Finding Substance Through History
Put briefly, learning about the history of something--whether it's a cultural phenomenon or political issue or subject of personal interest––is, to my mind, the surest way to write with substance. When you engage with the past, you can gain a deeper sense of how something works in its current manifestations. Everything has a past.
I should be clear here in noting that I don't mean that history itself is a monolith, or that it ever works in a clear, linear fashion; the past does not lead neatly into the present and future, and historians and other scholars who help us construct what has transpired do not always agree upon the details. Moreover, if you're thinking that we always need to contextualize what's wrong now with how bad it used to be, stop right there. We shouldn't think the past was always worse, nor should we assume it was always better. In fact, writing with substance requires that you not only look at what something was like in the past, but also ask questions about the perspectives from which those accounts are written. You may conclude that a current version of something is superior to previous days, but you must always contextualize that assessment by asking "superior for whom?" As you can see from these apparent digressions, grappling with the messiness of it all is the means by which we can find the substance for our writing.
The essay I mentioned in your Assignment 1, Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations," offers one example of how historical research can provide substance for what we write and support for ideas we have about the present and future.
The search techniques I showed you in the video on using JSTOR afford another example of how you can gain insight into the way our current thinking about privacy and data online is indebted to long-standing interests in privacy, even if the objects and contexts of these inquiries have shifted over time.
You and I will discuss together how historical research can
