Must History Students Write History Essays?

“Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.” —Jill Lepore quoted in Maia R. Silber, “Jill Lepore: A Historian's History,” Harvard Crimson, March 6, 2014 “Undergraduate students are not interested in becoming professional historians and one should not teach undergraduates as if they were trying to learn the techniques of professional historical inquiry.” —Hayden White quoted in Ewa Domanska, “A Conversation with Hayden White,” Rethinking History, 12 (March 2008), 12–13 “For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.” —C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy, vol. V: The Chronicles of Narnia (New York, 1975), 32 The authors of this essay went to college thirty-four years apart. One of us attended a large state university in the late 1970s; the other graduated recently from a small, private liberal arts college. Despite the differences in our ages and the type of schools we attended, both of us can testify that in the college history courses we took, the gold standard for advancing and assessing our achievement was the same: the history essay. For us and our peers, studying history meant writing history essays—loads and loads of them, fall and spring. Some were hurriedly scribbled responses to blue book prompts that typically began: “Write an essay explaining/ analyzing/critiquing/defending/etc.” Others were longer, more carefully prepared compositions, or “papers” as we called them, in which we analyzed primary documents; reviewed books, articles, or films; and took positions on historical questions, supporting our views (sometimes) with evidence and “the moves that matter in academic writing,” as the subtitle of a popular composition textbook puts it. Essays were not the only game in history town, of course. We also wrote minute papers and short-answer paragraphs, annotated bibliographies, and lengthy term papers. In certain instances, large classes impelled our instructors to curtail the number and length of essay assignments. But it remains true that in both our experiences, whether in the 1970s or 2010s, whether at a state university or a liberal arts college, when the situation allowed, all of our professors, as if by a common homing instinct evolved over eons of undergraduate teaching, equated seriousness and rigor in history education with the writing of formal essays.1