On the Reading of Historical Texts: Notes on the Breach Between School and Academy

TLDR

The article examines what it means to read a historical text and discusses how this understanding informs reading comprehension and the role of history in school curricula. The author draws on interviews with historians and think‑aloud sessions with high‑school students reviewing American Revolution texts to compare expert and novice conceptions of historical reading. The study finds that historians and students differ because each group applies a distinct epistemological stance that shapes the meanings they derive from historical texts.

Abstract

In this article I explore what it means to read a historical text. In doing so, I draw on my research with historians and high school students, who thought aloud as they reviewed a set of texts about the American Revolution. I begin by providing an overview of what I learned from historians, sketching in broad strokes an image of the skilled reader of history. Next, I compare this image to what emerged from an analysis of high school students’ responses to these same documents. I then speculate about the source of differences between these two groups, arguing that each group brings to these texts a distinctive epistemological stance, one that shapes and guides the meanings that are derived from text. I end by outlining the implications of this work for how we define reading comprehension and how we define the place of history in the school curriculum.