About two weeks before I left Egypt last July, Fulbright Egypt asked if I would be interested in doing a video showing a day in the life of an American scholar. Being a consummate attention-hound, I said yes!
The video was shot fairly quickly–we budgeted the entire day, but we were done in a few hours, beginning in my flat in Zamalek, and them moving to the neighborhood around it. (Those familiar with the area will spot the geographic claustrophobia, I’m sure. The nice folks at NViC let us film in their reading room).
Mahmoud Rohaim storyboarded the film and directed the shoot. The video was published today — I’d wondered whatever happened to it! Considering it’s been just over a year since I came home, it’s been a nice blast from the past.
This post takes its inspiration from something I’m working on in one of my upper division courses this semester, which is guiding a group of History majors (and a couple of willing History minors) who are on the cusp of graduating through their first real research project. Like most undergraduates, they’ve written papers for which they’ve done research, but they haven’t done an actual research paper before and I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that there’s not a lot of great stuff out there to guide them through it.
From my end (professor), it goes like this: I assign an article or part of a book in a class, and I ask my students what they think of it, and I get blank stares. And like many of my colleagues on the junior ends of things, I get a little frustrated.
What do you mean you don’t have any thoughts on the book?
And then I start thinking about one of the things that I admitted in the post I wrote for what eventually became the Grad School Survival Guide, that this is something:
I had to learn how to do on my own
I didn’t actually learn how to do until I was in graduate school …
… the second time.
So, let me turn this around and imagine that I’m a student being handed an article by a professor who then proceeds to ask me what I thought of it.
The, um, font was pretty?
And the reason for this is that you have to change the way you think about what you’re reading, and also how you approach it.
Now, I’m talking mostly about books here, but if you have an article, keep reading. They’re structured similar to the way that books from academic presses are.
Where books come from and why it matters
You see, when two books love each other very much … (OK, OK, dad joke.)
When you first get to university, you probably encounter the corporately produced textbook. A lot of these are going open source (which I’m not against), but in the liberal arts (and some other fields), you’ll eventually get assigned a book that almost always has a Catchy Title: followed by one, two, or three things that make the title very long.
We’re not here to talk about textbooks, or I’ll be ranting all day and we’ll get nowhere. We’re here to talk about the other books you’re more likely to encounter in an upper division class. The ones you’re asked your thoughts about.
These fall into two categories, which often look very similar: books published by academic presses (these are almost always named for a university, plus a couple of others like Routledge or Bloomsbury), and books published by popular presses (these are names you’ll recognize: Doubleday, Knopf, Penguin, Random House, etc.).
There are different flavors of book: the most common is the monograph, so-called because it has a single author. You may also come across a book jointly written by more than one author, in which it’s not clear who wrote what, or an edited volume, in which each chapter is written by a different person.
Academic presses
For most academics (people with Ph.Ds), the gold standard from our perspective is putting our research out with academic presses. There are many reasons for this, and they are not relevant here. The biggest difference between a book from an academic press and a popular press (other than the cost) is that most books from most academic presses (yes, I’m adding qualifiers so I don’t get loads of comments) go through a process known as double blind peer review. (Most articles in academic journals go through the same process).
This is a process where I, an author, send my manuscript to the publisher who sends it to two reviewers without any information that identifies me as the author. The reviewers read the manuscript and give feedback to the press (“is this book worth publishing?”) and to the author (“this area seems weak, can you find more sources?”) The publisher then sends me their feedback without telling me who they are (hence, the double-blind aspect).
So, academic books have been reviewed (theoretically) by someone who knows something about the subject being discussed and has told the press that the book is worth publishing. The flip side–and the reason I’m telling you about the different kinds of presses–is that most authors don’t actually include “this book was peer reviewed” in their introduction. Occasionally you’ll see a reference to the “anonymous reviewers” in the list of people the author thanks in their intro, but that’s about it.
Popular presses
Popular press books are also reviewed prior to publication, but the process is different. Some academic authors send their manuscripts to them, just structured for a different audience (more on that in a bit). In other cases, the press might seek someone out who knows about a topic they’re keen to publish on, sometimes quickly (hence the number of books that appear after elections and major events–these are solicited by publishing houses because they know people will buy them).
