HIST 489: General Scheme of the Course

(Read this at the beginning of the seminar, and you'll have an idea what you're getting into.—TI)

Old LeRoy just about drove us crazy. I'm talking about LeRoy Fischer, Professor of History at Oklahoma State University for about a hundred years. Talk about old school—we'd come to his afternoon seminar and sit down at the big table, and LeRoy would lean back, his eyes would roll up into his head, his hands in front of him on the table would start to flutter as though he were shuffling a poker deck, and then he'd say, "May I see your 3x5 note cards, please?" Week after week the damn 3x5 note cards, and then it got worse, because when he got your manuscript you had to go over it with him word by word, comma by comma, until you, Fowler, and the Chicago Manual were all broken spineless. And those multiple citation footnotes—I cannot speak of them without grinding my teeth.

That old guy knew how to run a seminar. Because just when you thought you were dead meat, you were not going to survive the thing, LeRoy would launch a lyric tribute to "the richness of detail" in someone's historical writing, or he would fire fifteen minutes of effusive praise toward some one of us who had ferreted out a forgotten cache of documents, or he would just haul all of us over to the college dairy for ice cream. In the end, after collecting the final drafts, he would fold his hands and smile a benediction over a stack of papers that were publishable, every one.

It is my privilege to convene with you in a historical seminar. Just what is this enterprise? A seminar is a college course where students become scholars. In a seminar, you don't just receive knowledge from a professor. No, you go out and find knowledge and bring it back, and not just for the professor, but for one another. The professor is a convener, organizer, and coach who helps you discover and present historical knowledge. He doesn't teach history, he teaches how to do History. And the student-scholars do it.

Here, then, is what you are going to do. Each of you will have a topic to investigate. The final product of your investigation will be a scholarly paper, a historical essay, comprising original research in primary sources. En route to this final product you will learn how historians work—the methods of historical research, the conventions of historical writing, and most important the joys of discovery.

Your topic will be one for which we know primary sources are readily available. You will read secondary sources on the topic and commence research using standard finding aids. Then you'll go beyond what is known on the topic, discover new knowledge in fresh sources. After gathering this material together you will weigh it, organize it, shape it into an essay that recounts your findings and connects your findings to the body of historical knowledge.

Along the way, too, we'll take a look at what some great historians have said about the historical seminar and the practice of history, and we'll talk about their ideas.

We'll do all this together. Scholarship in the Humanities is by nature, usually, a solitary pursuit, an engagement of a scholar with documents. The seminar, however, provides a network of support and encouragement, as well as counsel, so that the solitary enterprise need not be lonely. Moreover, by working parallel and sharing our fruits, we multiply the learning experiences. We learn to do History both by experience and by vicarious experience.

All right, let's do it. As Howard Lamar, the dean of Western Americana, told us in his Cater Lecture at NDSU,

Saddle up your typewriters, ladies and gentlemen, it is time to ride herd on these new frontiers.

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