People learn things not in isolation, but in relationship. Historians are no different. The second 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. In addition, 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; the comparison allows them to determine what was distinctive. For example, scholars have concluded that the countries of western Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century shared key features. First, they adopted constitutions of some sort that generally extended voting rights to a larger share of the male population, and mass politics emerged. Second, pragmatic leaders expanded the social responsibilities of government, offering education and some public health benefits, recognizing that these would make people more loyal to their governments. Third, the countries all saw growing popular nationalism, encouraged by new symbols and rituals, such as national holidays, commemorative monuments, and flags.

But while this pattern holds true for all western European nations, each developed in a distinctive way. 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 nations in the nineteenth century — like France and Germany — and also compare the same nation at two different points in time. For example, how was government in France during the late nineteenth century similar to that of France in the Napoleonic era of the early nineteenth century? How was it different? What had happened during the nineteenth century to lead to these differences?

Contextualization

Just as historical events make more sense when they’re studied alongside similar events, any event makes more sense when it is examined 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, the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century was propelled by the personal religious struggle of Martin Luther, a German university professor and priest. In 1517 Luther wrote a letter to the archbishop of the territory in which he lived, protesting the sale of indulgences, pieces of paper signed by a church official that promised forgiveness of sins. Luther’s letter was printed, first in the Latin in which he wrote it and then in German translation, and widely read. This letter is often seen as the triggering event of the Protestant Reformation, but to understand why it had such dramatic effects, you need to consider the larger context. That context, as Chapter 13 indicates, includes both the immediate context of the political and social situation in Germany in the early sixteenth century and the long-term context of calls for reform of the Christian Church that stretched back centuries. The context sometimes includes factors that might at first seem unrelated. In this case, the invention of the printing press with movable metal type, which had occurred in Germany in the middle of the fifteenth century, allowed Luther’s ideas to be communicated far more widely and quickly than they would have been without it. Many scholars argue that the Protestant Reformation would not have occurred without printing, a good example of the contingency of history discussed earlier.