Review at popular presses isn’t always blind, and it may also focus more on publishability (“is the book readable and understandable?”) than it does on the quality of the content in the way that an academic press might. This is not to say that books published by popular presses are better or worse (and if your professor assigned it, it’s probably for good reason), but it is something to keep in mind, especially if you’re doing a research project and wandering through the stacks or doing an online search for suitable material.
Nearly all academic books have the same structure:
Presentation of argument
Historiography
Plan
This will almost always be in the introductory chapter (which, depending on the press, may be titled “introduction” or Chapter 1). In books published by popular presses, however, the historiography section usually appears in the notes at the back of the book.
Academic articles will have a presentation of argument and a historiography, although they may be ordered differently. Usually they don’t include a plan, since most articles aren’t long enough to need one.
Let’s look at what each of these entail:
Presentation of argument
This is where the author offers their thesis or argument. This is the key difference between a survey book or a textbook and an academic book, and why your instructor has different expectations of what you’ll get out of it: rather than a recitation of facts, the author has compiled material to support their thesis, which is an evidence-driven argument that is presented in the rest of the book.
In the early part of the introductory chapter, the author will give background information, and, in the typical style you learned in high school, will begin to narrow their topic before the thesis statement appears. It will look like:
“[Name of book] argues that …”
“In [Name of book], I explore … by …”
a definitive statement that is followed by a lot of persuasive language (“will show”). These are a little harder to find, but you’ll notice that the progression of information stops and there’s a lot of discussion about this sentence.
This is the sentence you want to identify, highlight, write in the margins if it’s your book, etc. This is what the book is actually about. Everything else in the book is the author’s attempt to demonstrate the accuracy of this statement.
Historiography
Shortly thereafter, you will see reference to other scholars, authors, books, and articles. It’s probably not the most interesting section and you’ll be tempted to skip it. If you’re engaging on a research paper or project, though, you really shouldn’t — this section will tell you who else has written on this topic and how the book you’re reading fits in with them: agreement, disagreement, filling in a gap, answering a question posed, etc.
In a book from a popular press, again, this section is more likely to appear in the notes section at the end of the book, rather than within the text itself.
Historiography, as the name suggests, is specific to the discipline of history: it’s the study of how people have written about history and historic events.
The technical name for an in-line (meaning: it appears within the text itself, rather than as an appendix) historiographical section is a literature review. If it’s appended to the end, and shows as a list of books with notes about each title, it’s an annotated bibliography. These two terms are not discipline-specific to history, although their structure and format can differ in other areas of study. If you have to write one, ask your instructor for guidance.
Plan
The plan section is one of the most important sections of the introduction, but it is also the section most students skip right over because they just want to get started. This is actually a mistake.
The plan outlines the book, chapter by chapter, and is where the author lays out how they’re going to structure the presentation of evidence in support of their argument. In Chapter 1, I’ll do this. In Chapter 2, I’ll do that. And so on.
This is actually very important if you’re expected to present part of the book in class, because you’ll want to be able to explain how your chapter follows the ones that come before, and sets up the ones that come after. You shouldn’t have to figure it out for yourself – the author’s done the work for you!
The rest of the book
I’m not going to cover the mechanics of reading, but a word to the wise: if you’re covering an entire book in one or two class sessions, it’s not likely you’ll be asked to recite data covered on page 84. The discussion is most likely to cover the book’s argument and how well the author did demonstrating their point.
And you can read accordingly: efficiently and quickly. Generally you want to read the chapter introduction and conclusion, and read the first and last sentence of each paragraph; if you don’t understand the progression, then skim the paragraph itself.
Pay attention to the flow of the argument, and don’t be afraid to take note of logic leaps or things that don’t entirely make sense. These are good starting points for discussion in class.
Practice, practice, practice
The easiest way to get used to identifying these parts of a book is practice locating them. Go to the library, pick up a few random titles, and see if you can do it. The more accustomed you become to identifying these structural elements, the easier it will be to get what you need out of a book quickly–and correctly–and also to have an answer when your professor asks what you thought of the reading.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything here; once I finished the Grad School Survival Guide I kind of ran out of steam (especially since I sat on the job market not moving for quite a while — writing a “how-to” guide on how to be a Ph.D. collecting unemployment, as I did in the spring of 2021, just didn’t seem all that enticing).
So, very quick life update: at the last moment–literally, I had made up my mind to pursue opportunities outside of academia if this didn’t work out–I found a full time position at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio (about 75 minutes away, which, in all honesty, isn’t a bad commute for the Greater Austin area).
