The Unwritten Rules of History

Tag: Academic Life

A Beginner’s Guide to the CHA Annual Meeting and My Top Conference Picks for 2016

Beginners guide to the CHA

It’s that time of the year again: conference season! For most Canadian historians, this means the Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Annual Meeting, which starts on May 30th and runs until June 1st! I can’t go this year, but my intrepid friend Catherine Ulmer has agreed to serve as my “official” CHA report. So we can look forward to her reports in two weeks. If this is your first time attending the CHA conference, or Congress in general, everything can seem really intimidating. So in this blog post I’m going to give you a beginner’s guide to the CHA conference, and at the end, give you my suggestions for must-see panels!

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What do Historians Do, Anyways?

What do historians do?

TL; DR version: look at old stuff, think about it, write about it, and teach it.

I mean besides kicking butt at Trivial Pursuit. 😉 This seems to be something of a mystery, and historians haven’t done a great job of clearing things up. The answer that most historians give is that historians try to understand the past. But this isn’t really a satisfying answer for most people, since it sounds more like a philosophy than anything else. So in today’s blog post, following up from last week, I’m going to tell you exactly what historians do inside their little hobbit holes.

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Unwritten Histories – The Blog

photo-1429051781835-9f2c0a9df6e4Welcome! This blog will focus on the unwritten rules to history, as both a discipline, a field of study, and as a career. The information that appears in this blog is the result of thirteen years of doing history at the undergraduate and graduate level as well as six years working as a sessional instructor.

Here’s a look at some of the series I’ll be featuring:

  • Undergraduate Corner:
    • How to find good secondary and primary sources and what to do with them once you have them
    • How to construct an argument
    • Dos and Don’ts for paper writing
    • The art of documentation
  • Graduate School
    • How to prepare for comps
    • Navigating your relationship with your supervisor
    • Applying for grants
  • How To Do Academic Research 
    • Tips and Tricks for effectively searching archives
    • What to do with your research material once you’ve found it
    • Useful software for historians (Evernote, Devonthink, Scrivener, Pages)
  • So You Want to be a Sessional
    • How to build your own course outlines
    • Selecting appropriate reading material
    • Coming up with lesson plans
    • Online resources for activities
    • Developing your pedagogy
    • Building relationships with students
  • The Academic Life
    • Age and seniority
    • Conferences
    • Building on online presence and social media profile (especially on Twitter!)
    • Finding love
    • Survival tips when moving to a new city and/or university
    • Staying sane, happy, and healthy
  • Good Reads
    • Fiction, non-fiction, academic books, articles, and blogs I’m enjoying
  • Historical Tidbits
    • Interesting stories
    • Latest historical or archaeological discoveries

This is the information that I wish I had known going into university, when I applied for graduate school, during graduate school, and in my early academic career. The kind of information that, as many historians would say, is taken for granted, and consequently rarely discussed. Few academic historians will teach you this information, believing that acquiring this knowledge is part of the process of becoming an academic. But I think this kind of attitude perpetuates the “professorial mystique” while also crippling young historians. I can tell you that I’ve learned so much more outside of graduate school than I ever did while enduring it, and that my understanding of the past now is consequently much deeper and richer.

While I will be focusing on Canadian history, since that’s my background, the information on this site will be useful, no matter your specific field.

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