Moral, epistemological, and causal complexity distinguish historical thinking from the conception of “history” held by many non-historians.5 Re-enacting battles and remembering names and dates require effort but not necessarily analytical rigor. Making sense of a messy world that we cannot know directly, in contrast, is more confounding but also more rewarding.

Contingency can be a difficult concept to present abstractly, but it suffuses the stories historians tend to tell about individual lives.

In our teaching, we liken the first to the floating words that roll across the screen at the beginning of every Star Wars film. This kind of context sets the stage; the second helps us to interpret evidence concerning the action that ensues. Texts, events, individual lives, collective struggles—all develop within a tightly interwoven world

The idea of change over time is perhaps the easiest of the C’s to grasp. Students readily acknowledge that we employ and struggle with technologies unavailable to our forebears, that we live by different laws, and that we enjoy different cultural pursuits.

“five C’s of historical thinking.” The concepts of change over time, causality, context, complexity, and contingency, we believe, together describe the shared foundations of our discipline.

Pieces of evidence — in the form of primary and secondary sources — are the building blocks of historical arguments. When you see evidence being used, try to identity the part of the argument it is being used to support.

That is, you must learn to quickly determine the important parts of the scholarly material you read. The most important thing to understand about a piece of scholarly writing is its argument. Arguments have three components: the problem, the solution, and the evidence. Understanding the structure of an essay is key to understanding these things.

Everything we do, everything we use, everything else we study is the product of a complex set of causes, ideas, and practices. Even the material we learn in other courses has important historical elements – whether because our understanding of a topic changed over time or because the discipline takes a historical perspective.