Also, it kind of looks like Hogwarts.
I didn’t know OLLU was the kind of community I was looking for, but it turns out to be a pretty good fit for me: first off, I don’t have to move (the idea of living apart appealed to neither of us), but, secondly, as OLLU is a teaching institution, I can continue research and writing at my pace, but not with the pressure that comes with the tenure track at an R1–which was not something I particularly wanted to deal with.
My next article, which will be out in the spring in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, sat in revision for 16 months (admittedly, I didn’t look at it for 15 of 16 of those months), but that’s how things are with COVID. I don’t need someone breathing down my neck about it.
Plus, people are nice at OLLU. We all say hi in the morning. And, even though the school is going through an enrollment crunch and budget issues like everywhere else, everyone seems pretty determined to make the most of it with what we have.
Plus, as the world history half of the history program, I have the opportunity to reimagine course offerings in line with the school’s identity as a majority Mexican-American campus as that aspect of the curriculum continues to be emphasized. I really am very lucky, in so many ways.
I was particularly fortunate because about six weeks after being offered the job, I found out that I’d been awarded a Fulbright US scholar grant … and OLLU let me take half of my first year off to do it. (Again, I am very lucky).
Which is why I find myself this morning in Cairo, drinking a cup of mint tea and typing furiously on my computer in my apartment that does not have a view of the Nile (it faces the wrong way and also it’s not actually on the Nile).
I’m back in the saddle, working on my book again. I’ve put out a couple of articles based on material from the dissertation, and the heavy critique on both is that they don’t have very many sources in Arabic, or from the Egyptian point of view. This is both fair and unsurprising; in 2016 when I was working on my dissertation I was unable to travel to Egypt, so I had to do nearly all of my work in the British National Archives.
I’d been intending for a while to try to get back here and acquire some of the sources I would need to revise the manuscript, and now I have the funding to do so. Life in Cairo has its difficulties (I stumbled into a tourist scam yesterday with eyes wide open and my pride is still a bit wounded), but it’s manageable.
In all honesty this isn’t the first post I’ve made about this research trip, but some of the posts will, by necessity, be password protected and written for a select group of friends, family, and colleagues until I leave Egypt. (And, remember, my book is about World War I, so, no, I don’t know anything about the mummies they just found. Stop asking me about mummies.)
So, it’s time to dust this thing off and see where it goes. Come along with me on this adventure!
Over the weekend, the Thomas Cook company went bankrupt and shuttered operations, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded worldwide and searching for flights home.
A number of us Twitterstorians became particularly concerned about the impending demise of the company a few days ago when Ziad Morsy, a martime archaeologist and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southampton tweeted that Thomas Cook’s historical archivist had lost his job.
Few months ago Paul Smith, the archives of the Thomas Cook Historical Archives for 23 years lost his job, and now the archives are at risk amid the eminent liquidation of the company https://t.co/HEQC3xng6j
The Thomas Cook company was 178 years old when it collapsed (just over a month before Britain may or may not exit the European Union–coincidences which have been commented upon elsewhere). Some of its history in relation to British imperial history was covered by another colleague in a Twitter thread yesterday:
Thomas Cook began leading tour groups to Egypt and the Holy Land 150 years ago in 1869. He was even present at the opening ceremony of the Suez Canal in November that year. So began the history of modern Western organized tourism in the Middle East. pic.twitter.com/0pQjxNd60H
Inasmuch as it’s easy to point to the Thomas Cook Company’s early days as those of a commercial company essentially making money off of the expansion of the British Empire, there are occasional glimpses at a richer and more complicated role for the company in various contexts (@afzaque covers several of them in his thread, which is worth a read).
It’s these sorts of things that make the potential loss of the company’s archive particularly painful, as it is one of those out-of-the-box sources for material that can shed startling new light on historical periods.
And hence, I present …
The curious case of the Thomas Cook Hospital
I ran across the hospital while writing the first two chapters of my dissertation, which wound up comprising a comprehensive history of public health in Egypt between 1805 and 1914 as one did not already exist. (Wanna publish it? It’s not going to be in the monograph.)
The West Bank of the Nile, opposite Luxor, in 2010.
It was located in Luxor, a settlement that is notable mostly for what people were doing there thousands of years ago, as it is built on top of the ruins of what was almost certainly not known to its inhabitants as Thebes, but was one of the New Kingdom capitals of ancient Egypt. Across the Nile River, wide and lazily flowing at this point, is the pyramid-shaped hill that marks the location of the Valley of the Kings.
