Part of being students of history is reading heavily in the subject, whether within our own professional specializations or elsewhere. Such intense engagement with published texts, from academic monographs to more public-facing volumes, has led to us developing certain stylistic preferences and annoyances with everything from writing to formatting to citations. Many of these are due to the decisions of publishers, and some may even have good reasons behind them. Our staff just can’t resist giving our own opinions on what we’ve observed and have developed into personal pet peeves.
“I expect the bulk of this paper to be your own work.”
No, those are not the words of a current teacher desperately trying to stem the tide of AI-assisted cheating. They are the words, or close to them, of John David, my professor in numerous ancient history courses in undergrad. Dr. David was reinforcing to us that the point of any essay he assigned—indeed, any piece of scholarly history writing in general—is to contribute one’s own analysis to the topic at hand. A minimum page or word count makes this expectation even more imperative; padding out that space with excessively long quotations or extraneous information not only demonstrates less skillful writing but also approaches not fulfilling the assignment. Imagine my frustration, then, when seeing this very faux pas in serious monographs written by professional academics from major academic presses.
To be clear, quotations from outside sources themselves are not just nice in history writing, they are absolutely essential. Just as scientists perform experiments and gather data to support or modify their hypothesis, historians gather evidence in the form of primary sources. Directly quoting that evidence, then, serves a variety of purposes. It provides a layer of verification and due diligence, that the historian is not simply making up conclusions; it provides opportunities for more intimate, direct analysis; it can aid the flow of one’s prose and render arguments more integrated and comprehensive; and it can serve as a persuasive device, the ultimate appeal to ethos: “Don’t take my word for it, just read what people of the time themselves said.” Even this use, though, is not without its caveats. Generally speaking, paraphrasing one’s sources is perfectly fine and, on balance, preferable; maximizing space for original writing and analysis means that only when nothing can match the effect of a direct quotation should one be used.
Secondary sources, however, are another matter. Works written by other historians are necessary in our field in their own way, but they have a very specific place in one’s writing. In order to set their arguments apart from the rest of the field and demonstrate relevance, academics (especially when writing for their peers) devote an early section of their writing to “historiography,” or a discussion of how others have written about their subject and how that has changed over time. This is where secondary sources can work just like primary sources; if one is making a point about other scholars’ work, then the words of those scholars is crucial evidence. But that is not what is happening here.
Here, I am seeing otherwise plain sentences of prose, devoid of any real analysis or need for proof, suddenly transition to a quotation without any other attribution. Take this early passage from Micahel B. Ballard’s 2004 Vicksburg: The Campaign that Opened the Mississippi:
Resistance in the hill city remained strong for a time. Many residents refused to budge on the question of separation until they no longer had a choice. They had a much more realistic view of what war would mean than did the fire-eating secessionists that increasingly dominated Mississippi. The town’s “ties with the North—especially the river connection with the Midwest—fear of war stemming from property and personal hazard, genuine love for the Union, and strong partisan, political feelings which made the conservatives distrust the demagogic, secession-inclined Democrats were the forces which worked to hold the city apart from most of the state.”
The diction, use of past tense, and lack of attribution here immediately made me suspect that these were not the words of anyone from the 19th century being quoted here. Indeed, as I followed Ballard’s citation back into his notes, I confirmed my suspicions: this sentence is from a secondary historical work on Vicksburg penned over forty years previously, in 1960. It may seem small, but this offends my sensibilities as an historian in so many ways. First and foremost, the only time one should be quoting another historian during the narrative/analysis of one’s work is if that historian coined such a famous term or phrase that you cannot avoid using it—and even then, it should be as short a quotation as possible and invariably attributed to that historian in the text. Indeed, attribution should always be supplied regardless of the source being used, primary or secondary, so that writing is as clear as possible for readers (and citations do not in any way serve this requirement; foot- or endnotes are bureaucratic receipts only and all material necessary for understanding one’s prose must be in the text itself). This long, banal description of Vicksburgers on the eve of secession is not particularly eloquent, memorable, or unique. Any one could have written this, and I know that Ballard himself could have easily paraphrased the necessary information into his own words. I know that any work, of history or anything else, is a supreme effort, but I cannot view this as anything other than laziness that cheapens the book as a whole.
As with so many of the installments of this series, if not all of them, I doubt very many readers notice such small, one might even say pedantic, points. Yet unlike quibbles over the employment of numbers or layout of pictures within a text, this misuse of quotations cuts to the core of what it means to be a historian, for me. Not only does it verge on passing off someone else’s work as one’s own, it runs afoul of what I understand the goals and passions of the profession should be. I cannot conceive of including anything but my own words when composing prose no matter how long, and for someone who is much more accomplished in the field than I am to fail to meet that standard feels almost like a betrayal of trust, if an admittedly inconsequential one in the grand scheme of things. A pet peeve it is, to be sure, but one that would have resulted in a poor grade from Dr. David.