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 your 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 previously: causation, comparison, interpretation, and so on. Many of the questions in each chapter involve one or more of these thinking skills. For example, the first question in Chapter 11, “How did climate change shape the late Middle Ages?” is a question about change over time and about causation. As the authors answer that question in the chapter section on pages 324–325, 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 biologists who study tree rings; present a periodization of the events they describe, which historical geographers have termed a “little ice age”; compare the consequences in different parts of Europe and the responses of different rulers to the crisis; contextualize the developments within global processes of climate change; and develop an interpretation of the impact of climate change on late medieval Europe that synthesizes information from different sources and fields of inquiry. In this section the authors do not apply insights gained from studying climate change and natural disasters in the later Middle Ages to the present, but as you read it you might be reminded of current issues and thus do some synthesis of your own.

Asking questions is clearly 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?

Clarifying

As you read, ask yourself if there 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 — making sure your summary includes consideration of all five of the reporter questions from the “Questioning” section above. You might think of summarizing a section in this text as answering the main question posed in the section. For example, a summary of the first section in Chapter 11, which begins with the question “How did climate change shape the late Middle Ages?” might be: People and animals (who) in northern Europe (where) died from famine and became more susceptible to disease (what) during the fourteenth century (when) because the climate became colder and wetter and governments did little to help them (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 11 as an example, what do you imagine will come next to people who have been made weak by famine?

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. For example, use an up arrow to indicate growth, a horizontal arrow to indicate cause/effect, an equal sign 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?