Given the numerous pharaonic sites that dot the landscape up and down the river from Luxor, Cook had the bright idea to utilize boat travel for wealthy tourists to visit them without the hassle of having to move constantly to new hotels every night. Luxor, at the epicenter, was the site of the train station from which Wagon-Lits and other operators operated sleeper trains to Cairo.
In 1890, Luxor was a small town — perhaps five thousand permanent inhabitants, which could swell as high as twenty thousand during tourist season when there was work to be had.
John Mason Cook–the son referred to in the company’s official name “Thomas Cook & Son” after 1865 — had the idea to open a hospital as early as 1887:
In 1887, he decided, driven by the reactions of rich foreigners–British, American, German–in the face of the unfortunate hygienic conditions of the local population, to construct a hospital. “Accomplished in 1891, inaugurated by the Khedive Tewfik Pacha, it comprised 26 beds (of which 8 were for women, 10 for men)*, the buildings well constructed, each isolated from the other, in a healthy and fortuitous position.”
*(no, this doesn’t equal 26).
Jagailloux, Serge. La Médicalisation de l’Égypte Au XIXe Siècle. Synthèse 25. Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les civilsations, 1986. (translation mine).
The hospital was co-directed by a Syrian doctor and an Englishman (only the latter–a Dr. Saimders–is named). Given that neither were in residence in Luxor in the off season (April to November), a third doctor–an Egyptian–was appointed to see patients in the off-season.
It was estimated that over 120,000 patients were seen, with over 2,000 operational procedures performed, in its first twenty years of operation. The hospital was presumably built primarily for the treatment of visiting foreigners, with Egyptians working in the tourist industry as a secondary priority.
“One of the Dahabeahs (sic) of Thos. Cook & Son Company (Egypt)” Berlin: Cosmos art publishing Co., 1893. Collection of the Brooklyn Museum
What is interesting is that, with Cook’s blessing, the hospital was opened to the public as well. In 1898, The Lancet enthusiastically reported that people were coming from over two hundred miles away to seek treatment at the facility. (“Egypt.” The Lancet 152, no. 3905 (July 2, 1898): 59.)
After the British occupation in 1882, funding for public health flatlined. Under Lord Cromer, the public health budget never exceeded 100,000 Egyptian pounds (at the time LE 1 = £0.95).
Hospitals in the provinces, which were already run down and developing a bad reputation among patients (most of them had been built in the 1840s), were frequently closed or moved to other, newer buildings that were not purpose-built to serve as hospitals.
The construction of private facilities was encouraged by the Anglo-Egyptian government; the government would not open new hospitals or dispensaries (a combination pharmacy/clinic used to supplement hospitals in smaller settlements) in towns that had “good” private facilities. Many of the hospitals were funded by local European communities to serve their own–Austro-Hungarians, French, Greeks, Italians, and Anglo-Americans all had their own facilities in Cairo and/or Alexandria, most of which referred their Egyptian patients to government facilities.
Hence, it is a point of curiosity for me as to what inspired John Mason Cook to open his hospital to the general public, especially given that his company did not lack for wealthy clientele to fill its beds.
It suggests that, even at the height of imperialism, with a company that can (and has) be considered an agent of an imperial power, things are never quite as simple as they might seem.
As I was writing this, Ziad tweeted me this tantalizing entry from the archival catalog:
FYI, all the info you would need about the Hospital in Luxor could be found in Black Box #3
And here is more about what’s inside, if the Archive is ever opened again! 🤷🏽♂️ pic.twitter.com/VZbIlTaewV
Hence, the answer to my questions may lie in this box, whose future is now in doubt.
What you can do to help
If you’re one of us history types who has benefitted, or could benefit, from consulting the Thomas Cook archives, this thread has specific action items you can take to let people know that there is interest in saving the archive and not letting its contents be dispersed or destroyed.
People: you’ve seen the bad news about Thomas Cook. We *urgently* need to secure the archives, hugely important in the history of transport & mobility.
If you’ve used the archives, or have an interest, please help! Letters of support needed – pls contact Mike Anson: @BAC_Chair
You’re home from your research year. You’ve been all over the place, and have thousands of photocopies and scans and lots of great material!
So … uh, now what?
