As you read chapters of this text, remember that reading is an active process — so stay focused. The meaning will only become clear as you work at it. The authors have intentionally written an organized textbook and want you to be able to follow along, so take advantage of the clues they have provided, especially the main questions, section titles, and subheadings.

Active readers use four skills to understand texts: questioning, clarifying, summarizing, and predicting. These steps don’t have to happen in a particular order. In fact, once you become comfortable with them, they’ll pop up on their own without you trying in whatever order they choose, perhaps several at the same time — that’s when you know that they’ve truly become habits of mind. Use these skills along with note-taking to get the most out of your reading.

Questioning Historians look at the world in a particular way, and they usually organize their writing around the Historical Thinking Skills discussed above: cause and effect, comparison, interpretation, and so on. Many of the questions in each chapter involve one or more of these thinking skills. For example, the marginal question on page 15 of Chapter 1, “How did landscape, climate, and resources influence the development of Native American societies?” is a question about change over time and about causation. As the authors answer that question in the chapter section on pages 8–18, they utilize every other Historical Thinking Skill as well. They craft a historical argument using many types of relevant historical evidence, including evidence gathered by scholars in other fields, such as archaeologists and anthropologists who study the remains of early native peoples; present a periodization of the thousands of years before European contact, when the peoples of the Western Hemisphere were largely isolated from the rest of the world; compare the trade networks and religious practices of Native American groups; contextualize the different ways that societies developed within the processes of climate and geography; and develop an interpretation about the development of diverse groups across the Americas that synthesizes information from different sources and fields of inquiry.

Asking questions is thus an essential way to develop Historical Thinking Skills. For every section you read, you might begin with the very basic “reporter questions”: Who? What? Where? When? Why?

1.Who is the section about? History texts are almost always about people. Is the focus an individual? A social group? A political entity?

2.What does the section say about this person or group? Texts usually describe some major event or pattern. Did they do something important? Did something happen to them?

3.Where did the subject being described take place? Physical location is often crucial in history. Does this location help make sense of the subject in some way?

4.When did the events take place? Like physical location, chronology forms part of the historical context that makes events understandable. Does the text describe something unfolding over a very short period — or a longer one? Are there crucial events that came before that make the description understandable?

5.Why did the event or pattern being described take place — and why does it matter? Whether talking about a dramatic development or a continuity that endured for a long period of time, historians always attempt to understand what led to it. What reasons does the text provide for the event or pattern? How is the significance of the development explained?

Clarifying As you read, ask yourself if there are any words you don’t understand. Some of these will be included as key terms defined in the margins, but not all will. When it comes to vocabulary, use good judgment. Is the word crucial for understanding the passage? If not, read right past it, as the meaning may become clearer as you read further in the text. If it is a crucial word, you may need to look it up in a dictionary.

When a longer passage throws you off, usually clearing up difficult vocabulary will help make the passage clearer. If it doesn’t, simply reread the sentence a few times (slowly!). If you’re still unclear, back up — usually to the beginning of the paragraph — and try again. The most common way skilled readers get clarification is simply by rereading.

Summarizing A summary is a brief review of the “big picture” of a particular section or chapter. After reading, briefly explain what each section is about in one sentence — being sure your summary considers all five of the “reporter questions” from the Questioning section above. If you are summarizing a section, you might think of this as answering the main question posed in the section. For example, a summary of the first section in Chapter 1, “How did landscape, climate, and resources influence the development of Native American societies?” might be: Native Americans (who) in present-day Mexico and Peru (where) began raising domesticated crops (what) around 6000 B.C.(when), and as agriculture spread northward across much of North America, agricultural surpluses led to population growth and facilitated the growth of diverse urban societies (why).

Predicting Based on your reading of an entire section or chapter, what do you think will come next in the text? How do you know? You may think predicting what’s coming next is a waste of time, but it’s a really good test of how well you understand the flow of the text. If you’re in a car with your family going to visit your grandmother, you probably know the route to get there. If your mother takes an unanticipated turn, it alerts you that something is different from what you were expecting — and prompts you to ask why. So if your prediction based on reading is wildly off, it may alert you to the fact that your previous idea of the “big picture” of the section was off for some reason. You may need to back up and reread a section, or at least move forward more alert to where the author is going. Again using the first section of Chapter 1 as an example, what do you imagine will happen to native peoples after European contact?

Note-Taking Of course, simply reading the text is not sufficient. You’ll never remember everything that’s important unless you take notes. Students experience many pitfalls when taking notes. You should only write notes after you understand what you have read. Actively question, clarify, summarize, and predict in your head (or out loud) as you read each chapter, and then go back through the subsections and take brief notes representing the key ideas of that section.

Brief is generally better — don’t wear yourself out in the notes themselves. Find some consistent abbreviations for frequent words, and use symbols: an up arrow to indicate growth, a flat arrow to indicate cause/effect, an “=” to indicate a definition, and so on. Don’t write everything; ask yourself if a particular point is a main idea or just an example. If you own your textbook, make annotations in the margins. If not, get a stack of sticky notes and place them in the margins for your comments.

Now that you know what this section is about, what brief comments are worth writing down in your notes?