People don’t learn things in isolation, but in relationship. Historians are no different. The third category of Historical Thinking Skills reflects the ways historians make sense of the past by placing particulars in some larger framework. For example, they understand historical events and processes by comparing them to related events and processes to see how they’re similar and different. Second, historians recognize that historical evidence, including artifacts, photographs, and speeches, can only be adequately understood by knowing something about their context, that is, the time and place when they came into existence.

Comparison Comparisons help historians understand how a development in the past was similar to or different from another development and in this way determine what was distinctive. For example, some scholars have concluded that the reform spanning the Progressive and New Deal eras shared key features that led to the development of a welfare state. Other scholars have argued that the New Deal represented a radical break from the progressive policies of the past. Through the tool of comparison we can see how leaders and ordinary people handled common problems in unique ways.

As you develop this skill, practice comparing two social justice movements, such as the African American and women’s suffrage movements — and also compare the same movement at two different points in time. For example, how was the women’s suffrage movement of the nineteenth century similar to that of the women’s suffrage movement of the early twentieth century? How was it different? What had happened to lead to these differences?

Contextualization Just as historical events make more sense when they’re studied alongside similar events, historians know that any event can only be understood in “context.” Context refers to the historical circumstances surrounding a particular event. Historians look for major developments in any era to help determine context. They typically think in terms of two levels of context: an immediate (or short-term) context and a broad (or long-term) context.

The easiest way to begin thinking about context is to figure out when a particular event took place or when a document was created. Then brainstorm the major developments of the era. Ask yourself, “How might these larger events have shaped this event (or document)?”

For example, European Enlightenment ideas — among them John Locke’s revolutionary idea that political authority was not given by God to monarchs and that the people should have the power to change government policies, or even their form of government — had been carried over to the Americas by European colonists. These ideas added a secular dimension to colonial cultural life, but it wouldn’t be until the Revolutionary era that these ideas would be embraced by American intellectuals such as John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson in their formulation of republican political theory.

To understand why these ideas had such dramatic effects, you need to consider the larger context. That context, as Chapter 4 indicates, includes both the immediate context of the political and social situation in the colonies in the eighteenth century and the long-term context of the print revolution. The context sometimes includes things that might at first seem unrelated. In this case, after 1700 improved transportation networks facilitated the spread of people, goods, and information in the colonies. Around the same time, in 1695 the British government let the Licensing Act lapse, which had given it the right to censor all printed materials, further opening the floodgates for the spread of books, newspapers, letters, and pamphlets. In 1704, the first colonial newspaper was founded. By 1776, the thirteen colonies that united in declaring independence had thirty-seven newspapers among them. The transportation and print revolution thus allowed revolutionary ideas to be communicated far more widely and quickly than they would have without it.