Writing in history combines narrative (a description of what happened) and interpretation (an analysis of why events occurred). Historians ask questions that do not have obvious answers and analyze a variety of sources to draw conclusions.

When you take courses in history, you may be asked to write any of the following kinds of documents:

Critical essays

For some assignments, you will be asked to write a short, critical essay in which you look at a document or group of documents—or perhaps a historical argument written by a scholar. For example, if you were studying the US decision to send troops to Vietnam, you might be asked to analyze one or more of John F. Kennedy’s speeches and put forth a theory about why Kennedy chose to authorize the initial troop deployments. In the same course, you might be asked to read a journal article by a scholar analyzing Kennedy’s decision and assess the way that scholar uses evidence to support his or her conclusion.

Book reviews

Because historians view their own work as part of an ongoing scholarly conversation, they value the serious discussion of the work of other scholars in the field. In some courses, you may be asked to write a book review analyzing the logic and accuracy of a scholarly work or of several works on the same topic. When you write a book review, you will have to make judgments about how much background information to provide about the book so that your readers will be able to understand and appreciate your critique.

Research papers

When you write a research paper in any course, you are expected to pose a question and examine the available evidence to find an answer to that question. In history courses, a research paper will generally focus on why and how questions that can be answered using a combination of sources. If you were studying the Vietnam War, you might ask how the rhetoric of the Cold War shaped John F. Kennedy’s early Vietnam policy. To answer this question, you might look at government documents from the Kennedy administration, press coverage of Kennedy’s foreign policy, Kennedy’s own writings, and interviews with those who were involved in policymaking. If you were interested in the role of women in the military during World War II, you might ask why the British government supported the expansion of women’s roles in ways that the US government did not.

Historiographic essays

Historiography is the study by historians of how history is written. When you write a historiographic essay, you think about the methods by which other historians have drawn their conclusions. If you were writing a historiographic essay about how the Cold War affected John F. Kennedy’s policies, you would analyze how other historians have answered this question. What assumptions or biases influenced their choice and interpretation of sources? What methods shaped their work?