I’m told that Chuck Norris doesn’t read; he just stares at a book until it breaks down and tells him everything it knows. Good readers know how to make books confess to more than the book intends.)
Some of the questions to ask a text like Washington’s Crossing would include the following:
Why does the author select this moment in US history? The Battle of Saratoga is often seen as the turning point of the revolution. Why does Fischer choose the New Jersey campaign of 1776-77? What are the explicit arguments he makes in support of this choice? Do we have confidence in those arguments after reading the text?
The author disaggregates the armies on both sides. This isn’t a story about how the Americans fought the British. It is a story about how two quite different armies, composed of very different elements, were organized. Many histories spend less time looking at, for example, the cultural and organizational differences between Massachusetts and Maryland regiments. Why does this book highlight these questions – on both sides of the conflict? What light does this approach shed on the events described, and what does this choice imply about the author’s views on strategy and politics?
Additionally, the author writes in some detail about the political situation on both sides, the social position and personal backgrounds of the leading officers, and what might be called the political rather than the tactical dimension of strategy. What is he implying about the relationship between politics, culture and war – and how does this comport with other works you have read on this subject?
The battle scenes are recounted in great detail, and often told from the standpoint of individual units and soldiers. At the same time, the individual episodes are connected to a detailed analysis of the battles as a whole: we swoop from a description of a maneuver to a close up of one soldier trying to ford a creek. These battle scenes are unusually detailed. Clearly they make for a gripping story and give life to an account that could otherwise seem very dry. But what does this approach to writing about combat seem to tell us about the nature of combat itself? How does combat as it appears in Fischer relate to the ideas of, for example, Clausewitz?
Another way to interrogate a book is to put its ideas in juxtaposition with other books you have read. Many of my students have read Machiavelli’s The Prince. In Fischer’s book, George Washington is doing exactly what Machiavelli hoped that the ideal reader of The Prince would do: he is driving foreign enemies and armies out of the country in order to build a united republic. The parallel between Washington and Machiavelli’s ideal ruler was striking and obvious to many of Washington’s colleagues and contemporaries in part because both Washington and Machiavelli consciously invoke the history of the Roman Republic. If we read Washington’s Crossing as a commentary on Machiavelli, in what ways is it a critique and in what ways does it support Machiavelli’s ideas?
Readers can push their interrogation farther in space and time. Students who know something about ancient Greek history can make interesting comparisons between Great Britain at the time of the American Revolution and the Athenian empire at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Britain was a (sort of) democratic and very maritime empire engaged in a long and bitter contest with France, a land based enemy with autocratic institutions. The revolt of Britain’s American colonies presented it with strategic issues not entirely unlike those Athens faced. Are there any meaningful conclusions to be drawn by thinking about the similarities and differences between their approaches to these problems? Do British leaders like the Howe brothers resemble Pericles? Cleon? Nicias?
This kind of reading is a middle way between the page by page note-taking and the breezy once over. I think of it as active reading: rather than sitting back and let the words flow over you, you wrestle with the book and work to see how it fits or doesn’t fit with other books you have read or experiences you have had.
It’s been my experience that students who learn to read books this way are very well prepared for seminar discussions. They have insights and ideas into the book that will make sense no matter where the seminar discussion heads. Their ideas about the theme of the book and the world view of its author prepare them to discuss the beginning, middle or end of the book. They will also find it much easier to translate their reading and reflection into good term papers when the time comes.
But the value of reading books like this goes far beyond the classroom. By reading new books in the light of your knowledge of other subjects and other books, and by wrestling with each author you encounter, putting their ideas and assumptions in context and testing them against other approaches that you’ve seen at work elsewhere, you are deepening your understanding of past books you have read as well as absorbing the new one. You are building a tapestry of learning in your mind, weaving books, ideas and historical eras together in a way that will gradually become a rich treasure for you: a source of information and insight that will be of great use in daily life as well as in your intellectual pursuits.
Very soon, this way of reading books becomes a habit — something you don’t even need to think about. You will have trained your mind to become actively engaged with the information it takes in, and this skill will carry over into the way you ‘read’ people and situations in real life. Reading books in this way won’t just make you smart; it will help you become wise.
Learning to read actively is one of the most important things you can do; get this right and a lot of other things fall into place.