Earlier this semester, I started to notice an interesting trend in class discussions.  My students kept bringing up the bias, or lack thereof, of the authors we were discussing.  The term kept coming up again and again.  It was clear that when it comes to historians, my students wanted to hear from scholars without bias.  Scholars who would present them with true facts.  Scholars who would let them make up their minds for themselves.  They were pleased when they felt they were getting such assignments.  Since we were, in fact, reading books in which historians were making strong arguments, I was not sure what to make of this.  What did they mean, and why did they value the imaginary non-biased author so heavily?  These are very smart students, mostly non-majors who have been doing very well with difficult texts.  It’s not that they can’t get it.  Rather, I think it has to do with what they come into the classroom thinking about what history is, and how historians do their work. In the larger context of critiques of “revisionist” history and debates about the history curriculum for the AP or the Common Core, this seems like an important issue for us to think about in the college classroom.  If nothing else, it has led me to the conclusion that we really need to increase our attention to talking about what it is, exactly, that historians do—even in our lecture classes, and even when we aren’t focusing on training our students in historical methods.  Knowing historical methods isn’t just about research skills: it’s about reading skills, too.

As I’ve been thinking about this issue of bias, my mind keeps returning to E.H. Carr, whose wonderful answers to the question “what is history?” feature heavily in my early-semester lectures in courses where I spend more time talking about the craft and methods of history.  “Study the historian before you begin to study the facts,” he wrote.  Look for “what bees he has in his bonnet.  When you read a work of history, always listen out for the buzzing.”*  It seems like my students are on high alert for the buzzing, but not for the reasons that Carr suggests.  They are looking out for moments when they can see the historian shaping the story towards particular ends, for the moments when the scholar’s bias will distort the facts to tell a certain story.  For Carr, though, we need to know about the historian because we all know that interpretation and argument are central to what history is.  Facts are not simply fish on a fishmonger’s slab, so we need to pay attention to where our fact-fish came from.  For some of my students, it seems, they believe that the facts can and should speak for themselves.  Instead of seeing all historians as by definition shaping an argument about some collection of facts, they are mistrustful of any historians who they see as trying to push them towards a certain conclusion.  Those historians are biased.

This perplexes me.  In part, it perplexes me because I haven’t noticed it as a problem before.  In my other classes, though, I often open with Carr.  I talk about Carr in women’s history to explain how women’s and gender history is a different kind of approach than they would get in the standard survey.  I talk about Carr in my methods classes, for obvious reasons.  In those classes where I don’t open with methods, I haven’t had enough discussion built into the class to be able to hear whether the bias question has come up for my students.  From talking to colleagues, it probably has.  One colleague has taken to not allowing students to use the word, telling them instead to think about “perspectives.”  Another has said that he’s seen students unwilling to make an argument in a paper because they don’t want to be biased themselves—for every point, they feel the need to make the counter-argument, and leave it to the reader to decide. But maybe, also, this problem is getting bigger.  If any of us thought that fears of revisionist historians were a thing of the past, that doesn’t seem to be the case.  History, and how it is taught, is in the news again, and maybe our students are noticing.

So what to do?  I am going to be talking about the historians’ craft a lot more, in classes where I might not have thought to before.  I like Glen’s ideas about dueling-banjos to bring historiography into lectures.  I do this a little bit when talking about slavery in my women’s history class (Morgan and Brown pair so nicely for that), and one of the most life-changing experiences I’ve ever had in a lecture hall was listening to a lecture on that style about the Spanish-American War (ok, the only life-changing experience I’ve ever had in a lecture hall).  That’s when I first really got it what women’s and gender history was, and what it could do, and when I first realized that I wanted to be a historian.  So perhaps I’ve been shortchanging my colonial students in expecting them to realize what historians do before they come into my 300-level classroom.  Maybe, if we talk more about what it is that we actually do, we can similarly inspire our students.  Maybe, at the very least, we can help them to listen for the buzzing without assuming that any buzzing is a sign that someone is trying to engage in a culture war.

*E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 26.