What is Historical Studies Research Like?

Letters, diary entries and photographs provide snapshots in
time of people and places, serving as important resources for historians
conducting research. However, how is that evidence studied and utilized by
researchers?

For Monica Rankin, associate professor of history and
director of the UTD Center for U.S.-Latin America Initiatives, much of the
research for her first book, “¡México, la Patria!,” which studies propaganda in
Mexico during World War II, was done in archives in Mexico and Maryland. These
collections contain old primary documents held in environmentally controlled
spaces.

“We sit in these archives and we go through these documents
and try to reconstruct the past from what these documents are telling us. What
those documents are varies from one scholar to the next,” Rankin said. “I spent
a lot of time in the Mexican national archive and went through a lot of the old
memos, correspondence from the offices in charge of creating propaganda
information and pamphlets. The government archive sent me into really
interesting directions.”

For instance, Rankin found a collection of letters of
support from individual citizens sent to the government, when Mexico entered
the war. She read approximately 1,000 of these letters and categorized them to
gain an understanding of how citizens viewed the war. To analyze a source,
Rankin considers its intended audience, context and existing scholarship. 

“My own scholarship, I pair with a lot of diplomatic history
— so different ways in which nations interact with each other, leaders interact
with the broader public,” Rankin said. “In the book I am working on now, it is
centered very much on propaganda theory: what makes effective propaganda, what
is it and how do people respond to it.”

Kimberly Hill, assistant professor of history, begins
research by identifying an archive that holds sources she could use for a
particular event, then analyzes those sources through theory and alternate
scholarly perspectives. Her first book focuses on African American missionaries
in the Belgian Congo during the late 19th century and early 20th century.

“We reach conclusions by reading much more than what we
think is immediately relevant and trying our best recreate the total context of
that person’s experience,” Hill said. “We usually do a lot of scholarly reading
before we get to the archive that gives us key terms, people or events we need
to look for. Then usually once you get to the archive, you find you only get a
third to half of the story. You get used to the unexpected and see the way
people understood what was happening to them.”

Then Hill examines her sources for a common thread to her
argument, if not then she reassesses or interrupts her argument. She read 35
years worth of journal entries from one missionary and then compared it to the
official documents from his fellow missionaries.

“Some of the evidence I drew from the missionary’s record,
but then I add to compare the way that he described to what anthropologists or
theologians, say is representative of how people in the Belgian Congo at the
time were responding to western religions,” Hill said. “I also did some
comparisons with current Presbyterian ministers from the Congo to see how they
understand the legacy of their church.”

Hill did some of the research and writing at the same time.
She read journal entries on a microfilm reader, made notes and created a
database arranged by key terms. From there she began signing up for conferences
where she presented a paper that, she imagined, would be a chapter of her book
based on how she listed those key terms into major themes. This is a common and
required practice for researchers to present their papers, then publish them in
academic journals and then eventually a book.

“It was complicated by the fact that there is little
existing scholarship about the specific people that I wanted to make the center
of my book,” Hill said. “So on the one hand, that was exciting and unique, but
without that many models it could be nerve wracking to know whether the
direction I was going would lead to something or whether I might end up hitting
a brick wall.”

She said she tried her best to read every scholar who
mentioned these missionaries before.

“I took their approach seriously then had to go back to my
own records and think what do I have that’s different,” Hill said. “I learned
to lean into that, even if my original inclination was to do something else.”

Nils Roemer is professor of holocaust studies and director
of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. He said much of research in
history has the challenge of dealing with a baseline that is incomplete and
biased, which contrasts with research conditions of a scientist in a lab.

“But we, all the same, engage in research trying to discern
out of that horrendously incomplete track of sources, something that
nonetheless is discernible. It becomes more complicated because what is our
question?” Roemer said. “By and large our question is not always a question
that can be easily answered in a quantitative way. Mostly we’re interested in
getting to something more specific about, in the widest sense, the human
experience. The unique individual experiences within the larger changes.”

Roemer grew up in Germany, and he said that knowing his
history became an empowering experience for him. This is what prompted him to
study the subject in higher education.

“In any day that you walk around, you make assumptions about
what surrounds you. You make choices about all kinds of things in your life,
and you also never have a complete set of data available. You also make
assumptions incomplete, biased information,” he said. ““In a lot of ways, our
research in the humanities is actually far closer to how we as average humans
make our choices.”