You know how sometimes it seems like you go ages and ages without making any progress? Like you're just slogging and slogging and never getting anywhere, nothing gets any clearer, you sort of feel like Sisyphus pushing that damn rock up the hill? Welcome to my first two years of grad school. I didn't understand ANYTHING. There were moments that I felt like I was sort of onto something, like something was going to click, but it never really seemed to happen. It was like living in a constant state of anxious anticipation. I felt like nothing so much as an academic charlatan, scared to death that at any moment someone would realize that I didn't belong there. (I am told that pretty much every grad student goes through this at various points in their career....but mine went on for a really really long time, especially if you count the murky darkness that was my MA programs.)
Well, it's all coming together now. I finally don't feel totally stupid in my classes. All the stuff that people told me during my first two years that I pretended to understand, I actually understand now.
It took me a really long time to get the point of historiography. I think you really just have to read a certain amount of stuff before you see that authors really are arguing with one another, and before shit like "the Dar es Salaam School" actually make sense. They finally do; I know what that is now. I just had to read enough stuff coming from it to get what it was.
And you know how professors make you write all those stupid response papers? They're not just teaching you how to get the point of a book. They're teaching you to write book reviews, because you have to know how to do that. It's super formulaic, and an incredibly vital skill.
Oh, and learning how to read a book without actually reading it. FINALLY able to do that. Now I love it when my professors assign 2 or 3 books a week. Seeing connections between different books and authors is really more exciting than mastering a single book (although some of them you just need to sit down and read every word; and you have to learn the difference). This stimulates your thinking and helps you to position your own work and ask questions in new and better ways.
But most of all, I see more and more the vital role of the historian in interpreting the present. A good historian always keeps one foot firmly in the here and now, because otherwise what we do is worthless. You don't have to make specific policy recommendations or anything, but remaining cognizant of how our work affects our understanding of the present, and how current events shape our interpretation is just about the most important thing we can do. Marc Bloch says it better than I ever could:
"Misunderstanding of the present is the inevitable consequence of ignorance of the past, but a man may wear himself out just as fruitlessly in seeking to understand the past, if he is totally ignorant of the present."
Ain't that the truth?
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