This column is going to be one of those ones where I tell you what I wish I had done, rather than emphasize what I did.
What I did was this: I came home, worked another month at my job, quit, went to Mexico for two weeks to visit in-laws for Christmas, came back and started prepping my first adjunct class at a university nearby (not the one where I was working on my Ph.D.). It was the following summer before I even started working with the material I’d brought home and I’ll be honest: my memory isn’t as good as I had hoped it was.
We all have this fantasy that we’re going to get off the plane from research and immediately start writing our dissertations. Some of us probably set out for research with the expectation that we were going to get a bunch of stuff written while we were doing research.
In my experience, writing while doing research is minimal, and being able to compose those beautiful paragraphs right after research … let’s just say there’s a reason it takes a while.
In other words: if you’re sitting there thinking that you don’t know where to begin, you’re in the majority. Breathe.
Go through everything you collected
Unless you are an absolute superstar and heavily annotated every document you photocopies and scanned (in which case you don’t really need my advice), you probably did so-so on this.
Even if you did a decent job, you probably did what most of us do: your understanding of what you collected is based on which archive you got it from. Now, obviously you don’t want to forget this because it’s important information that you’ll need, but more than that you’ll want to know what everything you collected says.
In order to get excited about writing, you need to both simultaneously go through all of the stuff you collected in order to synthesize it, and gain a bird’s eye view in order to start seeing the linkages in the material. This sounds tedious (I won’t lie, it can be), but it can also get your brain cells firing up and ready to start composing text.
Here’s where you start.
Whether you use post-it notes, an Excel spreadsheet, the notes and keywords function in Zotero, or some other program and system (I would suggest doing it electronically rather than pen and paper as the search function is going to be a key factor in making this useful), start going through and giving your documents a closer read and collecting useful data.
I suggest that at a minimum you’ll want to track:
Names (sender, recipient, subject of the document, any other key personnel you think you might want to search for later)
Dates (the date it was authored at a minimum)
Places
Title (if the document has one)
Subject matter — (this doesn’t have to be super detailed: “Letter from H.C. [High Commissioner] to Interior Ministry re: sale of onions in 1917” is fine.)
Connections (see below)
What I Need (see below)
If you have multi-document PDFs (for example: if you scanned a box or file that all has the same file number and you want to keep them all together), create internal bookmarks for each sub-component so that you can easily locate a document within the larger file. I’ve lost hours scrolling up and down looking for one-page memos lost within a 90 page PDF. You’ll thank yourself for this later.
As you do this, you’ll start to notice trends and connections between documents. This is where you’ll want to go back and add items to your “connections” category — whether it’s “compare to [document reference]” or noting that the other half of the story is contained in a file you found somewhere else, or whatever you need it to do.
I also kept a running note of What I Need–I used this for two purposes. First, I used it to write notes to myself to do a little research in areas that I just didn’t know very much about. If the document referred to an incident or event or person that I didn’t recognize but seemed important, I’d make a note.
I also used it to record articles or books I knew were out there or things I wanted to review (“I know Gallagher discusses this in her book — revisit.”).
The biggest and most important piece of advice I have is this: NEVER EVER TRUST YOURSELF IF YOU FIND YOURSELF SAYING “I’LL REMEMBER THIS.”
You won’t.
Write it down.
Starting the writing process
At some point–hopefully–in all of this, you’ll find yourself with a story you want to tell. Start telling it. Open up a word document, and write it out (don’t forget to cite things!)
At this point, don’t worry about linear writing — none of the chapters in my dissertation were written straight through from beginning to end. Start writing things down as they come to you, and as they interest you. It doesn’t matter if it’s not very good and you’ll never show your adviser — at this stage in the game, what you’ll want to get over is the oppression of the blank document staring back at you from your computer screen.
In the early stages you’ll have a bunch of paragraphs that don’t link together — that’s fine. You’ll have stories that have a beginning and a middle but no end, or an end with no beginning — that’s fine too.
Potters don’t throw a lump of clay down and create beautiful vases immediately — they do a lot of molding and shaping and sometimes if it sucks they smush the clay back into a lump and start over. Writing is the same way.
What you want in this beginning stage is to get a feel for what you have in your documentation and what stories you’re excited to tell right up front. Let the structure of the document form around it. Don’t worry about whether it’s what you set out to write at the beginning–that can all come later.
Believe me, you’ll get plenty of practice in the months to come!
Christopher S Rose 