Hello ! The prompt is to chose a historian and read a section of their latest books. I chose Professor/Historian O’ Neil and I will attach the Prologue and Chapter 1 of her latest book. Your task is to write a 5-6 page paper double spaced about the historian, emphasis their methodological choices and how they approach their sources. The goal is to familiarize yourself with their work and provide some analysis of their approach to the past in terms of movements and methods we had looked at which includes philosophical, social, and economic movements from Karl Marx, and Fredrick Engel’s.
Here I am attaching the 3 questions I asked in the interview and her responses.
why did you become a historian ?
Professor O’Neil has always been interested in history. originally came through it because she read a lot of historical fiction as a kid she loves the true story of it, liked the idea that there is truth to stories that happened. She is trying to find out priorities of people living in the past and how they lived, she loves story telling as well. she did undergrad as a history major and also did graduate school for history she spend 5-8 years as a history major. She is mostly british history. She mentioned how grad schools teaches you how to produce and teach history which prepared her for her to be a historian
what interests you about the past ? on one level it’s exercise and empathy interesting to dig into foreign society and try to think about why it functions as it does and why people in the past made the decisions that they did and understand why people in the past made the designed they did. A quote she used throughout the interview was “the past is a foreign country they do things differently there “. She also said it helps us understand the present more. she’s not a big fan of the saying learn the past so you can repeats it but it helps us understand how people have made decisions in the past. It gives you a good frameworks to think about the present her early work was communication work
Talk about your research process ? both are guided by the same research questions what are you interested in ? For the second book which is more of a story. She asked herself where can i look to find specific information on these specific peoples. For this book it was more a treasure hunt. What survives where this people might be mentioned. Elite guys were writing letters about her second book. Professor gets a baseline to what’s going on from first book. they get involved with trading institutions. Institutions leave records she looked in there for letters about the prince’s. She also used online data based newspaper data based she key word searched a lot of things. She finds out about plays and there baptizism. She would also find google search where she would there birth certificate. She had to learn about all the places they went. Madagastar big island off of east africa that the princes went there. the process of her first book was having a questions and having sources to find it exploiting one source and the second book which we are referring in the essay was more of a treasure hunt.
Thank you and No Ai at all